About Me

Hello! I'm Austin Parker. I'm a software engineer, open source advocate, author, speaker, and more. Since childhood, I've been using computers to make -- and solve -- problems for myself, and others. This page is a brief overview of my career interests and history, although you can find more details on my LinkedIn.

One of my first jobs was as the webmaster of my home town newspaper. Each day, I would mark up the daily news stories, scores, and weather forecast into HTML, and copy it to a Macintosh Quadra sitting underneath a desk in the newsroom. Since then, I've often found myself drawn to professional pursuits that deal with the intersection of technology and human beings, first in information technology and systems operation, later as a software developer. Since 2018, I've been mostly focused on the topic of observability, specifically, the frameworks that developers use to implement it.

Today, I'm a maintainer and governance committee member of the OpenTelemetry project, and Director of Open Source at Honeycomb. In these roles, I work to nurture and grow the open source observability community and ensure that all developers have the tools they need to understand their systems and software.