About

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.” — Seneca

Who I am

I’m Cristian Gómez, a Platform Engineer specializing in Kubernetes networking and Linux internals, currently serving as AVP in SRE at a bank in Mexico. I lead a technical team and spend my days debugging traffic flows at L3/L4 — network namespaces, veth pairs, iptables chains, CNI internals. Not just kubectl apply. From the primitives up.

Outside of work I practice Stoicism, suffer through FromSoftware games, and have a long-term plan to own a ranch and grow my own food.

Tech Stack & Focus

What this blog is

This is the From Scratch series: Platform Engineering explained from the internals out, for engineers who want to understand why, not just how.

Every article starts where the abstractions end — at the Linux kernel, at the iptables rule, at the conntrack table. I build the concept by hand, show the commands, map it back to what Kubernetes does under the hood, and close with a troubleshooting checklist you can actually use in production.

The goal isn’t to produce content. It’s to go deep on the layer most engineers skip — and document that process publicly so it’s useful to someone else too.

What I’m building:

linux-networking-labs — Hands-on labs: network namespaces, iptables, NAT, firewalld, SELinux — everything that runs under Kubernetes.
From Scratch series — Platform Engineering from the internals out, published on this blog.
Targeting the CKA certification and a K8s networking specialist role (remote, US/EU market).

📬 Connect

I’m always open to discussing K8s networking internals, SRE war stories, or the lore of Dark Souls. If you’re hiring for a remote K8s networking / Platform Engineering role in the US/EU market, feel free to reach out.