$ whoami

• Husband and father
• Open source engineer — creator of Fluent Bit
• Entrepreneur, speaker, advisor

Here’s a quick summary and a look into the technical side of my journey so far.

Quick Summary

I’m Eduardo Silva Pereira, an open source software engineer from Valparaíso, Chile, now based in Costa Rica. I’m the creator of Fluent Bit, a high-performance telemetry agent now widely used in cloud-native infrastructure. My career started with systems programming in C and open source contributions, including Monkey Web Server—my first project from my Linux days.

Over the years, I’ve worked at Oracle (Support and Ksplice), Treasure Data (on Fluentd), where I created Fluent Bit, a lightweight and high-performance telemetry agent used across cloud and edge environments. In 2020, I founded and served as CEO of a company called Calyptia, created to build products on top of Fluent Bit and support its growing ecosystem. Calyptia was acquired in 2023 by Chronosphere.

Today, I continue to lead Fluent Bit while pushing the boundaries of telemetry and infrastructure tooling. I also speak at industry events and advise startups, students, and anyone navigating their career in technology.

How it started (Tech Edition)

I got introduced to computers when I was around 8 or 9 years old. My dad brought home an Atari 800XL, and my middle brother was the one who taught me how to use it. Back then, Atari magazines would publish code listings, and I remember spending some time typing out a BASIC program that, when it finally worked, printed a big, colorful number “1” on the screen. That moment sparked a fascination that would shape my path.

Later, a i386 PC arrived at home, and I started playing video games on a monochromatic monitor. But it wasn’t until I was about 14 that I started writing code. I picked up Visual Basic and began making small apps just for fun. I wrote a simple library app to manage books at school, a customer base application for the YMCA in Valparaíso, and then an application that let you see the final cutscenes of every Mortal Kombat 1 character—I’d play through the game, record each ending, and bundle them together in my own interface. It was basic, but fun :)

Eventually, I got tired of Windows crashing all the time (do you remember the blue screens?). My brother showed me something different: Linux. He booted up Red Hat 5.1, and I was immediately hooked. Watching the Linux kernel messages scroll by during boot gave me a glimpse of what the system was actually doing. It felt alive. From that moment, I never looked back. Slackware became my primary distro for years, before I eventually moved on to Debian and Ubuntu.

Discovering Linux led me to the world of open source. I started attending local events like Encuentro Linux in Chile, which inspired me to launch my first open source project: Monkey HTTP Daemon (now known as Monkey Web Server), a lightweight web server written in C. What began as a hobby turned into a deep dive into systems programming. Through Monkey, I learned about sockets, threads, event loops, and building software that could run reliably in production.

I studied Computer Science at DuocUC in Viña del Mar, and Monkey became my graduation project. After university, I did consulting, kept studying networking, joined Google Summer of Code to work on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and taught at DuocUC. Around 2008, I joined Oracle, where I worked for seven years. Most of that time I was part of the Support team, helping customers with critical systems issues. Midway through, I relocated with my family to Costa Rica, which has been home ever since. Later, I joined Oracle’s Ksplice team, where I worked on live kernel patching and low-level Linux internals. Eventually, I made the leap into the startup world—thanks to a job post I spotted on Hacker News.

In 2015, I joined Treasure Data, a startup based in Mountain View, California. I became part of the Fluentd team, with a focus on open source and developer relations—especially expanding visibility of the project in the Americas. Fluentd was already well known in Japan (where the company and its founders are from), but there was huge potential to grow its community globally.

While working on Fluentd, it became clear that there was a growing need for a similar type of log processor with a smaller footprint and higher performance—especially for edge and embedded use cases. That led to the birth of a new project: Fluent Bit. I already had experience from Monkey and reused its engine (event loop and other components) as the foundation for Fluent Bit: it focused on speed, small footprint, and modularity. Over time, it became one of the most widely used log processors in the cloud-native space, especially in Kubernetes. It’s now used by thousands of companies around the world to handle telemetry data at scale.

Fluent Bit today handles multiple types of signals such as Logs, Metrics, Traces and Profiles (dev).

As the open source project gained popularity, more and more companies began asking for support, services, and enterprise-grade features. The next natural step was to create a commercial entity. In 2020, I co-founded Calyptia with Anurag Gupta, who I had previously worked with at Treasure Data, where he led the Fluentd Enterprise business. Together, we built commercial products and services around Fluent Bit and helped define what’s now commonly referred to as Telemetry Pipelines.

In 2023, Calyptia was acquired by Chronosphere, marking the start of a new chapter—though my mission remains unchanged. As Open Source Engineering Manager, I continue leading efforts around Fluent Bit and open source observability, focused on building efficient tooling, empowering the community, and helping developers make sense of their systems at scale.

Public Speaking

I believe that after learning, there’s a responsibility to give back. Whether it’s sharing mistakes, lessons, or unexpected insights openly communicating your journey helps others grow, and often deepens your own understanding in the process.

Although my primary focus is engineering, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at conferences, meetups, and panels—sharing both technical knowledge and personal lessons from building and scaling open source infrastructure. I’m always open to contributing through talks, mentorship, or community conversations.

On the More Personal Side

I’m a proud husband and father of four :) These days, I’m learning to make family the center of my universe while balancing work, sports (karate and functional training), and exploring my purpose in life. I’m not trying to sound perfect… just doing my best to become the best version of myself. Not sure how long it will take, but I’m taking the necessary baby steps, one day at a time.