this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers you are listening to a1255.ofm where we pump out all the classics to get you through those long maintenance windows this is big stubby and i'll be captaining this ship of the tech tunes that you love to hear this evening this is the request hour and we've got some good ones coming up prepare yourselves for on the as path to my origin by the bgp boys blinded by the fiber light from sc to lc get your dtp away from me by the no negotiators the death metal hit collision city by the raging hubs and of course broadcast storm by no stp so hey even if nothing goes as planned tonight at least you'll be rocking with us but before we jam here is a very brief hour-long message from the art of network engineering welcome all back to another episode of the art of network engineering i am tim burtino and we've got a nice tight-knit group for you for you in this episode we have permit ip andy andy andy laptop how you doing buddy what's good big stubby i hope that this is great man it might be the name of the goat i'm uh i'm great tim um thrilled as usual to to be here life is good i'm working on some python at work and you know i'm thrilled i don't i don't want to talk about that right now and i shouldn't say that with the guests that we have we'll introduce him in a minute but anyway i want to talk about you've been doing uh you got a lot of good family stuff going on lately i've been seeing some some good pics you've been enjoying the family having a good time taking kind of taking a break to balance things out that's been looks exciting yeah i've i've been re-prioritizing i guess what's important you know what i mean um i mean now we're getting real tim right this is just the intro you know um uh i i have a tendency to get hyper focused and lose perspective and overwork and you know it doesn't seem to matter how good i get at my job or how high up whatever ladder there is to climb i just work as if yeah you know my life depends on it so yeah that that that caused you know some um just imbalance right in in life the work life balance everybody talks about so and and i don't know if it's just me but i feel like in tech you know this career can consume you if you're not careful you know every five minutes there's a new technology stack you have to learn and if you're busy at work you got to learn it at night right sorry family so yeah man um thanks for bringing it up it's been really nice uh my wife and kids have noticed a difference i feel much calmer and it's been nice so now the goal is to sustain it and not fall back to my old ways right but yeah man it's it's good you don't you seem pretty uh you don't do that do you you seem pretty balanced with work and family uh i'm a fan of beer so just that um that's your secret sauce yeah no seriously i so i i think it was um our buddy friend of the show robin c i wanted to get into like i wasn't outside of like technical material i wasn't i haven't been reading books for years and i i wanted to get into that kind of thing so i'm like okay i'm not i know me i'm not gonna put the time into actually reading so i'll cheat and i'll i'll try this audio book thing so robin turned me on to this this service where you just it's an app and you link it to a library card and you can download books from local library so i've been doing that and i went through this one that was i think it was called unwinding anxiety i i think you would hit uh yeah i'm a big fan and it really it really opened my mind to just being aware and paying attention to surroundings and how you're doing things day to day and really just becoming curious about how you react to things how you handle things how you handle stress and anxiety and it's it's uh it's a process but i can fee i can feel a little bit different than i did before i got through the book so yeah it's it's so easy to echo what you said it's so easy to find that next bright shiny thing and just get so laser focused on it that you feel like you got to be all or nothing and just put your head down and go into it you really got to step back and realize that you've got you know i know all of us on here have an excellent support system and we need to make sure that we reciprocate that and we can't do that if we just got our our head down all the time working so yeah it's it's been obviously an eye opening year a couple years now for i think all of us so balance i think is is key in sustaining that so yeah really good points here andy and now it's time for some wins winning in our discord channel this week is psychomet they got a job offer with a 25 pay raise congratulations freeman ed tech accepted a new job offer as a wireless network engineer hubus tank pilgrim passed the aws solutions architect exam congrats whis house i hope i said that correctly was selected to join the women in it networking at sc congratulations what an honor bearded packet was promoted to a senior network engineer congratulations and jeff kish passed the enterprise wireless design exam congrats that's from cisco network trials was recently selected to be a tech field day delegate congratulations charles maleficent one completed the meraki cmna training if you're not familiar with the cmna training it's like the ccna but focused on cisco meraki and it's usually for cisco employees and partners so it's not typically publicly available but it is a fun training i've done it myself and usually you walk away from that with a full stack of gear so congratulations steve mcnutt passed the comptia cyber security analyst certification congratulations steve and tim mcc took and passed the ace professional exam congrats robin canelo was invited to join the national society of leadership and success through wgu congratulations robin and smart377 passed the encore exam that's a big one huge congratulations and you're one gigantic step closer to your ccnp new patreons joining us this week are kev twad charlie dean and chase duke thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of net edge check out our different membership levels and join one that suits you best and we appreciate all of our fans for letting us know just how much they're enjoying the show and all the great feedback that we get keep it coming now back to the show all right on this episode we have the long awaited return of a well us a big fan of him we have the one and only john capo bianco john thank you so much for coming back how are you i am i am fantastic i'm i'm really happy to be back i had such a great time on the first episode let's call it and i've met you know so many more people and connected to so many people in your discord and really feel like i've joined a a ready-made community that celebrates wins we just heard some wins pick up each other from losses help each other out with new technologies it really is like a non-toxic um you know pillar of of the community now so but i i'm doing fantastic i i'm excited to be back i i felt like i had a little more to talk about last time and i've gone through some career changes since i've been on last time so yeah i'm here again and i'm really excited to be back i really like how you frame that john it it some of us you know may be intoxicating but not toxic definitely not toxic so yeah i agree with that thank you let's kick it right off with um what you just mentioned there you mentioned a career change let's uh let's unpack that a little bit sure so i um after a pretty long process interview process and selection process i've joined cisco formally and officially on their cisco training boot camps or more affectionately known as automation boot camps abcs which is a relatively new offering from cisco and they have you know like 12 seat classroom or per seat individual seats for this training and it's a deeper dive into automation so i'm really excited to be part of cisco it really is something that i've been working towards it feels like for about 10 years now or even longer a real life long dream to work for a technology company not just any technology company cisco in particular um and and i i'm very happy to be a developer advocate is really what i've joined as is to be a developer advocate and advocate for automation and programmability and this you know we we know that the industry is changing or has already changed but i really want to be part of this you know next wave or evolution of our industry and it's just a really good opportunity for me um for for a variety of reasons uh i i've reached a point where i i was ready to put down my pager and ready to have a little less production grade