About me

Hello, my name’s Tom Donohue, and this is my web site. Welcome!

I’m a techie who loves building things, advising and teaching. I currently work as a Senior Field Engineer at Grafana Labs, where I specialise in observability – particularly log aggregation with Loki, adopting OpenTelemetry, and everything that helps engineering squads to understand their systems better.

  • Currently based in: London
  • Favourite music: Disco 🎈
  • Favourite sandwich: egg salad.

Want to get in touch? Connect with me on LinkedIn. Or find my email details at the end of this page.

Read on to find out my story and what this site’s all about. ⬇️

My story

I haven’t always worked in observability and distributed systems. I started out as a web designer, as a part-time job during school, I dabbled as a Flash developer, and somehow ended up writing Oracle PL/SQL (a genuinely curious language).

After university, I worked a lot with enterprise integration – Oracle middleware, then Apache Camel, Spring, and web services – the kind of tools that connect everything together, behind the scenes. I spent years helping organisations move data around, and this taught me a lot about how distributed systems work (and how they can fail).

These days, I work with teams adopting Grafana Cloud and open-source observability tools, like Loki, OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. I help teams understand their metrics, logs and traces, and make sense of the data they’re collecting. I get rather excited about query languages and telemetry pipelines.

I’ve built everything from integration platforms, to Kubernetes operators, to interactive workshops, and hundreds of demo environments. I can build anything given enough time, coffee and a biscuit or two.

About this website

This website is where I share what I’m learning and building.

I’ve been running this site since 2015. It was first called “Integration Wire”, became “Clever Builder”. And then I stopped trying to be clever and just kept it simple, and used my own name.

The three main pillars

I focus on these three main pillars:

  1. Code - development tutorials, Java, application architecture, and writing code (the fun bit).

  2. Ops - observing systems, log aggregation, monitoring, automation, and all that jazz.

  3. Projects - my side projects, websites and apps, and experiments with new tech.

Also: occasional references to eggs.

Topics I cover

You’ll probably find me writing about:

  • Observability and monitoring (logs, metrics, traces, OpenTelemetry)

  • Cloud-native development

  • Apache Camel and enterprise integration patterns

  • Java (I still love it)

  • Building side projects, both for the fun of it, and a little pocket money

Why I write

When I first started in tech, things were a lot more confusing than they are now. Documentation was pretty impenetrable and assumed you already knew the tool you were trying to learn.

So, I write tutorials to help people learn.

I also write to improve my own understanding of the things I’m working with. And to share what I’ve learned with others.

I also quite like being able to maintain my own little homestead outside the walled gardens of social media. Details on that below.

Website techy details

This is a static web site built with Jekyll and served with NGINX from my small k3s cluster, at Hetzner.

(Hetzner are great, and I totally recommend them if you’re thinking of running your own tiny cloud lab.)

I write in plain text, commit to Git, and then GitHub Actions builds the site and pushes it to my server. It’s a bit more fiddly than something like WordPress or Ghost, but I like it this way. It’s kinda fun. A cross between writing and coding.

All the design is by me. I use my own custom theme, which is based on Pico CSS.

My earliest content dates back to 2015 when I used WordPress, but here’s my first Git commit in the current form:

$ git log --reverse
commit fe094ccef1719b2998a478ae6fa53fae8e0101f4
Author: Tom Donohue <tom@example.com>
Date:   Wed Dec 14 19:51:05 2016 +0000

    Initial commit

Let’s connect?

If you’re interested in observability, building things, or just want to chat about tech, connect with me on LinkedIn!

You can also reach me by email, at (my first name) at (this domain).

I’m always up for a chat about Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Camel, or help if you’re stuck on a problem.

Let’s keep in touch!

Tom