👋 $ whoami

Hello! I started this blog to write up notes on the tech I’m digging into. I studied cryptography and distributed systems, and since then I’ve worked on platform/DevOps teams and contributed to a handful of open-source tools. Lately I spend most of my time in the CNCF ecosystem — I’m Kubestronaut-certified and also hold a few AWS certificates.

🎓 university projects

During my studies I was lucky to work in a couple of research labs — Red Hat in Brno and the Fraunhofer AISEC institute in Munich — on some interesting, low-level problems. With Red Hat I worked on forward error-correcting codes, comparing open-source FEC libraries (thesis, implementation); at Fraunhofer I worked on physical-security research. I also interned at IBM (more DevOps-oriented) and tutored a low-level programming course, helping with its exercises and exams. For my master’s I focused on cryptography and distributed systems — implementing and benchmarking threshold decryption on top of the Protect library, with the TUM applied-cryptography chair and Siemens (master’s thesis).

☸️ CNCF & open source

I’ve worked with Kubernetes and the wider CNCF tooling for 6+ years, and I’m an open-source enthusiast at heart. I contribute where I can and want to do more of my work in the open — part of why this blog exists, as a nudge to build in public. I make it to KubeCon most years, and I’d love to speak there some day.

🏔️ off the keyboard

The rest of my time goes to the mountains — climbing, trail running, and mountaineering.

Elsewhere: github.com/xvirgov · gitlab.com/xvirgov