Gus Narea

Greetings, fellow human! 🖖🏽 I’m Gus.

I’m a software engineer who specialises in cryptography and networking. I’m also the founder and CEO of Relaycorp — a company on a mission to solve some of the most pressing and neglected communication problems.

Project highlights

I conceived and lead the following projects at Relaycorp:

Awala, a delay-tolerant network where apps can communicate with and without the Internet. Pseudonymity, end-to-end encryption, and authorisation are built-in.
Letro, an Awala-based alternative to email. Messages are end-to-end encrypted, spamming and phishing are virtually impossible, and users can send and receive messages even if they’re offline.
VeraId, a DNS-based authentication protocol that works offline.
Fān Qiáng (翻墙), a VPN tunnelling protocol specifically designed to bypass the Great Firewall of China.
The DDoS Report, which I consider to be the ultimate guide to DDoS attacks for developers and operators.

I’m also the host of the Inside Awala podcast.

I’ve been contributing to open source projects since I was a teenager. I co-founded the charity GNU/Linux Matters to promote Linux and Free Software to non-technical people across various languages, and I led the authorisation component of the TurboGears v2 framework in its heyday.

Employment

Prior to starting Relaycorp, I worked in the core engineering team at Auth0, responsible for the company’s flagship product.

I was also the tech lead at 2degrees (now Manufacture 2030) for many years, where we built products to help large enterprises and their supply chains to operate more sustainably.

Education

I graduated from the University of Oxford with a master’s degree in Software Engineering. Awala was the subject of my dissertation. I’m an alumnus of Kellogg College and a member of the Oxford Union.

Recent sightings of me have been reported on BlueSky, GitHub, LinkedIn, and X.

Outside interests

I love riding motorbikes, especially off-road. I also like to do all the maintenance work myself — if something breaks in the middle of nowhere, I’d like to be able to fix it!

Before founding Relaycorp, I’d take a yearly solo trip to cycle or hike in a remote corner of the world, camping along the way. I’m particularly fond of high-latitude regions — Patagonia, Scandinavia, Scotland, and the South Island of New Zealand have a special place in my heart!

Contact

For all matters concerning Relaycorp or its projects, please contact Relaycorp.

To discuss an open source project I maintain independently of Relaycorp, please create an issue on GitHub.