A plain account of why I started Keep Ukraine Connected, what running it for years actually felt like, and why handing it off this year was harder than I expected.
NOG communities run on volunteers stacking event work on top of day jobs, and the warning signs of burnout are almost always quiet until someone is gone. A reflection on why handoff so rarely works, and why the community rarely says so out loud.
Vendor neutrality isn't a mission-page value. It's a decision about who controls the agenda and the badge, and that decision is what makes honest failure talks possible.
Practical, first-person notes on what separates a call-for-papers abstract that gets accepted from one that quietly gets skipped, drawn from years of reading NOG submissions and building the review tooling behind that process.
Settlement-free peering runs on surprisingly little paperwork — most of the real vetting happens between people who've spent years running into each other at NOG meetings, not in a signed contract.
A plain explanation of what an internet exchange point actually is, how peering and route servers work, and why the culture around them stays deliberately boring and neutral.
On the LLM Gym's promotion gate — four pass-or-fail checks, no partial credit — and why a single weighted score was too easy to talk myself into.
On running unattended training jobs on your own hardware, and the adaptive pacing system that finally made it safe to stop checking.
A model that refuses ordinary requests is just as broken as one that gets them wrong, so the promotion gate in the gym now checks for both.
A checkpoint file sat in exactly the right folder with exactly the right rough size, and it still wasn't a checkpoint. Here's what "the file exists" was quietly failing to promise.