I recently replied to a comment that I think warrants a full blog post. I’ve been here at Cisco working on programmability for a few years. Brian Turner wrote in to say, essentially: Hang on! I became a network engineer precisely because I don’t want to be a coder! I tried programming and hated it! […]
TAC Tales #16: To microburst or not to microburst
I’ve mentioned before that EIGRP SIA was my nightmare case at TAC, but there was one other type of case that I hated–QoS problems. Routing protocol problems tend to be binary. Either the route is there or it isn’t; either the pings go through or they don’t. Even when a route is flapping, that’s just […]
Do we hate network engineers?
I was doing well on the blog for a few months but lately fell behind. With (now) 12 people reporting to me, and three major areas of responsibility (SD-Access, Assurance, and Programmability), it’s not easy to find time to write up a blog post. I have about five drafts needing work but I cannot seem […]
Moscone Microwave
My first full-time networking job was at the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there isn’t much to the Chronicle anymore, but in the early 2000’s the newspaper was still going strong. It was the beginning of the decline, but most people still took their local newspaper as their primary source of news. Being a network engineer […]
Network Engineering Jobs
I’ve been in this industry a while now, and I’ve done a lot of jobs. Certainly not every job, but a lot. My first full time network engineering job came in 2000, but I was doing some networking for a few years before that. I often see younger network engineers posting in public forums asking […]
A Passive Star
I was hoping to do a few technical posts but my lab is currently being moved, so I decided to kick off another series of posts I call “NetStalgia”. The TAC tales continue to be popular, but I only spent two years in TAC and most cases are pretty mundane and not worthy of a […]
Cisco IOS XE Programmability Book
In a previous post I had mentioned I co-authored a book on IOS XE Programmability with some colleagues of mine. For those who are interested, the book is available here. The book is not a comprehensive how-to, but a summary of the IOS XE features along with a few samples. It should provide a good […]
TAC Tales #15: Loopy
I’ve mentioned in previous TAC Tales that I started on a TAC team dedicated to enterprise, which made sense given my background. Shortly after I came to Cisco the enterprise team was broken up and its staff distributed among the routing protocols team and LAN switch team. The RP team at that time consisted of […]
On Being a Dinosaur
An old networking friend whom I mentored for his CCIE a long time ago wrote me an email: I’ve been a CCIE for 10 years now, he said, and I’m feeling like a dinosaur. Everyone wants people who know AWS and automation and they don’t want old-school CLI guys. It takes me back to a […]
Cisco Live US 2018
Cisco Live Orlando has wrapped up, at least for me, and I can relax until Cisco Live Europe in January. I never realized how much work goes into Cisco Live until I became a TME. Building labs, working on slides, preparing demos, and arranging customer meetings is a months-long process and always a scramble at […]