stress let's say in my life but i also think i've kind of transitioned and i i've reached a point where i want to give back or to teach the next generation or to share the knowledge that i've accumulated over the time i've been in the field i loved being a professor at college and this opportunity someone in the the one of the patreons mentioned it it seems like a perfect fit for me and um i i i'm i i'm glad to hear that vote of confidence that people think i will be a good instructor but but it really is like it's everything i've ever wanted and even just a month in at cisco uh i feel like i've made the right decision and that this was a really good move for me for a lot of reasons yeah that's excellent john i i think i'd let you teach me just about anything so and i hope that you bring back in these these new classes you bring back your teaching style by memes like you did back when you taught in college i think that would go over really well but i i did want to ask and i don't know how much you can uh talk about it just yet but so this is a new like learning path these are these are live classes is this something that's completely outside of like the cisco digital learning library it is so it's actually um a two-phase um classroom learning experience where you have a week of a little more normal training and learning from cisco um training and then you you follow up after a little bit of time for a four day deeper dive and that's where i come in i'm leading the deeper dive um where we have a schedule of um you know we talk about say the models and the objects and we talk about git and we talk about postman we talk about python and pi ats and we talk about ansible all of the wonderful things that i've i've really enjoyed learning and and becoming pretty good with over the past three years in a in a cisco-backed you know official um very well structured um a lot of thought goes into these modules and it's kind of a la carte not i think the goal is to have an a la carte menu where organizations or individuals can kind of say i'm a little more interested in ansible than i am python we're an ansible shop can we do lean you know tailor the training more towards ansible than say python or we we're really interested in apis can we focus more on the rest api and sdks and things of that nature so it's it's supposed to help um accelerate people's adoption of these automation solutions uh across the cisco portfolios so there's boot camps for aci and meraki and nso there's going to be one for enterprise networks ios xe focused so it's it's it's kind of like i said it's a dream come true for me because i feel like i've been talking about this stuff as a non-cisc for free for a few years now right now it's great that i actually get to you know i don't have to do disclaimers anymore and say you know this is just my own personal opinion i don't work for cisco you know they don't even know that i'm talking about this stuff but now i actually am part of that family so it's it's been it's it's been incredible it really has so are these geared toward folks of all skill sets or is it is it more toward people that are that are just breaking in beginning into these these topics what's it who's it geared toward so i i think it's geared towards both but the intention is is that the first week that you take is enough for beginners and introducing the topics of ansible and ginger and acis and postman and then students will have some time in between that first week and then the follow-up four days five days with me and the other developer advocates where we do a deeper dive so we take what they learned in the first week and then expand upon it and actually go deeper what's neat is that it's it's real hands-on labs and we're not we're not giving you i don't know if you've ever done the training where you just sort of follow along and you get the little completed lab and then you're like i don't know what like i don't know what i just did i it's completed and it worked but i don't really you know i didn't really connect the dots because i just robotically followed along with these steps in a lab guide it's a little more um yes if you're a beginner will offer you the code more complete python let's say but you have the option to say you know what i'd like a a little more challenging lab don't give me the complete python file let me figure out some of it or all of it or most of it or i am a beginner and i actually do need you to show me every library i need to import every command every variable so it's it's hard to do a one size fits all i understand that but i think we're targeting just above um the middle of the road right so so a little beyond beginners a little beyond the average user but not a full expert by any means so just a little challenging to get people to think and to create right as we move up that pyramid of just raw rote memorization all the way up to being a creator and creating things with the knowledge we've learned that's the goal and i see a question about the class size it's a 12 seat uh class or a group of 12 or 12 individual seats i believe i hope i got that right but i think it's 12 seats so i i would really love to to kind of experience your take on that john because i've been part of those sessions before sessions like that before where you've got labs that they want you to do in the session and you really just feel like you're going through page by page click here click there do this do that and you at the end of it you don't always really know what it was that you just did or maybe you know what it was but you don't know why and it's just step by step and do this do that and sometimes it's not very beneficial so i i think i'd really love to experience because i i know the kind of energy that you bring to those kind of settings and i know that you want students to leave those sessions uh feeling like they've done something meaningful so i i can't wait to see your take on on these kind of classes well i well i don't think we'll leave anyone to flail and say well figure it out right i just did the la right we're we're there to help him and there to guide it but it but from what i understand it it can start with the with the structured outline from the student guide but then we have the time and the flexibility because it's such a small group and because it's tailored for the customers needs and what they required up front we can kind of explore it a little bit more and go even you know it's a deep dive exercise right so it's it's it's a it's a balancing act though right it it's pretty challenging to to give just enough right to lead them down the path but not just spoon feed answers and and get into rote memorization right i think the goal is that the customer can leave these boot camps with the ability to create to to implement on you know in their own environment i've looked at some of the modules and for something like aci like we're using postman to to define um tenants and vrfs and epgs and contracts like real world stuff that you would want to do with an aci fabric um but beyond just doing it in the apic gui right that we want to move to get customers to program the software-defined network that's the whole point right yeah and i i like how it does seem like these classes are tailored not necessarily for certification study but more toward hey you can use these skills on the job and and the uh the postman thing is is something that a little while back i wouldn't have thought of i was only really thinking of postman as is kind of a teaching tool and this is how you explore apis and that kind of thing until i was on an aci project and we had a partner come in and said hey check out what i can do since you we have all of these templates built for how you want to name your objects and and how you want everything to look we can put all of this into postman into a collection and it'll spit out all the config and do all the config for you within aci i was like whoa this isn't just a teaching tool you can use it for for actual production deployment so that was that was really eye-opening yeah so i completely agree i was when i first found postman i thought of it more of like a browser like experience where we consume apis through gets and it gives us json and i sort of thought that was the extent of it until i really started working more with with apis and in particular like postman has pre api and post api javascript that you can run before and after you do your requests for example it has a logging capability where you can check logs and and actually look at the full flow between an api the other