Oliver Eckel

If you ask what I do, the simplest answer is: I fix systems. Sometimes it’s infrastructure or security, sometimes governance or compliance, sometimes all of it at once. Basically when something breaks, gets misconfigured, or turns into a puzzle nobody understands anymore, I sort it out. Job titles come and go, the work stays the same. Occasionally I fix things at home too, unless it’s a shower or some other boring plumbing job.

My path into tech was not academic. As a kid I had an internship laying out the Lions Club magazine on a Macintosh Lisa, and that was it — I was hooked. Later, while studying Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna, I worked part-time installing Novell networks. The company gave me a PC so I could learn. A friend filled it with 80 MB of DOS games, and I spent days adjusting autoexec.bat and config.sys so everything ran without memory errors. That was my real introduction to ops and debugging, long before I knew those words.

After university I moved back to Ghana, where I had grown up. The country’s internet and media scene in the early 90s was basically a blank map. I worked at the first private ISP as content manager. We rented Video-CDs from Chinese video shops, digitized them and broadcast the movies, because there was literally no other option. When we started offering internet access, there were no manuals or standards. We built networks from scratch until two officials from the US Embassy showed up and asked us to stop using US military IP ranges for testing. Fair enough.

Later I became CTO of the first private TV station in Ghana. Broadcasting there was improvised: redundancy meant building two versions of a device out of random hardware and hoping both wouldn’t die at the same time. In the late 90s I also worked with local banks, helped them build their network backbones, explained basic security, and ran my first vulnerability scans. Around the same time I built the High Court’s electronic docket system in ColdFusion. I moved back to Austria in 2000.

These days I help organizations make their technology work in a sane way. I use AI for pretty much everything: ops, research, code, planning, automation, analysis — not just for repetitive tasks. For fun I build drones, FPV quads, robots and home automation systems. I’ve lived in a few places and seen enough to compare, and Vienna is still the best place to do all of this, even if nobody agrees on the reason.

Oliver Eckel is a Security Architect based in Vienna with decades of experience building and fixing systems across infrastructure, security, governance, and compliance. His assessment revealed something rare: externalized methodology that captures not just what he does, but how he thinks. He builds verification playbooks with implementation details, structures his own reasoning for retrieval, and creates bidirectional linking patterns that make complex decisions traceable.

These aren't theoretical frameworks. They're battle-tested approaches from someone who built Ghana's first ISP infrastructure, ran vulnerability scans for banks before standards existed, and now uses AI across every dimension of his work. His trajectory across multiple assessments shows consistent improvement where most plateau. The next frontier: making his hard-won frameworks teachable at scale.