Hayden Kotelman
Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Osseo, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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RockstarHayden Kotelman is a Senior Software Engineer and creator who blends product-first thinking with deep full-stack and backend expertise across Go, Rust, and cloud-native tooling. He built and maintains Mealie—a popular self-hosted recipe manager—and later launched a Go-based SaaS successor, demonstrating end-to-end product ownership from code to CI/CD and community adoption. At Johnson Controls he led adoption of OpenTelemetry, cloud modernization, and developer-velocity initiatives that cut API response times and standardized secure, containerized workflows. Now at Grafana Labs and running his own consulting firm, he focuses on observability, developer tooling, and practical reliability for distributed systems. Hayden’s open-source contributions range from CLI tooling enhancements to UX improvements in Rust projects, reflecting a habit of solving real problems he’d use himself. Outside engineering he balances work with endurance sports—biking, running, and winter skiing—bringing the same iterative improvement mindset to both code and training.
6 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (40)
back-end-development10
go-language10
self-hosting10
recipe10
go10
front-end-development10
command-line10
golang10
management10
rust10
web-development10
backend10
cli10
dependency-management9
actix-web9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
hay-kot/homebox
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
Homebox is the inventory and organization system built for the Home User
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 releases, 18 reviews, 227 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Hayden primarily contributed to back-end development tasks, including dependency updates, code refactoring, and database schema generation. They focused on improvements to the project's underlying code, such as package updates and removal of outdated components. The user's changes also suggest experience in Golang, as the commits include modifications to Go modules and imports within the project's back-end.
inventory
mealie-recipes/mealie
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend application built in Vue for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recipes into your database by providing the url and mealie will automatically import the relevant data or add a family recipe with the UI editor
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:47 releases, 304 reviews, 628 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Hayden primarily contributed to the Mealie project by implementing features, fixing bugs, and improving the user interface. Their commits demonstrate a strong understanding of both front-end and back-end technologies, including UI improvements, recipe management enhancements, and fixes related to the API. The commits reveal work with the recipe view components, data management and the application as a whole, indicating full-stack involvement.
restapi-backenduser-experiencevuereactiveui-editor
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