thing i really like in my and and this is actually part of these boot camps not to give too much away for free cisco won't like that but you you can take a working request and there's a little reveal as code button now that reveals code button that was my leap into python because you just say reveal is code and you can pick the language you want so we we talk a lot about python but if you're interested in javascript or c plus plus or something they're in that list of reveal is code and then postman will give you back a snippet that you can literally like with the python you can literally highlight it copy it save it to a dot pi file or go into the python command line either way and and paste it in and it will give you the same javascript that postman did i think postman is actually abstracting either curl or python under javascript under the hood and making it nice and easy and a nice gui system for us right the other thing i want to mention about postman that i really like is this idea of environments and this can sort of lead you into programmability with some really simple variables so let's just take ice identity services engine from cisco which has multiple apis really good apis as of 3.1 but let's say you had a lab or a pre-prod or a test and then your prod ice you could variabilize the url right so instead of typing in lab.mydomain.ice.com you can variabilize that and set it to your environment right so then you're just toggling to say okay send this request to prod or send it to pre-prod or test using variables right and and it's a great way to handle usernames and passwords just make them little variables in your environment in postman i i can't say enough about postman and then what's kind of neat is it doesn't have to be aci or prime or ice or rest comp or whatever if you're interested just in the general high level of learning apis i suggest you find something that you're interested in like i'm a big marvel comics fan look behind me the paintings might indicate that there's a marvel comics api and you can look up an issue number or like the first appearance of a character or um every comic book that your favorite artist has was involved in the api from marvel will give you all that and that's just one example there's space there's pokemon um star wars you know whatever you're i feel like whatever your interest is there's likely a rest api out there on the internet for you so i got a question john last time we talked we were talking about the space api and i tried to make the thing do the thing postman after the show and and nothing happened so this is who you're dealing with so what does that do for me right what what do i do with a space api like do i get to see something cool do i see the space station's toilet like what happens so the nasa apis just a few i think the easiest one is probably how many astronauts are in space oh right and that it just answers that question you can go to the api and do a get and it will return structured javascript that says the name and the nationality of the person in space as a really simple example as you as you start to explore and if you can get you know a 200 status back meaning your request was good and it gave you a payload then there's like like you can go to the mars you're not going right to the mars rover right but the mars rover has things like the wind speed or the temperature on mars depending on where the rover is in mars you can get that scientific data from the nasa api there was one using something yeah someone wrote a discord bot for their space related discord sort of like we have the art of engineering discord they have a space one well they have it where you can type in you know where is the iss where's the international space station and their bot does a request against the iss location api and then the bot tells the users in discord the space station is going to be above texas tonight or whatever right that's so cool i mean for a kid who wanted to be an astronaut most of his childhood to be able to find the wind speed on mars you know through an api like we i i think you've said it before john like find something you're interested in or a problem you can solve or like you need some you need some skin in the game right and that is an interest of mine space and that would motivate me to keep banging my head into postman until i get that you know that successful uh get i i would say it it takes away the feeling like you know my job wants me to learn python and i've got to figure out rest comp and what is this json about you know a vlan or whatever like it feels like work or it feels like forced learning whereas i feel like if if you were to make a bot that could tell people in discord the wind speed on mars you're obviously going to learn a lot through that process and it's easily transferable in a month or two to restcom for aci or whatever because you know you had some fun while you were learning it and it didn't really feel like you're back in high school in some math class like i feel bad when i i don't say force python onto people but i don't want people to get you know back to school learning and i've gotta you know i don't wanna go back to college and learn programming maybe there's a fun you know maybe there's a more enjoyable experience that you could still learn some tricks as you go right i think that might be the secret sauce for me john that you you nailed because every time i try to learn this stuff it's in the context of what i got to do for work and it does feel like school and i didn't like school when i was in it right but if i could do something like a python script to do something in my personal life that would be much more interesting to me it would hold my interest you know yeah that's where i like it it's really counter like these um it's kind of counter i don't want to say counterintuitive but but counter to the traditional learning where okay i'm going for the certification or i'm sitting in high school or college and need to to pass this exam i need to get through this entire book take all these notes and and do all this uh like john you were saying wrote memorization earlier and you're really taking another approach where you can say okay tell somebody download this app postman go to whatever site you're you're interested in that has an open api and find the documentation page it's usually it's not a whole lot of documentation you need to read through tells you how to write the the basic api calls and you can get all of this really cool information from it and you didn't have to sit in front of a book for three hours you know it's it's really exciting well i mentioned discord bots which which you know i don't want to minimize that that that is i would consider that an advanced topic you know chat bots but what's gonna happen is you're gonna get a blob of json back and that might feel like the end of the road right okay so what so i have this little structured bit of data what am i supposed to do with that i think this is where we can kind of apply our i call them business ready but don't you don't have to think in those terms can i make a spreadsheet can i go get the speed the wind speed on mars daily or every hour and plot them in an excel spreadsheet and then maybe make a bar graph out of them or like this mind map thing that i like the mark map that can i put it into markdown and then visualize it so like the space one is kind of neat that you could have mars and then you know temperature is a as a a leaf in your mind map wind speed that's another leaf in your mind map so it's more than like i think it's a great leap forward i have a postman request working and i have json and it's the x-men animated series json about apocalypse in you know very cool stuff for me i love the x-men cartoon and they have a wicked api that's easy to use and well documented and i can tell you that you know omega red appeared in season three that kind of stuff i can make a spreadsheet of every character from the cartoon or a mind map or um html pages my my nephew thought it was neat that with python he could type in the name of his pokemon his favorite pokemon and it would generate an html web page with images because postman will give you hyperlinks to images that you can then quickly embed in a simple html tag and display that image you didn't download it you didn't have to go find it on the internet and right click and save it and then upload it to apache you're just making an api call and passing that url along so there's a lot of different things you can do to get started um and it and i think people with maybe