From Java Dev to DevRel: What Does a Twenty-Five-Year Career Actually Teach You?

Adriana Vilela is a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace and a core contributor to OpenTelemetry, the open source standard for instrumenting applications that has become one of the highest-velocity projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

In this episode, Adriana and Rosie trace the arc of long careers in tech, from Java development in the early 2000s to the current age of AI-assisted coding, and reflect on what has actually changed and what hasn't.

They dig into what observability means for testers (more than most people think), the idea of telemetry as a quality gate, and why OpenTelemetry's vendor-neutral community model is a rare success story worth studying.

The conversation also navigates into AI slop, the flood of low-effort AI-generated pull requests threatening open source communities, and what project maintainers, community builders, and organisations can actually do about it.

If you work in quality, DevOps, or community, this one connects threads you probably haven't seen joined up before.