Alan West
Software Engineer at New Relic, Inc.
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan West is a pragmatic software engineer based in Portland, Oregon, with a decade of professional experience building reliable backend systems and instrumentation. Currently at New Relic, he brings deep .NET and C# expertise, a strong database background, and practical experience in observability—contributing notable fixes and gRPC/HttpClient instrumentation work to the widely used OpenTelemetry .NET client. His career spans startups and enterprise teams, and he pairs hands-on engineering with automated testing and thoughtful internalization of components to improve maintainability. With an M.S. in Computer Science and prior experience teaching at Portland State University, he balances rigorous technical foundations with mentorship and knowledge sharing. Off the usual path, he once honed customer-focused service skills as a "Pizza Topping Consultant," which informs his practical, user-minded approach to building software.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
M.S., Computer Science, M.S., Computer Science at Portland State UniversityK-6, K-6 at Oak Hills Elementary School
English, Persian
Stackoverflow
792reputation
47kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
distributed-tracing10
net10
dotnet10
asp-net10
dotnet-core10
csharp10
grpc10
test-automation10
asp-net-core9
instrumentation9
telemetry9
logging8
otel8
metric8
datadog6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet
Jul 2020 - Nov 2022
The OpenTelemetry .NET Client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:7 releases, 1318 reviews, 128 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Alan made substantial contributions to the OpenTelemetry .NET client by implementing functionality to handle null values in `TraceState` and adding comprehensive tests to validate its behavior. They also made code changes to internalize various instrumentation components, including `HttpClientInstrumentation`, `SqlClientInstrumentation`, and gRPC-related instrumentation. Furthermore, the user implemented and tested gRPC client instrumentation, enhancing the client's ability to capture and propagate context information.
instrumentation-librariesiloggerprovidertracingloggingilogger
alanwest/opentelemetry-collector-contrib
Dec 2020 - Jan 2024
Contrib repository for the OpenTelemetry Collector
Contributions:1 PR, 31 pushes, 11 branches in 3 years 1 month
contribopentelemetry-collectortracingcollectoropentelemetry
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