with children it's if there's a lot of fun things you can do with apis and making web pages or yeah spreadsheets probably not going to excite a 12 year old boy but or girl but you know maybe if you gathered all the data into a spreadsheet and then made a pie graph pie chart out of it they might find that a little bit more interesting right yeah that's that's a big thing because what do kids do more than than practically anything they ask questions constantly oh yeah which is a great thing but i mean if you can you can take that curiosity and and say hey let's let's sit in front of the screen let's put in these basically put in these questions to this application and you can get this information from not your dad you can get it from the internet look how cool you can be i mean i i think it really if you can go after that curiosity in in kids it's just gonna it's gonna spark you know that might be a new way i do that i google everything for my son like my wife jokes that i'm annoying question guy right and we probably know that if you've listened to the show for five minutes like i never shut up with questions so my son has inherited that from me but i'll just google stuff i don't know but how cool would it be to pull up postman find an api because then i could show them that too so john not not to appear like a really crappy podcast host but i was going to try to impress you while we were on here and see if i could pull up the nasa api and so it generated a question for me so i'm on here and it says sign up for an application an api key to access the stuff right oh i don't know what that is can you just describe to me and the audience what an api key is sure it's um so i unfortunately some of the nasa ones are locked behind a key and and they use those keys basically to authenticate and it's a good question because in the production grade world of the apis that you're going to deal with on the job there's a variety of ways some use what's called basic authentication and that's exactly what it sounds like a username and a password some of them use open authentication keys some of them you need to do a request to get a key from one api and then send that key along as the authentication mechanism to subsequent apis yeah that's what i did when i tried your question you needed to get like a token right which is why this api key threw me that's right yeah okay yeah the api keys are a little that's that that is a little bit more complex um andy look for iss notify i think if you maybe google that i i'm not sure i i don't want to crash my my session again by opening another browser tab but i think if you google open notify space api some combination of those words there's some that don't require any tokens they don't even need a username or password you just go and get the data and i don't want to post down any strange rabbit holes of me failing over here at automation but you know this is all very no no that's okay so i have a follow-up idea that that that's i would suggest or submit to you is is probably the easiest python you're going to to be able to learn or to start with i would also suggest that if you have children that are old enough to use postman and and and conceptually get this idea of rest apis i would and i've made some videos about this or or there's some open source stuff wikipedia has a python library and it's exactly what you were talking about andy when you were saying i google things with my children to get answers and and i don't know what 7 out of ten of those results probably lead you to a wikipedia page of some kind right and you start to read the wiki right python has a wikipedia library that you can import and then you i hate to say the word pythonically but you interact with wikipedia through python and it's like you know um dot search or dot links or dot images based on the wikipedia page and it gives you back javascript object notation or structured data from wikipedia now you can get just the summary from an article or you could even just search like like you would on wikipedia if you search for x-men and it gives you the pages of all the results well you can search at the python command line for x-men and then it will return all of the articles that x-men is found in that then you can follow with python to say kind of load page and then one of the page titles that you got back um i i think it's really exciting because wikipedia is you know it's it's incredible it's like you know this open source of knowledge and it's a great way for us to start with python i would think it is probably the easiest example i can think of and you know you're going to have to pip install a library you're going to have to go into the python command line and import that library set some variables right like dot into some things it's going to cover all of the groundwork but you can do kind of neat things like if you want to introduce a for loop or an if statement right if there's no hits in my search send a message that says wikipedia didn't find anything or for every result in my results give me the page title so that it's not just a big blob of pages python will sequentially give you each page title uniquely um so i just an idea i i want to try to help people kind of get into this stuff and you know postman and python particularly the wikipedia python they're like i made some um those mind maps i was talking about i i thought wouldn't it be neat if you could mind map the osi stack where you could have a leaf for each layer in the osi model and then subsequent information and and like wikipedia is just a wonderful place for that right ten-based tea it has an article a spanning tree it has an article and and you know then you start to collect those those things into mind maps or csv files or whatever right you've been such a great teacher john this whole time for me so i just want to appreciate your i want to thank you for your selfless contributions to the community like you know you just got a job as a developer advocate right but you've been a developer advocate for the couple years i've known you so is isn't that cool that just by being who you are somebody's like hey we're gonna pay him to do that like it's just so cool to me i'm really happy for you oh i thank you andy and it's i've fallen into this perfect job like i i don't know i i sort of my wife said to me she knows me really well i kind of caught a bit of a tail end of the discussion i know families come up a lot it's really important to me she's been a big supporter of my whole career but she sort of said so you have unlimited access to cisco knowledge and learning and training and books and you can study for any cert you want now you get to be a developer advocate you get to teach and train people it's all automation based and then they're going to pay you and they're going to pay you for this i was like i know right i would do this for i would pay them to do this job right so it's just well hang on really really happy about the way things have turned out hang on john how long have you been there they are paying you right yeah yeah yes yes yes they are paying me i have to make sure i did get a paycheck already i they i am being compensated but it's all it's only been a month i i'm about a month in um to my journey at cisco and um you know i don't i don't have anything but good things to say and you know i know i'm being paid to be a developer advocate but just a month in and i i can i can appreciate now why they win things like the best company in the world and why so many people want to work with cisco and why you know the the saying is you know you never get fired from buying cisco right it i've always wanted to do this every time i went to cisco live it was like going to disneyland for me it really was and now i get to participate in that and and evangelize and and be an advocate for them so yeah it's interesting i am i did a snack minutes i've done a few of those and they're like um his first snack minute is an actual employee of cisco right so it's quite a different thing it's uh it's pretty neat yeah so i think this is a good segue john you had spent what was it about eight years i think in your previous role as a network engineer you started getting into abstraction orchestration automation and then started using those skills at your previous employer how did you get to the point where you knew it was it was time for a change was was cisco what you were planning for the whole time did it just kind of happen tell us the whole story so i i saw um hank preston he sent a tweet out advertising this opportunity with cisco and um