Meet the Grafana Labs Team: Robert Milan

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know the team members who are building the cool stuff you’re using. Check out the latest of our Friday team profiles.

Meet Robert!

Name: Robert Milan

Grafana Labs Software Engineer Robert Milan

Current location/time zone: As I am writing this I am in Paris (CEST / GMT+2), but yesterday I was in Tirana (Albania). I typically move around between GMT+2 to GMT+8 (from Western Europe to the Philippines and everything in between), but I plan on staying in Tirana for a few months starting in November.

What do you do at Grafana Labs? I work on our Hosted Metrics Graphite platform. At its core is Metrictank, a drop-in Graphite replacement. However, my work also extends into all of the supporting infrastructure and applications which keep data flowing through ingest, storage, and querying. I have also been involved in our Kafka and Cassandra upgrades.

What open source projects do you contribute to? I contribute to Metrictank, carbon-relay-ng, tsdb-gw, and some private repos.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles? Github is robert-milan. I know, it is very creative. Twitter is @robtherambler.

What do you like to do in your free time? I spend a lot of my free time in media production and running. I just finished up a feature-length documentary and am currently working on an episodic series about stereotypes. I also enjoy running through parks or along rivers. Those two things take up a lot of my time, but I also try to set some aside for personal tech projects. I’ve been very slowly working on designing free software for indie filmmakers which will allow them to use their phones with lav microphones from a centrally controlled location. It is basically to help people get semi-decent audio when they don’t have a budget for it (can’t afford the expensive wireless audio setups/recorders). I also love photography. Lately I’ve been into roaming around cities in the middle of the night and taking long exposures of architecture or pretty much anything over water. Oh, and of course I travel all over the place.

Do you like to code in silence, with music or ambient noise on your headphones, or with people talking around you? I like to code alone so I don’t have to listen to my music through headphones. People talking around me while I am trying to code is very distracting, but music brings everything together.

Favorite ice cream flavor? All of them (except durian)! I love ice cream. :)

What’s the last thing you binge-watched? The Boys.

Spaces or tabs? That’s a trick question, because even people using tabs should have their environment set up to turn that tab into spaces.