Ralf Horstmann
Technical Lead Systems And Network at Skyhigh Security
Paderborn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRalf Horstmann is a Technical Lead in systems and network engineering with over two decades of hands-on experience in internet security, kernel work, and appliance design. He combines low-level skills—from soldering server mainboards and reading oscilloscope traces to kernel/BMC instrumentation—with higher-level expertise in C/C++ application development, Linux/OpenBSD kernel contributions, and cloud infrastructure design. At companies like McAfee and Intel he led platform changes, implemented UEFI and software-RAID for appliances, and solved tricky hardware problems such as SGPIO reverse-engineering and BMC packet root-cause analysis. Ralf also maintains a Linux distribution for network appliances and contributes OpenBSD-specific collectors to the widely used prometheus/node_exporter, showing deep OS-level metric and systems-programming knowledge. Based in Paderborn, Germany, he blends engineering leadership with a tinkerer’s curiosity—occasionally dropping into assembly-level reverse engineering when the puzzle demands it.
13 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Diplom-Ingenieur (FH), Informationstechnik, Diplom-Ingenieur (FH), Informationstechnik at Fachhochschule Bielefeld
English, German, French
Github Skills (9)
go10
system-programming10
openbsd10
system-information10
hosts9
prometheus-exporter9
metric9
prometheus9
procfs3
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
prometheus/node_exporter
Feb 2018 - Feb 2019
Exporter for machine metrics
Role in this project:
Back-end & Systems Engineer
Back-end & Systems EngineerContributions:6 commits, 6 PRs, 5 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Ralf primarily contributed to the `node_exporter` project, focusing on OpenBSD-specific system metric collection. Their work involved implementing and updating collectors for CPU and disk statistics, ensuring compatibility with different OpenBSD versions. They also addressed code quality issues, fixing static analysis warnings. The contributions demonstrate a strong understanding of system-level programming and OS-specific APIs for gathering hardware metrics.
exporterprometheus-exportersystem-metricshost-metricssystem-information
ra1fh/s725
Feb 2016 - May 2024
Contributions:92 pushes, 1 branch, 5 comments in 8 years 4 months
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