A Journey in Network Innovation
More than 13 years have passed since KickstartSDN began.
Some of the technical content on this website may now be outdated or obsolete. But KickstartSDN was never just about a project, a technology, or a collection of code and documents.
It was a journey. A story of curiosity, experimentation, and network innovation.
Back then, we were a bunch of university students fascinated by the possibilities of programmable networks. It was the pre-AI era, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) was beginning to gain traction and challenge the traditional way of building and operating networks.
We started experimenting, learning, building, breaking things, and trying to understand what the future of networking could look like.
We even built a low-cost SDN setup using Raspberry Pi and Wi-Fi routers for less than $80 — proof that innovation didn’t always require expensive hardware.
There were no polished AI assistants to guide us, no instant answers, and often no clear roadmap. We learned by reading papers, discussing ideas, writing code, running experiments, and figuring things out together.
KickstartSDN was born from that spirit.
Today, networking has evolved enormously. SDN has influenced modern network architectures, cloud networking, network automation, 5G, 6G and beyond. The technologies may have changed, but the curiosity that drove us remains timeless.
So, rather than treating this website as a perfectly maintained technical reference, think of it as a snapshot of a moment in the history of our journey — a reminder of what we were exploring, building, and dreaming about more than a decade ago.
Technologies become obsolete.
The journey of learning and innovation never does.
Welcome to KickstartSDN — a small story from the early days of our journey into network innovation.