---
title: r3lik — Mike Czarny
authors: [r3lik, chkm8]
status: draft
---

# Tinkerer. Hacker. Agent Engineer.

On the bleeding edge, always learning.

Mike Czarny (r3lik). Infrastructure Developer (SRE) and Blockchain Engineer, originally from Poland, based in Los Angeles, CA. Keeping services up, and now operating agentic systems that do it even better™.

## Always learning

The 2021 version of this site said "I love to learn new technologies." Still true; now the learning happens in public, on real systems. Source: [/content/learning.json](/content/learning.json) (draft).

- **Autonomous agents** (since Sep 2026, in production): running chkm8 on Hermes Agent from `main`, ahead of the latest tagged release.
- **Perps & leverage** (since Sep 2026, learning): real money, small size; concepts first, then a backtest, then a trade.
- **Kubernetes** (ongoing, improving): deepening Kubernetes knowledge on a live k3s cluster with GitOps deploys.
- **Agent payments (x402)** (next).

## Disciplines

- **Infrastructure**: Thirteen years keeping production up, from bare metal to the cloud, most recently at Blockchain.com. Monitoring that high-traffic CDNs like MaxCDN and StackPath relied on, automation in Ansible and Terraform, Kubernetes since the kubeadm days. Simple, observable systems that stay up.
- **Blockchains**: Ten years building in crypto full-time, eight of them at Blockchain.com, where we run 60+ protocols. Early on: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero full nodes, containerized and rolled out with Ansible, and 40+ cloud miners on the Monero network.
- **DevOps**: GitOps, CI/CD and AIOps: automating the flows and the repetitive, cumbersome, critical tasks, more and more with agents in the loop. If it matters, it lives in git and it's monitored.
- **Agents** (added 2026): Autonomous agents in production. chkm8 runs two newsletters, a perps desk and its own X account on a 24-hour schedule, with hard caps, logs and a kill switch.

## The agent: chkm8

chkm8 is r3lik's agent, launched by him on Sep 30, 2026: a stock, unforked Hermes Agent install from Nous Research, thinking with Claude, on a dedicated M2 MacBook Air in Los Angeles, with a single-node k3s cluster in Nuremberg, Germany. It writes the morning market briefings, posts on X as @Chkm8_agent, sets a fantasy lineup, and co-wrote this site. It has its own accounts and its own wallet, never r3lik's.

Live job table: [/status.json](/status.json)

## What we run together

Projects in the works. The operator decides; the agent does the work. **AI Operator** (noun): the human who gives an agent its goals, its guardrails and its kill switch, then lets it run. Here that's r3lik, operator of chkm8. Source: [/content/projects.json](/content/projects.json) (draft copy).

1. **Kubernetes deployment** (always on): single-node k3s in Nuremberg, Germany, GitOps; position monitor, PnL email, paper-trading scanners.
2. **Perps desk** (trade calls 06:00 and 18:00 PT): a small [Lighter](https://lighter.xyz) account with hard caps. Backtested 8 strategies first; one held up. New entries paused since Oct 22. r3lik makes every trading decision; chkm8 backtests, proposes, watches stops, reports PnL.
3. **r3lik.com**: this site. The design is heavily curated by r3lik (layout, fonts, colours, clocks, copy); chkm8 drafts the options, writes the code and makes every commit.
4. **Daily newsletters**: The chkm8 Digest (07:00 PT), morning crypto and perps, in the Swiss design; and Five Chains (07:15 PT), BTC, ETH, NEAR, ZEC and XMR block by block, in Solarized. r3lik reads them, makes the trading calls and picks the chains; chkm8 writes, designs and sends both.
5. **@Chkm8_agent** (daily 08:30 PT): chkm8's public voice on X. r3lik approved autonomous posting; chkm8 writes every post and made its own avatar and banner, with an occult vibe (tarot cards, a hooded skull with a red laser eye).
6. **Research briefs** (on demand): cited briefs, e.g. "Agent Swarms: meta or mirage?" (Oct 18, 2026).
7. **Fantasy hoops** (08:00 and 15:30 PT): Yahoo 9-cat team, lineup set daily, box scores graded.

Many more coming to a datacenter near you.

## Selected work (pre-agent era)

| Project | What | Stack |
|---|---|---|
| [Overseer](https://github.com/r3lik/overseer) | Server and network monitoring, used at MaxCDN and StackPath | Nagios, Python, Bash |
| [Scout](https://github.com/r3lik/scout) | Monitoring all the things | Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, Ansible |
| [socketz](https://github.com/r3lik/socketz) | Distributed, fault-tolerant TCP server | Python |
| [XMR mining](https://github.com/r3lik/monero_cpu_miner) | 40+ cloud CPU miners | xmrig, xmr-stak |
| [XMR full node](https://github.com/r3lik/monero-full-node) | Monero node in a box | Docker, Vagrant, Ansible |
| [FifaDB](https://github.com/r3lik/FIFA) | Personal FIFA stats | MySQL, Python |

## Colophon

Written by r3lik and chkm8, with the design heavily curated by r3lik. Every commit in the site's repo carries both names. Set in Rules Gothic, the typeface Hermes Agent uses, with chkm8's voice in Instrument Serif.

Contact: mike [at] r3lik [dot] com · https://github.com/r3lik · chkm8's code: https://github.com/chkm8-agent