Interview with Paolo Lucente from the pmacct project
I conducted an interview with Paolo Lucente (NTT, IETF) about the origins of the pmacct project. The interview can be also be enjoyed on youtube.

Job — pmacct is a wonderful open source tool that allows you to correlate what happens in your routing and where data is flowing. It allows you to analyse the profitability of the network, and it helps with security aspects. All in all the best traffic analyzer engine you can wish for! Paolo, you started this 15 years ago?
Paolo — To be more precise it was in 2003, it is actually 16 years ago!
Job — What were you thinking?! What was the moment you thought “you know what, I will open my text editor and start writing pmacct”?
Paolo — There were no alternatives back then. There were either totally integrated solutions or it was like dumping every aspect of the traffic into files. I thought a better thing could be done. I started out of operational needs, I had a problem to solve. I needed a better insight in my traffic back then, this was at the university. There was no analyzer that could fit the bill. What I wanted to do was aggregate/re-aggregate the traffic and put it in a relational database. None of that existed back then, so I thought… lets code it!
Job — What made you think you could actually pull this off? If nothing existed at the time, it would’ve been a bit of a crazy idea start making it yourself!
Paolo — You are right, it is one of those moment where you just start something. You don’t know where you are heading, but you have the energy, you have right environment and the time, and you just start it off. In retrospect I could’ve never at the time imagined that the project would still exist after 16 years. No chance it would’ve been adopted by top players in the industry. It has been a great adventure!
Job — So we are now 16 years later, most human social relations are shorter than 16 years. What makes you still carry on with this project? What is it that brings you joy to continue this?
Paolo — In part it is still the original intent — without re-inventing the wheel, filling gaps that are clearly there, and are not filled by anyone else. Sometimes there are no commercial products available. Along the years you can see there have been cycles of innovation, this happened multiple times. I still have a lot of energy, I have a lot of enthusiasm. I met a great share of fantastic people and I look forward to do more!
Job — Thank you!
Paolo — You are welcome
