Welcome to Netstack.fm

Elizabeth & Glen (00:18) Welcome to NetStack FM, where protocols meet people. In this first episode, we will introduce who we are, why this podcast exists, and what's ahead.

Ping, Pong. The connection is established. Welcome in the studio Glen. Thank you. And before we begin, I would like to make a disclaimer that the views of me in this podcast are mine only and not of any past employers. Noted

As this is our first episode, I was thinking it might be good if we can go a bit through your own origins and how we arrived here. After that, we can talk about our goals with this podcast, the structure, a short overview of the upcoming episodes and what people can expect from us.

Let's go back in time before protocols and packet inspections. Who were you? What got you into tech?

I've been writing software professionally for nearly 13 years. However, already since very young, I was working on computers, like repairing them, putting them together. So that was more hardware based. And occasionally, as I was also reading a lot of books, I would sometimes find a book around develop your own little 3D game or write your own basic website using in those days Dreamweaver or finding this book around the Turbo

C++ compiler or some random assembly book for whatever CPU platform I had laying around. That's how I started.

I've known about a story when you were in primary school that you once screamed out loud to your friends that you were a hacker. Can you tell me more about it? Yeah, I mean, as I was always fooling around with computers some weeks or months more than others, I knew from very early on that I want to be a hacker. However, I didn't really know what it meant and...

In fact, most of my friends in those days, as I was in a small village, didn't even know what a computer was or if they didn't know it was like very basic, like they could surf the web, but that was about it. However, I did have the confidence and I would even make these kind of pranks where I would make some kind of animation or visual graphic to make it look like their computer would explode. And then I would say like, ha, you're hacked. But of course it was just a prank until the teacher would be very angry at me.

and shut my computer down for the next week.

When do you go from experimenting to professional software development?

As I said, I was playing around with computers, so hardware as well as software since a very young age. But it's not that I was doing that from age 8 until age 18 in a continuous line. Some months I would do almost nothing or even nothing at all. And then other months I would be very hardcore doing it day in, day out. What was very consistent, however, was the fact that I was always diving into video games, playing them.

trying to be very competitive in them and even writing my own hacks. And as such, it's only fitting that my first real start was in the game industry, where the deadlines and the dreams and late night rebuilds collided. Version control back then was optional and we bounced between Perforce, Tortoise, SVN or whatever half working setup existed before Git took over.

Sometimes we remember to commit and other times someone spilled a beer or a pizza on a keyboard and poof, a whole day work was gone.

That sounds like a chaotic beginning. What was your first office job like? Well, it felt very huge and I was very happy there. was in the French side of Belgium and by day two I was demoing my progress. My boss just stared blank. As it turns out, I had wiped the main version control server.

and half the work was recoverable. So it wasn't entirely bad, but it was neither the glorious debut I had in mind.

Did game development scratch your technical itch or were you already looking deeper? So games itself, they were always close to my heart as they were always in my life, both in a competitive level and trying to make my own from an early age. However, I was also very interested always in the systems, like how to connect, how to generate the graphics, how to do the music, etc. And in my Erasmus, which is like an exchange program in Europe.

I was going to Finland for a couple of months where I was with three other Belgians and we would make our own cross-platform game engine for desktop so desktop being Windows and Android. And we would also teach other teams how to use it to make their own video games. And that kind of stuff always was a lot more interesting to me. Now, don't get me wrong, I love playing the games themselves as well as watching other people play the games I worked on.

of course unless they glitch through the map. But what really pulled me in was the stuff under the hood. So the reverse engineering of SDKs to try to get the most out of them, or little hardware quirks that could be used for it, as well as all kinds of weird protocols. And eventually I moved into engine development also professionally, working on the physics systems, implementing audio systems, for example, how to do slow motion audio in Angry Birds Transformers.

as well as graphics, entity systems, and of course networking. Back then TLS was optional, and we often built custom protocols directly on TCP or UDP. But still, I wouldn't have really called myself a network person at that point. I was more about pixels and pushing platforms.

