Brian Trammell

Scientist, Synthesist, Cyclist, SRE

I’m an American-Swiss geek of several trades living in Wallisellen, Switzerland. I’m a proud father, unrepentant pedestrian supremacist, recovering security person, and scientist with interests in Internet architecture, Internet measurement, and the evolution of the Internet general and Internet protocols specifically, especially at Layer 4. I’m active in the IETF, IRTF, and have been recently appointed as a Trustee of the Internet Society.

My day job is in Site Reliability Engineering at Google in Zürich, where I don’t work in networking for a change.

from Vienna to Landeck

26 July 2026

In the late winter of 2006, I realized, on a train from somewhere between Freilassing and Rosenheim, after an interop in Salzburg leading up to IETF 65 in Dallas, that I was probably going to have to move to Central Europe. A bit more than twenty years later, I’m sitting on a Railjet on the way to Landeck – a train that did not exist at the time – waiting at the platform in Freilassing – an occurrence more frequent now that Germany is reaping the rewards of running its rail network as a Volkswagen ad for the past two decades. This gives me time to reflect a long week at IETF 126 in Vienna before I disappear into the mountains for a bit. In addition to joining the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, on which more after I’ve understood the assignment, a couple of things of note happened that warrant talking about here. …