i i reached out to him privately just to kind of get a sense of what the role was and and um i have a great deal of respect for hank and and you know many other developer advocates but but hank in particular is um has supported my work publicly and and sent me some encouraging words along the way and really kind of looked out for me in the community so after talking to hank privately i uh i decided to pursue this opportunity um i i wouldn't say that i was dissatisfied at my current you know my previous role at parliament i i'm very proud of the work we did there and what i was able to accomplish um not just technologically but sort of culturally as well you alluded to bringing in automation and and sort of transforming the organization um at the same time it it is a its big government its public sector not exactly known for agility or forward thinking or uh adopting new ways of doing things it was a little slow for me i'm you know i wan i'm a go-getter and i wanted to keep go getting right and i was a you know a little bit a little bit tired of the same old automations next year's focus or you know it's it was a little bit demoralizing at times not seeing the not seeing us capitalize on opportunities let me let me put it that way that was that was a little bit it got a little bit tiring for me but it was more the the lifelong desire to work for cisco and and this particular opportunity so i i had pursued some other roles at cisco and and to be totally transparent didn't get them went through some interviews met with management sorry you're not the right candidate and that happened a few times over this eight year period and um but when i saw this this particular opportunity i was very excited and i thought i don't think they made this role for me or had me in mind but it really it lined up like it sounds like this is for me like they want me to apply teaching and automation and boot camps and evangelism and devnet and python and pi ets and ansible so like i was like it checks all the boxes i i have to really pursue this and um and and it went very well i i had i had three interviews over a few months the christmas shutdown happened which which added a bit of delay to the process but that aside um the interviews felt like this podcast they didn't feel i didn't have any nerves i wasn't overly anxious i gave it my best and i was very open and honest and sort of had this friendly giant attitude and approach and um and i think they were impressed and i was certainly impressed with them but uh i i don't have any regrets you know i i think it was the right time for me to move on we mentioned that i mentioned this before we got started i i feel like i'm at a point where i can contribute more by teaching and passing on knowledge and evangelizing solutions and helping people like yourselves and others get started with automation and and maybe demystify some of this programmability and automation world as opposed to building yet another production enterprise network system i you know i i was at a point where i wanted to put my pager down and um over the eight years i was at parliament i was their go-to person every p1 every major outage two o'clock in the morning phone call came to me and uh even after moving into senior roles and automating things everything sort of kind of fell back on to me as as the escalation point which was okay i it's not that i couldn't handle it but i'm old i'm 44 now and um i wasn't like i i don't want to be going hey wait a minute oh two in the morning troubleshooting problems anymore you know yeah so i had this when the when the when the staff is working i was planning and when the staff wasn't working i was working and when the network wasn't working i was working even harder right so i needed to change i needed a change i love what you said that the interview felt like this podcast right because i i feel like every job interview i've had that i wanted i wouldn't say i was lying but i was presenting my best self and you know i don't want to say putting on a show but my my three interviews for the job i have now john same thing like it just felt like we were just shooting the breeze and i was really into them and they were really into me and i was impressed and it just it felt different right it's neat to to interview over your career and not have it be relaxing like every networking job i'm like oh god what are they going to ask me you know the technical interview here we go there's just so much they could ask right but yeah i mean this job just sounds like it was written for you just such a great fit well i i agree i i thank you and i and i can echo that the the previous when i interviewed for more of a solutions engineer or architect type role with cisco you know i'm studying all night acronyms and products i don't know and things i haven't touched and what are they going to throw at me and i didn't feel comfortable and then like you said you know you're kind of stretching oh well i'm not the expert on this but what i understand is and you're kind of trying to say i don't know without saying i don't know all right um yeah and a deep technical stuff and not to say my current role isn't technical but but the interview process i i i really went in there calm and and confident let's say i think it's confidence was more than anything that that i i was able to project that i was confident that i could do the role that i would enjoy the role and then i had the technical chops to achieve success but i didn't have this nagging like you said imposter syndrome i'm not really up for this job and even if i get the job that's only that then you have to go do the job right and if i can't get through the interview technically with the little bits and bytes how successful am i going to be day one week one year one right whereas this this opportunity i felt comfortable and confident and and able to contribute almost right away you know you just described my entire technical career and i wonder why it's been so stressful like oh god i got i failed the technical interview and they gave me the job again i'm not sure how to process this not again not again how am i gonna do this job so john i i i gotta ask you i've i've seen people like yourself so you and and people like you that are have removed themselves from enterprise roles that are at you know a tme role or a developer advocate role and all of them seem to be able to really keep their finger on the pulse of the people that handle these enterprise networks all the time what is your advice and strategy for someone that is thinking about getting into a role like yours to be able to stay relevant with the the technologies that you're supporting that customers are using in their environments daily so i think we have to be curious and remain curious um and i and i've um so duan lightfoot who was on here and i've done some work with him when he was with cisco he he sort of thought kind of similar like you know you're gonna give that up i would love to be deploying a new dna and building a new fabric and like you know kind of the flip side of why i'm saying i wanted to get out of it so i i think there is a risk that um you know those that can't do teach right and i certainly don't want to be one of those you know paper tigers that can't do it but i can deliver and teach it so i i think that i think that we have an advantage though in today's day and age that a sandbox or a virtual environment or a vm or you know the apis it it's a lot more accessible than it was even five years ago 10 years ago 20 years ago forget about it right even just the advice of how to break into tech that was really hard a long time ago because of this two to three years of experience that's on the footer of every job wreck you've ever seen right and you kind of go well how am i supposed to get that how do i even get two to three years of experience to get into the field to get two to three years of experience in the field right this circular logic of of junior requisitions but now with sandboxes and vms and just how much more accessible it all is you can still maintain you know maybe not the pressure of a production-grade environment and the businesses on the line but you can play with an aci simulator or an nso instance or you know technology x y or z um i think it's important to keep an eye on the industry trends and and it's also important to kind of um like here's a good example and i i want to give them give danny wade a big shout out on his journey for devnet expert he's been doing some incredible work he had a throwaway comment about how easy it was to to