About

I'm René Weinberger. I live in Pasching, just outside Linz, Austria, and this blog is the written version of my basement: Home Assistant, Zigbee, PV, a Tesla, and a few things I did with the GPIO header of a Raspberry Pi that would make an electrician wince. I write down what broke before it worked, because that part is missing from most guides.

The day job

I'm a CTO. Currently co-founder and CTO of a retail-loyalty startup — Flutter, Laravel, PostgreSQL, and an Ollama setup that runs locally because the data isn't OpenAI's business.

Before that, ten years at hitbox.tv (2013–2023), a live-streaming platform later acquired by Azubu. And before that, own3D.tv (2009–2013). In practice that means video at scale, CDN, transcoding pipelines, traffic spikes nobody warned us about, cloud bills someone has to own, and engineering teams you hire, lead, and occasionally have to shrink. None of it was a whiteboard job.

More recently: private AI. Local LLMs, Ollama, self-hosted inference — not as a demo, but because some data genuinely can't leave the building, and because two weeks into running it you notice the model choice was the easy part.

If you need someone for that sort of thing

Occasionally I do this outside my own startup — as a fractional or interim CTO, or as a sparring partner for one specific problem: streaming and CDN, cloud infrastructure and its invoices, on-prem LLMs and what they really cost, building and leading engineering teams. On the side, not as a business; DACH, remote in Europe, or remote worldwide.

What I don't do

Smart home installations. This blog is a hobby, not a service offering — I won't come over to configure your shutters, and I don't take on building-automation projects. If you like how I approach technology here, that's the point: same approach, applied to company infrastructure instead of my living room.

Contact

One email is enough, ideally with the actual problem in it: rennne@gmail.com