.chance

Most of my career has been in environments where the network is genuinely critical: service provider, defense, large-scale enterprise. The kind of work where an outage has consequences beyond a degraded user experience. These systems span terrestrial, airborne, and on-orbit, sometimes across thousands of locations. Each domain has different constraints on topology stability, latency, and failure modes, but the approach doesn't change: invest heavily in architecture, engineering, and test before anything goes operational, so that operations is smooth and when something does go wrong it fails in a mode that is already understood and recoverable.

Over time that work has moved toward architecture and engineering leadership at scale. Designing systems, making decisions that compound over years, leading programs across disciplines. The technical depth at the protocol level has stayed relevant throughout, because the best architectural decisions come from understanding what actually happens when things go sideways, not just what the design says should happen.

Satellite networking caught my attention because it sits at an intersection I find genuinely interesting: orbital mechanics that are fully deterministic and a routing problem where different parts of the industry have strong opinions but no good way for normal engineers to interact. The existing answers range from "standard protocols are fine" (Tony Li in RFC 9717) to "you need purpose-built temporal SDN" (Aalyria and parts of the US government with PWSA) to "we built something proprietary and won't say how it exactly works" (Starlink). I wanted an environment where I could actually test the assumptions against real data rather than take anyone's word for it.

I have worked with and built network digital twins and simulation environments across a range of programs. The tooling to do serious orbital network emulation with protocol fidelity, in a form anyone could reproduce and examine, did not exist in the open. Building it was the only way to run the experiments I wanted to run.