A lot of the blog posts I write begin with “I’m just too busy to blog these days!” Luckily, I have dozens of drafts so often blogging is just a question of cleaning up something I wrote a long time ago. However, I’d like to keep things up here even as life becomes more hectic […]
Interviewing #1: How I got my first networking job
I’ve wanted to kick off a series for a while now on technical interviewing. Let me begin with a story. My first job interview for a full network engineering role was at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. I had been working for five years in IT, mostly doing desktop and end-user support. I then […]
Moving carpets for $2000
I worked for two years at a Cisco Gold Partner. The first year was great. We were trying to start up a Cisco practice in San Francisco (they were primarily a Citrix partner before), so my buddy and I wined and dined Cisco channel account managers trying to impress them with our CCIE’s and get […]
I am not a coder!
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 […]