Tommy worked on the grafana/tempo repository, focusing on backend development and improving Prometheus metrics for observability. During this period, he addressed a key issue by refactoring the deduplicated spans metric used in compaction, switching its implementation from GaugeVec to CounterVec in Go. This change ensured accurate, monotonic tracking of deduplicated spans, resolving metric type conflicts and aligning the metric’s naming with its semantics. Tommy’s work preserved existing dashboards and alerts while enhancing the reliability of telemetry data, which supports more accurate capacity planning and trend analysis. His contributions centered on maintenance and metric quality rather than new feature development.