Ben Sigelman
This And That
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Sigelman is a seasoned software leader and entrepreneur who has spent his career advancing observability and introspection for large distributed systems. He co-designed Google's Dapper tracing system and led the Monarch monitoring effort before co-founding Lightstep, where he helped drive open-source standards that evolved from OpenTracing into OpenTelemetry. After Lightstep’s acquisition by ServiceNow, he served as VP and GM for cloud observability, blending cloud-native innovation with enterprise governance at scale. Ben is an active contributor to language-specific OpenTracing libraries (Java, Go, Python, JavaScript), with hands-on work around context propagation and span logging that influenced widely adopted tracing APIs. Based in San Francisco, he now consults, advises, and explores technologies to improve media ecosystem measurement while staying involved in open-source observability communities. Colleagues describe him as technically deep yet unusually focused on approachable APIs and pragmatic product-team culture.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (Sc.B.) Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (Sc.B.) Mathematics and Computer Science at Brown University
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
tracer10
python10
apidoc10
api-design10
testing10
opentracing10
java10
javas10
go10
api10
logging10
trace10
http-header9
versioning8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
opentracing/opentracing-java
Jul 2016 - May 2017
OpenTracing API for Java. 🛑 This library is DEPRECATED! https://github.com/opentracing/specification/issues/163
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:85 commits, 56 PRs, 80 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the core OpenTracing API in Java. Their contributions involved adding and integrating the `Format` interface and its built-in implementations to the core API, allowing for more flexible propagation of tracing context. Further work included moving and splitting up `TextMapImpl` and refactoring code to adapt to the changes, reflecting a strong understanding of the underlying tracing mechanism and API design. The user also fixed typos and improved code readability.
javaopentracing
opentracing/opentracing-go
Jul 2016 - Feb 2017
OpenTracing API for Go. 🛑 This library is DEPRECATED! https://github.com/opentracing/specification/issues/163
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 26 commits, 92 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the `opentracing-go` library. Their contributions centered on adding and refining features related to HTTP header propagation, including the implementation of `HTTPHeadersCarrier`. Furthermore, the user updated sub-packages and adjusted terminology, while also improving documentation and refactoring code related to logging and span references. They also introduced key-value span logging features.
goopentracing
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