Engineering NOGnet event-management profile-centralization data-consistency

The Single Profile Problem

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-27 / ~2 min read
Industry NOG Culture

What a NOG Is, and Why I Stayed for Seven Years

A plain-language explanation of what a Network Operator Group actually is, and an honest look at what kept one person showing up to volunteer-run networking meetups for seven years straight.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-26 / ~3 min read
Engineering LLM Gym Security AI

The Uncomfortable Number Behind My Injection Defense

I ran a red-team battery against a model I’d already shipped, and two-thirds of the attacks got through. Here’s what I built in response, and why grading it honestly turned out to be the harder problem.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-25 / ~3 min read
Engineering LLM Gym AI

The Dashboard Was Lying to Me

I built a home training platform to keep a fleet of small language models improving. For a while, three stacked measurement bugs meant its scores were close to meaningless, and I didn't notice until I went looking.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-24 / ~3 min read
Engineering Magatama AI

An Ops Agent for an Audience of One

Notes on building Magatama, the diagnosis-then-execution agent watching my home and cloud server fleet, and why I still don’t think the question of how much autonomy to grant it has a settled answer.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-23 / ~4 min read
Engineering NOGnet

Teaching NOGnet to Watch Itself

NOGnet runs without a team, which means nobody's awake when something breaks at 3am on the other side of the world. This is the small, deliberately limited watchdog I built to cover some of that for me.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-22 / ~3 min read
Engineering NOGnet

Going Solo: Why I’m Building NOGnet

After seven years with the Global NOG Alliance, I went solo this year to build NOGnet, an event-support platform for network operator groups. Here’s what it actually does, and where it honestly stands.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-21 / ~3 min read
Engineering Magatama Retrospective security automation integration

Magatama, From the Beginning, Part 5: More Ways to Close a Finding Than I Remembered

Part 5 of the series explores the integration of Magatama with NOGnet's security system, emphasizing the importance of manual review for critical findings.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-20 / ~3 min read
Engineering Magatama Retrospective Security Automation Data Integrity

Magatama, From the Beginning, Part 4: Turning the Audit Inward

In Part 4, I delve into the internal audit of Magatama's reasoning layer, ensuring it can't be turned against itself. Discover the critical changes made.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-19 / ~2 min read
Engineering Magatama Retrospective AI Safety Model Training Risk Management

Magatama, From the Beginning — Part 3: What the Execution Gate Couldn't See

Part 3 of Magatama's journey reveals unseen risks in model training and highlights the need for additional safeguards before execution gates.

Rene Fichtmueller / 2026-07-18 / ~2 min read
// projects & tools
// about the author
Rene Fichtmueller
Social Networker
20+ years building and breaking networks. Optical transport, peering, data center infrastructure. Writing about the things that go wrong at 2AM — and how to prevent them.