At some point you work in UK. What make you leave UK? What pushed that decision?

Well, the UK summers, or more accurately the lack of them. As a Belgian I needed sun, for physical as well as mental health. And around the same time I was shipping a first multiplatform Rust project. It was a game analytics client used by millions. And that was in the Rust pre-1.0 days. But it already felt like magic because as a C++ developer it was solving exactly the kind of problems I was having. And this library both the client one and the server implementation

was previously written in C++ and already under development for several years as well as in use and yet despite all these fantastic people working on it, it was still full of holes and bugs. The kind of bugs which only trigger in edge cases but when you're dealing with millions of devices, these edge cases happen several times per day. So I pitched remote work and the company said yes. And suddenly I was working from South America building backend service and network layers. Slowly but surely I was falling in love with networking.

came the blockchain phase, right? Yes, as well as a baby, because the company lost a contract and in the same week you and I found out that you were expecting our first child.

Let's say timing was dramatic, as you may recall. at that point, I shifted into an R &D role and later I moved to a position of principal engineer. I worked on the blockchain protocols, cryptographic primitives, edge computing, all kinds of wild stuff. The company didn't go global, but I learned fast.

And then came another job and another baby. Yes. And yes, at that point I suspected the kids were coordinating my job changes. I joined the company extracting hundreds of gigabytes of hotel data daily. We built massive pipelines perfect for combining everything I had learned about systems and protocols.

So after all those changes and pivots what led you to Rama?

So Rama grew out of my experience around building network services, logic, protocols, clients, proxies in all these different jobs. And what I noticed in these different jobs is I was each time reinventing the wheel by implementing the same logic or trying to find my way around the 50th framework or how to duct tape libraries together. And what you will realize if you were doing that is that

you are constantly trying to fight the system that is supposed to help you. And so what I really wanted is some kind of modeler framework, which I can utilize parts of, but customize others where I need something custom for that specific customer or that specific use case. At the same time, I really don't like magic. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Houdini, but in my software, I really do not like magic. When I read code, I want to really clearly be able to read what's happening when.

and I want to see the flow and that should be the same for anybody reading for the first time a codebase. And that's what you get with Rama, the framework I was building at that point. It's a modular and open source toolkit for building and transforming network packets in Rust. As I said, I don't like magic, so it doesn't contain magic. It has no surprises and it just gives you the full control over your traffic and logic that you deserve. It's there to empower you, just like

And now a podcast. Why? Well, because networking is still a mystery to many, even back-end devs. I mean, I've met people who have never seen an accept language header, some guess location by IP, which, yeah, please just don't. Because as a Belgian, there is nothing less I like than to visit the website and get the French version. I mean, do not get me wrong, I like the French language, but I prefer my content in English.

And that's also what my browser is advertising in this header. So this podcast is here to educate, clarify misconceptions and celebrate the people behind the tech.

So tell us about what's coming up. So every Tuesday, we will talk to engineers, protocol maintainers and creators pushing the edges of digital infrastructure. For example, people like Sean McArthur, the creator of Hyper, or Chris Batterby, who is the founder of Metoro, which works a lot around open telemetry, as well as Delaney Gillian, who is the creator of DataStar. And finally, in mid-September, we will also have a conversation with Daniel Stenberg.

who is the creator and maintainer of Curl. We will dive into their work, their journeys and sometimes their sense of humor. IPv6 jokes included.

And we want you our listeners to be part of this

Send your questions, feedback, or ideas via our Plabayo Discord or email hello@netstack.fm. Every episode comes with a full transcript, show notes, and bonus links.

Whether you're writing your first HTTP server or debugging something in layer 4, you are part of the stack and we are glad you're here.

Netstack.fm is brought to you by Plabayo, building secure, open and resilient infrastructure with Rust, protocols and purpose.

The theme music of this podcast was composed by DJ Mailbox.

Thanks for tuning in. We will see you next time for the next handshake.