Who am I
Hi, I’m Ines Panker. I’m a senior staff engineer at Sleuth, a multi-tenant SaaS observability platform. I was the first engineer they hired and became its de-facto architect, from the data model and the army of Celery workers to the anomaly detection and the circuit breakers guarding 2-3 million third-party API calls a day. I also speak at developer conferences like Devoxx Belgium and J-Fall, and I work remotely from Slovenia.
I’ve been building software for almost two decades, mostly in Python these days, and lately Go.
Python Go Django Celery PostgreSQL Redis RabbitMQ Elasticsearch LLM agents Conference speaking
Anything tangled, a codebase, an argument, a hard idea, has a shape that makes it feel obvious. I’m good at finding that shape. With agents, code now gets written faster than it gets understood. And so my speciality has become breaking code I didn’t write: it’s the quickest way to understand it.
How to contact me: 
LinkedIn works best.
My software life, told as a timeline of firsts:
First agents doing real work for me
My conference planning runs on Confetti, a tool I built: Claude agents discover conferences and chase CFP dates, the app tracks submissions, travel costs, vacation days, and acceptance rates.
First conference talk on a big stage
Voxxed Days Luxembourg: "Software Estimation Is a Delusion". The recording is on YouTube.
First data-science system in production
A self-tuning anomaly detector for customer metrics: an algorithm that watches your production metrics and pings you when you deploy something that deteriorates them. It needs no manual calibration and has been running for many customers for years without hand-tuning. How it works, explained with pictures.
First job as a startup's first engineer
Joined Sleuth when it was two coding founders and a small codebase (Python). Everything that grew after that had my fingerprints on it.
First production site where I'm the entire team
I was the backend dev (PHP), the frontend dev, the designer, the sysadmin and even the marketing for my partner's business's website.
First paid line of code
a C# invoicing system
First ever teaching job
I taught adults the basics of computers and Microsoft Office. My explaining-things career started before my engineering career.