I’ve been reluctant to comment on the latest fad in our industry, generative AI, simply because everybody has weighed in on it. I do also try to avoid commenting on subjects outside of my scope of authority. Increasingly, though, people are coming to me at work and asking how we can incorporate this technology into our […]
Layer 1 Friday
My readership is limited, so consider a post to be “viral” if I get more than 2 thumbs up at the bottom of a page. (Incidentally, I’ve only ever gotten one thumbs down, for this post, but I don’t know why.) My 2021 post For the Love of Wiring got 3 thumbs up (!) but […]
Some thoughts on “digital twins”
As I mentioned in my last post, I like modeling networks using tools like Cisco Modeling Labs or GNS3. I recalled how, back in TAC, I had access to a Cisco-internal (at the time) tool called IOS on Unix, or IOU. This enabled me to recreate customer environments in minutes, with no need to hunt […]
Back in the lab
We all have to make a decision, at some point in our career, about whether or not we get into the management track. At Cisco, there is a very strong path for individual contributors (IC). You can be come a principal (director-level), a distinguished (senior director-level), and a fellow (VP-level) as an IC, never having […]
Goodbye, Building K
I haven’t written anything for a while, because of the simple fact that I had nothing to say. The problem with being a writer is that sometimes you have nothing to write. I also have a day job, and sometimes it can keep me quite busy. Finally, an afternoon drive provided some inspiration. There’s a […]
Networking Simplicity
There’s a lot of talk about networking simplicity these days. There’s been a lot of talk about networking simplicity, in fact, for as long as I can remember. The drive to simplify networking has certainly been the catalyst for many new products, most (but not all) unsuccessful. Sometimes we forget that networking has some inherent […]
The death of CLI: A lesson from Swift
Update: From Fred, who was the guy referenced in the first paragraph: Actually it was a white button with a router icon on it and “make cli great again”, I know this because it was me. It was June 2016. Needless to say in my view that did not age well. When I attended Cisco […]
The War on Expertise
Like many network engineers, I quickly fell in love with my field and worked hard to master it. I got into networking when I was working in desktop support. The behind-the-scenes stuff was way more interesting to me than the front lines. Back in the late nineties, I bought a library of books to learn […]
When it’s time to go
I’ve mentioned my first job as a network engineer several times on this blog. I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the biggest newspaper in Northern California. I was brought in to manage the network as a Cisco-certified engineer, having just passed a four-day CCNA bootcamp. Right before the dot-bomb economic crash, network engineers were […]
Apple Certified…what??
I’m thinking of doing some video blogging and kicking it off with a series with my thoughts on technical certifications. Are they valuable or just a vendor racket? Should you bother to invest time in them? Why do the questions sometimes seem plain wrong? Meanwhile, a little Netstalgia about the first technical certification I (almost) […]