How Observability and Telemetry Can Enhance the Practice of Software Engineering

Martin Thwaites argues that observability must evolve alongside serverless and event-driven architectures. OpenTelemetry acts as a vendor-neutral layer that decouples telemetry emission from backend tooling, letting developers focus on producing high-quality, consistent data. He introduces Weaver, a tool for defining shared telemetry vocabularies with live convention checking and code generation. Good telemetry is framed as a development task — not an ops task — that directly improves MTTR, MTTD, defect rates, and developer happiness. The talk also covers how observability applies to AI systems and how integrating telemetry into TDD workflows makes code observable from the start.