configure an aci with terraform and i was like i made note of that i'm going to have to look into this i'd like to try that because i think that's going to be something that people do more and more is is configure declarative infrastructure through terraform so i think we have to pay attention to to even little comments like that from from the twitter sphere or from blogs or really kind of keeping involved the other thing i want to mention is that and i've only been there a month but cisco is just they're constantly communicating their plans they're constantly having open invite sessions to see new technologies to understand the roadmap and in my boot camp role in particular there's some discussion with the customer about what they want in their deep dive right so it's not quite a cookie cutter training provider x thing that's going to be the same every time it's sort of tailored to what they need um and i i don't want to say that i'm going to be a just-in-time expert right but there is going to be a lot of homework involved for me um for something like nso for example that we didn't have at parliament and that i've done a little bit of work with their apis to make some mind maps just to play with it but but yeah i'm definitely gonna have to still um still do lifelong learning as as my college's slogan was you know lifelong learning i think that's very important i don't know that i don't know that we're ever going to stop having to learn given that we're all we're all technologists and not just network engineers that that goes for for any aspect of of the digital world um i think we're going to have to continue to to learn and to grow i hope that that sort of answers the question it's certainly i don't want to say a fear of mine but it's something i'm very conscious of that um the last eight years or even 15 years has all been practical hands-on network engineering that i supplemented with certificates along the way i'm i'm not going to have that at my fingertips anymore right yeah and i think that's where the the curiosity comes in because if you're it's the age-old phrase if there's a will there's a way right so if you're you're talking to customers you're going to be in these boot camps that you have you're going to be talking with students and they're going to be you know like it or not they're going to be discussing their pain points that they have not just you know learning what you're teaching them but they're going to be talking about how they can put these things to reality in real life and what challenges they have so i have a feeling you're going to take in some of that information that you get from those students and then be able to go lab it up on your own figure out how to make it look like a production environment so you can help the next person so i think the opportunities are there just take somebody who is like yourself who is curious and willing to continue learning to be able to uh maintain that caliber that you had in your your 15 years as a tech career and that's also you know john that's something those 15 years nobody can take that experience away from you so i mean that's even that in and of itself is going to be with you for a long time yeah the um it's funny what you remember over the time we there's a big vtp discussion going on on twitter over the last couple days and um like i'll never forget the day the consultant plugged his switch into our network and and killed it like instantaneously the network's just gone and um because someone said well you know if we never use vtp in production why do we have to learn it for our ccna and i said because when a consultant plugs in and kills your whole network you'll know where to look right so even though you may never configure it or configured in transparent mode and forget about it you still have right and it's those kind of things that'll always stay in my mind of the um it's funny i tend to remember the p ones and the failures a lot more than my successes even though i've had probably ten times the amount of successes failures it's those failures that are just they just stay with me right yeah that's a good point i i get asked about that from time to time it's like you're having just a friendly conversation with somebody like so what's what's your horror story what's the the top five bad things that you've done accidentally in your career and you just hammer those things you nail them out right away and then somebody's like so what's what's the biggest achievement that you've had in your career and you got to stop and think about that for a second it's like hold on that should be the other way around but i guess that's also you know you learn from your scars you you learn from the mistakes and you know you never want to make those mistakes again so it's it's easy to ingrain those in your brain yeah i i'd love to maybe we could all have a i don't know some way to record everybody's horror stories we could have like a netflix special or something about the nightmares of that have happened in i.t i c here's one for you and this will this isn't even a technical thing sort of is i was sitting in front of our core consoled in once this wasn't a parliament this was a very very long time ago and i'll protect the company but i'm on the core and all of a sudden it's just dust there's just dust in the room and i'm kind of going what is going on i look and the company had bought a ups that wouldn't fit through the data center doors so the maintenance crew took a sawzall and just cut a hole in the drywall just to just like no plastic nothing taped off we didn't turn anything off he just got the saws all out and started cutting a hole in the d and i'm like watching the sawzall draw this line down the wall behind the core and all the dust is doing this into the fans and and like wait was his name dan richards nothing coming out of the other side holy cow holy cow so that was and that's at like you know two o'clock on a wednesday afternoon we have to shut the core down and get vacuums out and anyway yeah pre-record horror stories for halloween i like that jordan that is a really good idea you could have a halloween yeah we'll have to note that one hey john you said you're going to be teaching boot camps right you're going to be an instructor yes yeah in the um exercises so and i guess it depends on the audience you're talking to but i i just want to throw my two cents in for a little bit of empathy as your d as you're trying to help these poor souls so i i've been in a lot of technical boot camps and i find that the pace the breath of material and the fire hose of material and i don't know if it's just how my brain functions but after a couple hours of a boot camp um my brain just feels like like stuff starts to bounce off of it and i'm like oh my god there's four days left so i you know like the api tonight's a perfect example i go to the nasa api i'm like i'm just gonna get this thing and show off for john well now it's an api key well what the hell is that like it's not just automation but in tech you know you try to do one thing you find something else and you get in all these rabbit holes so uh you know i guess you guys have like a syllabus and course material you have to get through but i i i'm i hope that these poor not these poor bastards but you know boot camps to me are just so challenging you know at the end of it it sounds like you guys got a really cool thing going on it's gonna be like practical application i know if you're teaching it they'll be fine but i have trouble with boot camps because it's just too much information and to compress the time and i'm amazed that people can do that like i don't know how they retain oh you know all that fire hose of information i mean have you been in boot camps have you had that experience or maybe it's just my learning style i don't know no i it's definitely good feedback and definitely something that that we we try to be aware of and cognizant of when we're building these materials in these boot camps and again i've only been there a few weeks and i've i've read them and looked at them and that's added some comments and some feedback i my ccna was a result of a boot camp so i did a global knowledge i think it was like i don't know if it was 60 hours like we had like 10 and 12 hour days on that boot camp it was intense and i i feel for you and i agree with you what what tends to lose me is um the two hours solid block of theory right i i i need to be doing something right i need to put it into practice and the other thing that i i think what our boot camps have going for us that i've