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Ken Hamric

Seasoned Entrepreneur and Engineering Leader

Ken Hamric is the Founder of Tracetest, a cloud-native testing tool that leverages OpenTelemetry-based tracing to enable deep integration testing for distributed applications.1 With over 30 years of experience in developing software products, Ken has a strong background in enterprise testing solutions.2

Career Highlights

Tracetest: Ken founded Tracetest in December 2021 as a Kubeshop project. Tracetest allows for easy creation of end-to-end tests via a simple user interface, utilizing existing investments in OpenTelemetry-based tracing.

Previous Ventures:

  • Founded CrossBrowserTesting.com in 2008, which was acquired by SmartBear in 2016.12
  • Served as Vice President of Software Engineering at SmartBear from March 2020 to October 2020.
  • Founded HomesByOwner.com in 1999, a SaaS-based B2B model for FSBO magazine publishers, mortgage brokers, and flat fee MLS realtors.

Expertise and Achievements

Ken's expertise lies in:

  • Developing software products, particularly in early-stage ventures
  • Enterprise testing solutions
  • Cloud-native applications and distributed systems testing

Under Ken's leadership, Tracetest has achieved several milestones in its first year, including:

  • Reaching 500 GitHub stars
  • Integrating with 9 different products
  • Producing 38 blog posts and numerous videos
  • Presenting at conferences such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe3

Education

Ken holds a Master's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from The University of Memphis.

Ken Hamric's LinkedIn profile can be found at linkedin.com/in/ken-hamric-016b1420.1

Highlights

Apr 29 · linkedin

Tracetest celebrates its 2nd birthday with the release of version 1.0! Born from a mission to use OpenTelemetry for pre-production testing, it’s come a long way. Tracetest works with your testing frameworks, observability solutions, and CI/CD flows to catch issues early. It encourages “Observability First”, benefiting everyone from Dev to SRE engineers.

Our team has made notable contributions to OpenTelemetry and established integrations with 16 tracing backend vendors. We’re grateful for our community’s support, and as we move forward, our focus shifts to making Tracetest a commercially viable business while continuing to support API testing with open-source code.

As the founder, I’m immensely proud of our team. Here’s to more milestones with Tracetest!

#Tracetest #OpenTelemetry #DevOps #SoftwareTesting #Observability #PreProductionTesting #VersionRelease #TechAnniversary #InnovationInTech

https://lnkd.in/ep7sHQjf

Mar 17 · linkedin

These little guys are going to have to hold their breathe until we get to #kubecon2024 in Paris - compression bags were required! And no, Scout is not coming (sadly).

Stop by Tracetest at booth L37 and take a short quiz about the state of your #observability & #testing, and you will be entered to win one of these plushies (kids, and dogs, love them!). Giving away 10 to 12 each day...

Related Questions

What inspired Ken Hamric to start Tracetest?
How did Ken Hamric's experience at SmartBear influence his approach at Tracetest?
What are some of the biggest challenges Ken Hamric faced while founding Tracetest?
How does Tracetest integrate with other observability tools like Datadog and Lightstep?
What makes Tracetest different from other end-to-end testing solutions?
Ken Hamric
Ken Hamric, photo 1
Ken Hamric, photo 2
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Experience

Founder at Tracetest.io, A Kubeshop project
Vice President of Software Engineering at SmartBear, Director of Development at SmartBear, Founder of CrossBrowserTesting.com, LLC, Founder of HomesByOwner.com, Technical Sales Consultant at Oracle

Education

Master's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from The University of Memphis

Location

Collierville, Tennessee, United States