Regional meetups with thirty people build a kind of operational trust the big flagship conferences structurally can't match, and that's exactly why they're worth protecting.
Network engineers will spend a whole evening arguing about diverse fiber paths, then let an entire community run through one person who never wrote anything down. A reflection on what it would mean to treat "no single point of failure" as something owed to people, not just to infrastructure.
Practical, unglamorous notes on venues, sponsors, program deadlines, and the workload nobody warns you about, drawn from years of watching NOG events come together through community tooling work rather than from chairing one myself.
A look at where sponsor visibility should end and program influence begins at a volunteer-run network operator event, and why that line erodes through small, reasonable-sounding exceptions rather than one obvious sellout.
The internet doesn't route around damage on its own. Someone is awake, staring at a graph, deciding what to touch.
The industry that made remote connection possible still can't shake the conference room, and the reasons why don't all hold up under close examination.
Border Gateway Protocol quietly decides where your internet traffic goes, and for decades it's run almost entirely on the assumption that every network on earth is telling the truth. Cryptographic verification is finally catching up, slowly.
Undersea cables get damaged constantly, mostly by anchors and fishing gear, and almost nobody notices because traffic reroutes across other cables and paths. Here's why that's true, and why a few unlucky regions feel every single cut.
A pattern I keep noticing on program committees: the talks that nearly get rejected on a weak abstract are sometimes the best ones in the room. That says more about how we judge submissions than about the submitters.
Moderation queues, bounce storms, and a public archive that still beats every flashier alternative: an honest look at what it takes to keep a network operator mailing list alive in 2026, and why nothing has managed to replace it.