seen is this kind of scaffolding approach right so we're not going to throw you right into python and some sdk or some deep python code we're going to start with the postman and doing it through a gui and through the postman system we're likely then going to show you ansible first and then we'll likely get into the python where where it's a natural logical flow it's not too much on a topic it's not like we do six hours of python right there's going to be modulars modular approach that builds on the previous or you know maybe not builds on because you know ansel and python are quite different or postman and ansible or what have you whatever mix it is but but they are the dots are hopefully not connected for you or not too far apart but something that someone can um follow logically but also maybe to pick their favorite maybe at the end of that four days um they they they had an affinity for ansible right or or the pi ats was just too much and they they prefer using postman i think that that that's an advantage of maybe this automation world andy is that it is so diverse um it's not necessarily just like like ccna or learning layer two layer three and it's just you know pure routing and that's all we talk about for the whole boot camp is routing routing routing routing routing it's kind of varied enough that we're going to do a little pie cs we're going to do a little postman so hopefully that breaks it up a little bit but it's it's it's a very valid concern about boot camps and um i don't know if coding boot camps are any better like i didn't i went to college for my coding experience i didn't i i didn't take a boot camp um and our boot camps are not going to garnish your salary for four years while you pay it back like some of these some of these coding it's not that kind of boot camp where you sign away a third of your salary to get your diploma or whatever it's not like that yeah i i no offense anybody frames those boot camps for profit i love that you said automation is diverse that's a that's a good reframe for me because i'm i'm frequently intimidated by how much is going on in automation right like it just i can't seem to keep a single thread long enough to like get something into my brain long-term but i think diversity is a better way for me to think of it there's just so much there it doesn't have to be overwhelming i just have to find something that's interesting to me like i think that space api running a git and postman will be something that i can get excited about and not really be overwhelmed by the rest of the diversity right like but what about python what about ansible what about yaml files and what about data structures and am i doing spaces or tabs and does it matter and should i make my tabs into spaces because that's what people do what ide should i use i mean you know that's that's what happens in my head i'm like okay well i i think that's that's an excellent point andy it's kind of that that catching fire mentality you use the the spark of the postman in a in some web-based nasa harry potter or whatever api to just kind of see that that instant kind of gratification of okay i can push this api call get back data and then oh i can look um to the button john you're gonna have to remind me what it's called but within postman to reveal the code of what it looks like in python oh now i can see what that looks like in python that's another sparks starts another small fire that oh i can go over here and look at this and now can i not just do the easy button but then i can take that python code and oh maybe i can edit it a little bit and make it do something else so i think it's it does really start with you know step away from the the straight traditional i need to read a book i need to know what every little bit of the basics is before i get started find find that one little thing that interests you and i think it's just going to make those start those sparks and just point you in a bunch of different directions where you're going to keep learning more yeah for me the context in which you're learning that thing right like me learning python to automate networks doesn't excite me i see that i'll tell you i i get it i got to do it but right like given a different context or applying it to something i'm actually more passionate about than routers and switches right i mean it's a job don't get me wrong i i appreciate my career but i'm more excited about you know the the temperature and or the wind direction at the mars rover right now like that to me is like holy crap not you know oh i just pushed the config to 32 switches like okay i mean that's useful that's good that's what they i'm paid to do but yeah i'm going to try to switch that context and maybe apply it to something that maybe is a hobby right or more of a passion than in my career well i'm excited to hear that andy and i hope i hope people listening who maybe have shied away or haven't found that hook into them maybe this will be their hook and and you know what's neat is that you know i don't know once you start to apply it or do it in you know production or whatever i don't know let's just take the status codes um they might not mean anything to you right now right like i kind of equate some of these things to the dashboard in an airplane have you ever gone to a cockpit and wondered how these pilots do it like what is what does that knob do what does that like mean if this thing's flashing is that bad or good i don't know i don't think i could ever take all that in right now you look at postman and you okay i get a status back 200 that's good that's a good thing right but if i get a 404 versus a 403 i'm sort of at a point where just through habitual use it's not because i'm smarter than anyone i just it clicked over time that oh 404 it's not found it means my request is pointing at an api that doesn't exist just like if i get a 404 when i go to a browser page and it says this page isn't found so little things will accumulate through your hobby right and i don't know like i think that you can parlay harp hobbies into your real world in this digital sphere um how many graphic designers or web designers started out with a myspace page you know like there's certain things you can do for enjoyment that then kind of transition into a career or or in your day-to-day life and technology um i think there's a lot to be said for having fun and if you're not having fun one you're not going to get paid for it like in your own time at home when i'm after hours i'm not getting paid the last thing i want to do is work really hard for no money sometimes very little payoff on something that i'm not enjoying right that's your free time and it you know i've put books down if i don't enjoy a book i don't force my way through it if i don't enjoy a film i'm watching or a tv show i shut it off and it's so easy to do that at home with postman or python or ansible or i'm not getting it i'm turning it off i'm not enjoying this experience forget about it right whereas holy cow i just made a spreadsheet of every ninja turtle and what episodes they appeared in right like that's fun that is kind of neat right yeah maybe it's about fun right i mean that this this podcast world now started out as a hobby and we weren't sure if anybody was gonna listen but this is the most fun i've had in most of my career you know so far and i haven't made a dollar from it yet but because i'm having fun it's all good right like it's a hobby it's fun i met so many people i mean i never would have met you like it just so yeah maybe it's you got to have fun that's apply learning to something that's either a hobby or that you find fun because then it takes the drudgery out of it you know i just feel like i'm back in high school sometimes learning stuff like ugh but maybe i'm doing it in the wrong context so yeah this is this is helping me john i'm i'm gonna be bothering you when i get my api key figured out and then i hit my next problem i mean i'll google it i won't bother you for everything but no but it's funny i don't think that's you're not you wouldn't be bothering me i'd be like all right he wants to he wants to learn he wants to ask questions and figure out that that's definitely not bothering me um you know i i don't actually get a lot of direct questions or a lot of direct asks for help as much as i did when the book was hot so i i certainly have cycles to help and and this goes to anybody listening or anyone in the community i'm always in the discord channel um i've i've toned down reaching out to others saying hey do you wanna hey do you wanna learn some