Hello World!

I'm Sina, a software engineer from Toronto, Canada. Currently, I'm a software engineer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution and a number of other open source products such as MAAS, Juju, and Charmed Kubernetes.

Here is what I'm currently up to and some of the things I've done!

Canonical Observability Stack (COS)
My role at Canonical is software engineer on the Observability team, where we engineer and maintain observability solutions for enterprise use. I contribute and maintain software operators which drive Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Grafana, Opentelemetry Collector, Alertmanager and some other observability related solutions on Kubernetes. The stack is deployable on Kubernetes using Juju, an open-source application modeling tool that automates the deployment, configuration, and management of complex software systems across clouds and machines. Juju deploys charms, which are software operators handling the operations of a workload such as Prometheus. My job invovles writing and maintaining these software operators and enabling integrations between different observability applications in the stack.
Grafana Prometheus Loki Tempo
Bloorsoft
I was previously a founding engineer at Bloorsoft, a startup which specializes in delivering fast, user focused solutions for startups. I worked on Engager, I engineered a social media marketing management tool for integrations with Linkedin, Medium, Reddit, and X. I created a full app for tracking and calculating carbon emissions for civil engineering companies using React in less than 30 days. Later, I developed a React-based AI add-in for MS Word to streamline grant writing (25-day delivery).
Grafana

My Discourse Posts

As a software engineer mostly developing Juju charms (in other words, I'm a charm author or charmer :)), I write some of my opinions on how I think charms can be improved. The platform for discussing all things charming is Charmhub Discourse. You can see some of my Discourse posts here!

Should charms implement a `show config` action

Why charms could benefit from having a `show config` option which provides visibility into both workload AND charm level metrics.

Charm self tests: the story of the Prometheus that looked healthy

Charms can benefit from a self-health test mechanism that periodically monitors conditions which cannot be reliably expressed as alert rules, giving administrators early warnings and time to take preventive action.

Some of my open source work

At the time of writing, I maintain the Avalanche snap, which

Avalanche Snap

Avalanche is an open-source load-testing tool designed specifically for the Prometheus monitoring system. It functions by artificially generating highly configurable metrics, allowing engineers to find the breaking points, CPU/RAM limits, and ingestion bottlenecks of their monitoring infrastructure. I maintain this unofficial snap on the Snap Store. Installing it allows you to use Avalanche on all Linux distros that support Snapd.