I’ve been revising my Cisco Live session on IOS XE programmability, and it’s made me think about programming in general, and a particular idea I’ve been embarrassed to admit I loathe: Object Oriented Programming. Some context: I started programming on the Apple II+ in BASIC, which shows my age. Back then programs were input with […]
TAC Tales #20: Crash, burn, and exit
I’ve mentioned before that, despite being on the Routing Protocols team, I spent a lot of time handling crash cases in TAC. At the time, my queue was just a dumping ground for cases that didn’t fit into any other bucket in the High Touch structure. Backbone TAC had a much more granular division of […]
The tech industry and the worship of the new
“Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.” – Ogden Nash The book The Innovator’s Dilemma appears on the desk of a lot of Silicon Valley executives. Its author, Clayton Christiensen, is famous for having coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The term has always bothered me, and I keep waiting for the […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II
In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked. (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.) In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990. It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my […]
Vintage DDoS
With Coronavirus spreading, events shut down, the Dow crashing, and all the other bad news, how about a little distraction? Time for some NetStalgia. Back in the mid 1990’s, I worked at a computer consulting firm called Mann Consulting. Mann’s clientele consisted primarily of small ad agencies, ranging from a dozen people to a couple […]
TAC Tales #19: Butt-in-Chair
This one falls into the category of, “I probably shouldn’t post this, especially now that I’m at Cisco again,” but what the heck. I’ve often mentioned, in this series, the different practices of “backbone TAC” (or WW-TAC) and High Touch Technical Support (HTTS), the group I was a part of. WW-TAC was the larger TAC […]
Where does time go?
Two things can almost go without saying: If you start a blog, you need to commit time to writing it. When you move up in the corporate world, time becomes a precious commodity. When I started this blog several years ago, I was a network architect at Juniper with a fair amount of time on […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System
It’s inevitable as we get older that we look back on the past with a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia or not, I do think that computing in the 1980’s was more fun and interesting than it is now. Personal computers were starting to become common, but were not omnipresent as they are now. They were quite […]
TAC Tales #18: All at once
The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A large US service provider had a Packet over SONET (PoS) line card […]
Interviewing #2: Why do we interview?
In the last article on technical interviewing, I told the story of how I got my first networking job. The interview was chaotic and unorganized, and resulted in me getting the job and being quite successful. In this post, I’d like to start with a very basic question: Why is it that we interview job […]