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 welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray recovering from a cold so uh probably a little congested uh but we'll make it through uh dan how you doing i'm doing good aj it's uh it's starting to get nice outside so i'm back in the yeah let's walk around the neighborhood i don't want to hear it dan i talked to the earlier today and you told me how nice it is down there yeah i think it was like when i say 67 or something like that yeah i think you said it was like 74 yeah 74. yeah yeah yeah so yeah and i i was you know 19 19 19 degrees here it's 25 here right now it's 10. it's 10 right now it's uh it's wonderful i uh and that's fahrenheit for all you you know yes yeah right the time of year in new england where like one day it's like 40 almost 50 and you're like oh spring's coming and then the next day it's like you know negative two and you're like yeah yeah tennessee's been that way too we had snow randomly come through the other day and it was just like out of nowhere two days before that it was like 50s and and getting up into the 60s a little bit and then it went down to like 32 or 30 or something like that and had some snow come through and i'm just like in tennessee it's a joke right like we have all four seasons in a in a week if if it you know if it comes to it but um yep it just one of them things gotta love it awesome let's get to some wins i don't worry i i have to go nice all right winning in our discord channel this week is ethan he passed the jncda congratulations ethan is that like the ccda equivalent or i guess they don't have the da anymore but yeah they don't have the ccd anymore but it is basically the same thing it's it's a juniper's network design certification gotcha yep yep that's a good one uh smile and chris passed the pc nsa that is the palo alto network certified network security administrator nice he said he uh he just passed it like he just decided to take the exam and he he like had it scheduled and then he he had to move it once and he was gonna move it again he's like you know what and he just like buckled down the day before and then he went in the next morning and just knocked it out so that's awesome yeah uh dion uh pat or no dion accepted a new job uh working in the data center congratulations dion nice and nice e-l-i-g-r-p passed the lpi the linux professional institute i believe it is uh the linux essential certification awesome i love this uh i don't know if you guys are on twitter but there is somebody that i follow she makes the funniest networking related memes out of like clips from movies uh emirage i hope i'm saying that right she just accepted her first job in tech as an entry-level network consultant and i am so excited to be able to announce this win on here for her yes congratulations that is awesome yeah i absolutely love her memes by the way yes yes so the world needs more networking memes absolutely absolutely well especially because i i have a special place in my heart for harry potter and she makes a lot of harry potter movies yeah she does so uh t-pal double-oh-seven passed the ccna exam congratulations nice good job uh i i like this name not working engineer they got a promotion and a huge raise so they're working pretty hard nice i guess they're working now yeah they are uh that's all the wins we have for this week welcome to our new patreons elle savage dan jeff and christine thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering and just just a little over a month's time we are going to be at a1 live in asheville i cannot wait it's going to be so much fun mostly because the five of us are going to be meeting in all in the same room at the same time for the first time um you know i've met dan dan came up and hung out with me for a little bit tim came out hanging out with me last fall uh but that's it and none of us have met many of the others so uh all right just so excited to get everybody in the same room and we're gonna be living together for like three days so i hope we like each other and andy and i are definitely gonna wrestle at some point so don't want to miss out it didn't happen yeah do i need to pick up like a kiddie pool and some jello when i get off the plane no no no no no not that kind of wrestling definitely not so uh i i hope that by the time this episode drops the registration link will be live we are going to get it very soon from our sponsor opengear and we are going to offer it to our patreons first so if you want the first shot to register you can sign up to be a patreon and then we'll release it to everybody else we are hoping to provide 60 slots if those fill up quickly we're going to go back to the venue and see how many more people we can squeeze in there and if they'll let us you know bring more people in we will extend the invite and let more people register but you know when we first threw this out to twitter and you know tried to gauge some interest like 30 or so people were like oh yeah that'd be cool i'd go to a live event but um i got to tell you that the discord has been clamoring for this registration link and it it has me concerned we might fill up registration a little too quickly yeah they uh they've been starting riots in there it's uh it's getting a little out of hand yeah i think you know now that we're two years into you know march 2020 people are looking to get out of the house yeah exactly amen i'm ready to get out of the house yep excellent well we are looking forward to a1 live in asheville north carolina we will be at high wire brewing uh and we are going to be there from about 4 p.m until 7 pm we are going to record a episode right there we'll meet and greet with the fans hang out have some beers we've got some great swag being built right now as we speak we'll have some stickers and stuff to give away to everybody that attends and uh it's just it's going to be a fantastic time so i hope that you can join us and there is a link to a page that has more details about the event and again as soon as the registration link is available we will post that to the show notes we'll post it from our twitter account we'll sing it from mountain tops high and uh you know make sure that everybody can get a chance to join us in asheville that's that'll be april 9th from 4 to 7 p.m and then who knows we'll probably be an after party somewhere else hmm most certainly will be an after party just trying to figure