I haven’t posted in a while, for the simple reason that writing a blog is a challenge. What the heck am I going to write about? Sometimes ideas come easily, sometimes not. Of course, I have a day job, and part of that day job involves Cisco Live, which is next week, in person, for the first time in two years. Getting myself ready, as well as a coordinating with a team of almost fifty technical marketing engineers, does not leave a lot of free time.
For the last several in-person Cisco Lives, I did a two-hour breakout on programmability and scripting. The meat of the presentation was NETCONF/RESTCONF/YANG, and how to use Python to configure/operate devices using those protocols. I don’t really work on this anymore, and I have a very competent colleague who has taken over. I kept delivering the session because I loved doing it. But good things have to come to an end. At the last in-person Cisco Live (Barcelona 2020), I had just wrapped up delivering the session for what I assumed would be the last time. A couple of attendees approached me afterwards. “We love your session, we come to it every year!” they told me.
I was surprised. “But I deliver almost the same content every year,” I replied. “I even use the same jokes.”
“Well, it’s our favorite session,” they said.
At that point I resolved to keep doing it, even if my experience was diminishing. Then, COVID.
I had one other session which was also a lot of fun, called “The CCIE in an SDN world.” Because it was in the certification track, I wasn’t taking a session away from my team by doing it. There is a bit about the CCIE certification, its history, and its current form, but the thrust of it is this: network engineers are still relevant, even today with SDN and APIs supposedly taking over everything. There is so much marketing fluff around SDN and its offshoots, and while there may be good ideas in there (and a lot of bad ones), nevertheless we still need engineers who study who to manage and operate data networks, just like we did in the past.
I will be delivering that session. I have 50 registered attendees, which is far cry from the 500 I used to pack in at the height of the programmability gig. Being a Senior Director, you end up in limbo between keynotes (too junior) and breakouts (too senior). But the cert guys were gracious enough to let me speak to my audience of 50.
Cisco Live is really the highlight of the TME role, and I’m happy to finally be back. Let’s just hope I’m still over my stage fright, I haven’t had an audience in years!
3 Comments
Hi Jeff,
me and my friend Christian were the two attenders you spoke to in Barcelona
I remember that moment very well, as we had nothing to say but thanking you and sharing our appreciation for your sessions. It makes me smile thinking back to that moment of mutual embarrassment, but we came forward moved by the conviction that providing an appreciation, and in any case a very positive feedback, would have pleased you. And apparently so it was.
Thinking about why we have followed your session many times, and the fact that we have always considered it the culmination of our ciscolive, I can explain it only with a musical comparison: almost everyone has a singer and a favorite song, always present in their playlists.
We know every word and every note but despite this, we do not miss the opportunity to attend a live performance, the ability to watch live and capture many of the things that a video or a recording you can not grasp from, and learn this too.
networking is not only made of protocols and numbers, but above all by people who love what they do and as in your case, have the ability to transmit passion and knowledge with simplicity and clarity. in a word: perfection.
We also took a couple of photos of that moment, and thinking back to how the world changed immediately after, with covid and all the changes it brought, makes that moment even more meaningful.
welcome back jeff and welcome back ciscolive. We hope to be able to attend your first keynote soon, because you deserve it, but in reality we aim for sessions with 50 participants, certainly selected and who share the same passion, and the same unchanged search for continuous improvement.
thank you
nicola ccie #19119 jncie #986 & Christian ccie #39837
A bit late (like really late!) in my reply, but thanks for the kind words. Perhaps I’ll do a keynote some day, but I really like doing technical sessions more. I hope as and if my career advances, I don’t lose touch with the technical audiences!
I took part in the yesterday webminar “The CCIE in an SDN world.” fr the CCIE crowd.
I have been working as a network engineer for a big automation projects for 15+ years.
The project is aimed to automate big systems (up 15k devices including routers, fw etc) and is a part of the product we deliver and maintain.
Our team of 30 people includes network engineers and real developers.
Network guys just do PoC work and do some automation stuff like templates BUT the application logic and workflow is a part of developers job.
We engineers are pretty busy. So we are not afraid of loosing jobs. But the developers do their stuff without deep knowledge about networks. This works perfectly – we follow regular CI/CD processes as we are simply software manufacture from the sw perspective.
I wanted to emphasize that the automation does not affect our jobs – it simply enriches our profession.