Ward Bekker
Senior Principal Product Manager Cloud Solutions Office Of The CTO at Grafana Labs
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWard Bekker is a Senior Principal Solutions Engineer in Grafana Labs' Office of the CTO with 16 years of experience bridging hands-on engineering and pre-sales across observability, big data, and cybersecurity. Based in Amsterdam, he moved from a multi-language software background (Java, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Go) into solutions engineering and now evangelizes Grafana Cloud and the increasingly popular Grafana Loki logging project. He brings deep backend chops—contributing to Loki ingestion, error handling, retry mechanisms, and PII-obfuscation helpers—and a pragmatic love of Erlang/Elixir’s concurrency model that informs reliable distributed system design. Ward’s career includes senior roles at Hortonworks and Cloudera, where he helped translate complex data platforms into customer value. He’s as comfortable debugging ingestion pipelines and Chef/Erlang build tooling as he is guiding technical sales conversations and architecting observability solutions. Colleagues know him for combining developer empathy with product-level thinking and an uncanny knack for making logs matter.
17 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Interaction Design, BA, Interaction Design at De Haagse Hogeschool / The Hague University of Applied SciencesHavo, Havo at Mgr. Frencken College, Oosterhout (NB)
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
6,356reputation
318kreached
58answers
48questions
erlang
top-5%
Github Skills (36)
cookbook10
erlang10
travis-ci10
js-template10
go10
prometheus10
cloki10
logging10
lokijs10
cpp-templates10
documentation10
c-templates10
chef-client9
chef-solo9
automations8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
grafana/loki
Sep 2019 - Apr 2021
Like Prometheus, but for logs.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 15 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Ward contributed to the Grafana Loki project by implementing and improving backend functionalities related to log ingestion and processing. They fixed out-of-order error handling in the Ingester component, enhancing troubleshooting capabilities. The user also addressed retry mechanisms for the FluentD plugin by throwing exceptions for HTTP error codes, enabling more reliable log delivery. Additionally, they implemented a SHA256 and SHA3 template function for obfuscating PII data within the replace stage.
prometheuslokigrafanaloggingcloudnative
travis-ci/travis-cookbooks
Aug 2011 - Aug 2011
Chef cookbook monolithic repo :book: :bomb:
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:5 commits in 8 days
Contributions summary:Ward's commits primarily focused on configuring and managing tools for the Chef cookbook, specifically related to Erlang and its build system, kerl and rebar. They made changes to attributes and recipes that install and configure these tools. The user worked on updating versions and ensuring compatibility within the environment. The commits also include copyright updates and minor fixes to existing recipes.
monorepocookbookmonolithicmanaged-by-terraformchef
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