out where everywhere we're going to paint the town yeah yeah you ever hear those flower runs that people used to do they used to have like groups of people that go out drinking and they would take flour and like throw it on the ground and you had to like follow the path to the bar no i've never heard that oh yeah yeah there used to be a group of people like the burlington beer run and like they would do all sorts of like antics and stuff like that it was it was fun interesting well we have a guest this evening and i am very excited to welcome heather to the show heather thank you so much for joining us thank you very much for having me we met on twitter uh and i believe the first time i saw a post from you you had a guitar maybe it's a bass guitar yes a bass guitar and and then i saw that you're like all about networking too and i'm like well hello this will be a fun conversation uh and we've talked quite a bit on the side and i i'm very excited to get a chance to interview you so thank you again for joining us yeah no i i think a lot of it blew up after you know what i will call twitter gate in the networking engineering world and that's kind of where i think everything's like picked up we'll say right no i i think you're right invisibility came out of that right a lot of visibility came i'm surprised how much visibility came out of that to be honest yeah and you know i don't i don't know if this is like the twitter algorithm or something right but it was not until that event did i find a lot more women in tech and you know specifically women in network engineering so same really you know kind of terrible as that whole event was it brought about like more visibility and now now i follow a lot more women in network engineering and i i enjoy it for one yeah yeah i mean that's that's something that i've been yeah i mean you know i've been doing network engineering for 20 years now so not to date myself here but uh don't worry i'm not going to ask you how old you are i'm 41. in case you have to know hey look i didn't ask her she said i have no qualms about my age i i am what i am that's what i am sandy gives me a hard time because he thinks i ask every woman that comes on here what her age is and i do not i have asked too but no no i i have no shame about my age you know you get older you don't get younger well that's true so if you're 41 and you've been doing a network engineer for 20 years that's basically all you've done yeah yeah basically that's awesome yeah it's funny how i got into network engineering actually so i can't wait to hear about it yeah so i'm uh i went to school at rensselaer polytechnic institute uh also known as rpi in upstate new york he has a lovely hole named troy and um i was originally intending to be a you know programmer because my degree was computer science then that was what the degree was was c plus java even like full on c with yoyo then reallocation fun all that type of stuff but my very last year there they offered a cisco academy sponsored course for the full year so the first semester and second semester you know over the both semesters you would get your ccnp not everything whoa so that's not normal is it no no it's not normal but this isn't this was an engineering school so of course then you know they had to raise the bar you know stealing whatever the metaphor is these days i can't even keep track of it but um so the very the first semester we did and back then the ccna was only one test and they didn't have the lab simulations back then like this was 2001 we're talking about so we're talking like ages ago they didn't have those fancy you know virtual things back then so it was just a multiple choice test it was all one thing but you did the ccna and then you did routing in the first semester so there's ccna test plus routing second semester was switch wow remote access and troubleshoot oh so there was something that was four tests oh wow okay yeah so back then the ccmp was for tests there was routing there was switching troubleshooting and another one about remote access and that was all about ppp frame relay atm all the stuff that you don't see much these days wow yeah so after i did that class and and yes i was the only female in the entire class the entire year but i didn't care my instructor was amazing guy i even found him on linkedin recently just to say hey look i'm still doing network engineering now later and he's like hey thanks for reaching out but he was the one that kind of like got me enthusiastic about networking in the first place because i ended up graduating college not only with a degree but with my ccnp ready to go out into the world and you know route some packets and you know make bend them to my will and i was and i was yeah yeah bc red as jordan says i still have that book today i still have all of my cisco books i've even got the you know what the the routing tcpip you know the the tcp bible like volume one yeah i don't have volume two i'll i'll get it at some point but um but yeah we're ancient ancient cisco like cisco press books that i still have today just because network fund never fundamentals don't change yeah so so was that like a bachelor's program like yeah okay all right i got you so i was originally it was originally just gonna be you know as a bachelor's in computer science okay and most computer science degrees are programming so i was doing the c plus plus i was doing the java i was doing that and he was thinking okay i'll go and i'll be a software developer but found this course decided i don't want to code i went into networks and now here i am 2022 still doing networks yeah are you coding at all now are you doing anything yes a lot of python and ansible these days nice i'm about to uh do some deep diving and dance bowl aj's kind of showing me some stuff but uh i'm i'm working towards because because what i'm wanting to do is kind of do cross-platform stuff and and it seems like ansible's really good at that so yeah yeah i think um well in the environment that i'm in so you know quick background i'm a senior network engineer at wayfair i've been with wayfair for almost six years now and i've done everything from their data center to their campus network and i've gone from campus to data center and now i'm back on campus and one of my big focuses right now is our land site builds so a lot like we have probably about 75 to 80 different sites right now very small network stacks but very widespread