python are you free uh you know i came on a little strong there for a bit directly messaging everybody in the discord hey what are you doing today hey i just got a coffee what do you feel like do you feel like writing some python i'm going to write some python who wants to write python you know everyone's like backing away like uh just leave them alone right so i'll try to you know i'll wait for people to come to me i guess i'm gonna hold on i'm gonna start introducing you is hey have you met our friend and savior john capo bianco sorry i had 18 messages and every one of them was like i'm spending time with my kids today it's two o'clock in the morning here like do you do anything else other than like i had like 18 messages and they were all like various ways of telling me to fuck off and leave you alone but so well when you when you were going crazy with your mind maps after like three weeks of it john i'm like jesus christ what the hell is he mind happening now this man is a he's a madman with mind maps i love what's happening you nailed it hey uh are you an anna green or do you like anne of green gables i hear there's an ad of green gables api do you feel like investigating that anyway yeah it got a little carried away oh that's great so john as we start to kind of round this out um i do want to give you a chance to to talk a little bit more i don't know how far along these uh these boot camps are into the planning stage but where can people learn more about these if they can yet oh sure yeah if um if you just google cisco training boot camps or if you look at my pinned tweet i've just made it my pin tweet so people can find um the organization i've joined and what i'm doing now with my you know career and there's going if anyone's going to cisco live uh the three developer advocates and our manager we're all going to be presenting condensed labs at live so i'll actually get to present and speak it live at two different sessions this year which are pretty i really i just excited doesn't cover it i'm really excited about that but um the the documentation is pretty easy to find and and there's actually if you find the cisco training bootcamp landing page if you scroll down a little bit there's a really nice video that yulia santala one of my colleagues one of the other developer advocates and cisco tv and my manager joe reinhart they shot a video discussing them i think that's probably the best source of truth about the boot camps is the little video series and the info infographics that are on that page that's excellent thanks for that information john is there anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to cover tonight no i'm so happy to to be back and i really liked the way the conversation went tonight i i i like that i'm not just telling my story but but getting some ideas out there to get people started and and get enthusiastic and i think maybe we're onto something here tim and andy that it that there can be a fun way to approach this and maybe it's the approach that just needs to change and if anyone's finding like you said drudgery is a great word or it's mundane or it feels like school again honestly like there's if you're into music movies cartoons comic books space dinosaurs pokemon ninja turtles like there is an api for almost anything out there so go get postman and get started and maybe take my advice on the wikipedia python library and if anyone has children i also have made videos and have repos on github that are that are you know focused for parents trying to help their kids get involved in programming that's all i wanted to mention and as always if you join the art of engineering discord you can send me a direct message and i'll get you a pdf of my book i'm happy to do that or on twitter or however you want to reach me i'd prefer you join the discord and and join the community and as a reward i'll give you the pdf of the book and i'm always here to help you guys or anybody listening i really enjoy um you know i just love being a part of this this movement that that's going on on the internet definitely thank you john this is always a pleasure andy what are your final thoughts uh i know i've said it before john but i'm just so happy for you this job couldn't have been you know it couldn't have gone to a to a better more deserving and and nicer guy um i you know if the biggest thing i got out of this conversation i think is what you just said it's it's almost like a revelation to me like huh i've been i've been learning automation in a very static drudgery-filled networking context where i think changing the context of the material is really going to help hook me because you know for a while every conversation we have about automation like oh find your use case and you'll get meat in the game and like that did happen to me at work and i had to update a bunch of like snmp community strings but it still just felt like drudgery but i i'm going to try switching the context i'm going to try applying some automation to a passion of mine a hobby something i'm more interested in and and that might keep me going so that when i hit that wall i don't just go god damn it i suck at automation and give up again right you know i can i'll be like shit i gotta get that temperature on mars john like i gotta keep going you know like really i i need that you know i need that passion so yeah man i'm thank you so much for coming on you've just you're such a i hope we can i hope it can remain friends i i think we're we might be sworn enemies per our employers but i'm really hoping that you know we can stay friends and that they they don't make us uh you know say me things about each other no i think we're going to be okay and the only other thing i would add andy that maybe we didn't talk about is that confidence and self-confidence is going to go up because you're making successful space calls and you're doing things successfully at home i think as your confidence goes up that has a lot to do with how much you're enjoying or how much you can absorb or want to continue to learn if you're not enjoying it and you're confident i i really i really want you to succeed andy because i i i can see sometimes that that you're hard on yourself and it's almost like your confidence is too low and i get that because it's hard to to start something that you're not really passionate about so you know get get going on the space apis and and confidence will follow and then success will follow the confidence but oh there's no question we're going to remain friends and i i looked it's a 14-hour drive i can't come to the on-site meeting unfortunately i looked into it but maybe someday we'll actually all get to meet too you know i hope so man i hope so thanks so much john yeah i think the only thing i'll add is they take care of you everybody while that we know that you know anything worth doing is is worth putting time into and potentially some stress i think when it comes to this type of topic any way we can lower that barrier to entry i think is helpful and and if it is just finding something that you know reframing it like you said andy and find finding something that interests you to get you that initial spark to push you into other use cases i i think is is really great advice i've i've heard it before but i've never really kind of put two and two together until this conversation john where it's just like sometimes you you just need to step back and rather than finding that that use case that is is work it could be drudgery finding something that's just fun can can spark into finding something that can help you at work so yeah that was that's the biggest thing i'm going to take away from this so thank you john very much andy thanks for the chat tonight everybody listening thank you patreons we always appreciate your support if you want to become a patreon you can check out patreon.com artofneting this was a fun conversation for the love of anything let john capobianco show you some damn mind maps and we'll see you next time hey y'all this is lexi if you vibe with what you heard us talking about today we'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast in your favorite podcatcher also go ahead and hit that bell icon to make sure you're notified of all our future episodes right when they come out if you want to hear what we're talking about when we're not on the podcast you can totally follow us on twitter and instagram at art of neteng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find a bunch more info about us and the podcast at art of network engineering dot com thanks for listening you