so our win is very broad yeah but um and the environment isn't pure cisco it's probably 75 percent cisco but we've got we've got palo altos we've got you know open gear if we can use opengl right very much in our out of band and you know in a hybrid environment like that you can't just use like a cisco tool to manage everything you need something agnostic and something like ansible with a lot of plug-ins for cisco peloton arista juniper anything even linux that's the type of thing that you need in order to automate everything and kind of tie it together yeah so how long have you been doing the ansible thing only a couple of years really like probably like the last two i would say is becoming need i feel like in the past automation hasn't become really prominent in the networking world probably only like last five years i think it's become more of a thing yeah and it's and it's all of a sudden like blowing up because you see cisco now doing you know their their dev core exams you know a whole like dev heavy you know courses and it's only the last couple of years like wasn't it it was only a couple of years ago that they just revamped all of their you know certificate curriculum and added all of these developments heavy things yeah it's it was not that long yeah i know yeah time has no meaning anymore it feels like it was just yesterday you mean it wasn't i assume they'll be going off to college that's that's really cool yeah i i'm still like kind of blown away by that program uh the networking academy where where they offered the the professional i've i've never heard of that like i've heard that they they've done stuff like the a plus and the ccna but i've never heard them offer professional level courses in the network academy and and i think at the college level i think that's very appropriate and i think that it's so cool that you got to graduate with a bachelor's and a professional level certification and head on out in the world that's that's fantastic i mean unfortunately i didn't renew the certification because i was lazy and i mean at that point in time i was i was doing you know i was doing networking i was doing the job i didn't really feel the need for the certification because at that point you know the certification had gotten my foot in the door right and the job experience is kind of what carried me up until now right yeah and unless you're working for a place that wants you to have that like there's probably not a need to carry it exactly yeah yeah you know i i have a cousin who works for cisco and he he got to see ccie as part of his job because he worked for cisco so so i can see that being a requirement you know if you're working in like someone like the deep deep levels of like cisco attack you know the higher tier support levels and you know super new customer like focus type things then yeah i would see them wanting a cci somebody who's that deeply involved into the technology but in my experience learning trial by fire has been my teacher you know being thrown a problem like okay this route isn't going where it's supposed to go why you know figure it out and and what ex in one example i had it turned out to be a weird ospf thing where i needed to use a like a a 255 metric route in order to force traffic to not go where it wanted to go because that wasn't where i wanted it to go yeah so little little hacks like that and little real world problems like that i think are some of the best teachers as far as networking goes yeah right right yeah that's awesome well let's let's uh go back so um you know you're senior network engineer today at wayfair we know you went to college and you got your np and you graduated what was the first job in networking i worked at a little financial company in connecticut they did um just like real-time like financial software essentially like and this is really old-school stuff like this is where we had 2600 series routers and isdn lines and they're still doing like atm frame relay type lines like direct point to point to client site so they could like directly connect our data centers and get that real-time data so this is pretty old-school stuff and even even like the servers that we had running this stuff was running open vms and you know how ancient open vms is yeah i remember those 2016 yeah jordan csu dsu cards i remember that the orange color will stick in my head forever nice i remember those 2600s we had those uh in my life so i i we're not too far apart in age i'm i'm 38 and i uh i went to college late because i didn't know what i wanted to do when i grew up um i still don't want to do it and so when i got to champlain college uh it was like what was it like uh oh seven i think i started there and and so we had 2600s in the lab yeah and it's funny you mentioned champlain my younger brother went to champlain and he's 37 so you're probably there around the same time oh no kidding did he get to go for a degree in networking or rit no he went into friends like digital forensics oh yeah okay all right it's entirely possible we had a class together because i did networking and information security so i had to take some of the same forensic classes for the security piece of it so interesting yeah you probably ran into him at some point that's funny small world i love it very i love it so yeah so you're doing doing some of that and then uh so how long were you there for a couple of years a couple years a couple of years yeah so i'm you know quick backstory you know i'm massachusetts native you know born and raised in western mass berkshire county you know if you drive directly north from there you'll end up reaching aj yep especially but uh yeah i ended up getting this job was in connecticut so i was like you know what you know it's a job they're gonna pay me decent money i'll move to connecticut i don't quite like connecticut too much it's a bit too you know a little bit too rich for my blood you know which you know some people love connecticut yeah especially that part this is like stanford greenwich and greenwich is like one of the really like fancy fancy places and i didn't really feel like i fit it because i was just a recent college graduating you know college students are poor they don't you know have like porsches and vmws and all these nice cars that you see running around so yeah it's like oh what am i gonna do i'm just this young person among these tons of rich people i feel out of place so nice so yeah i did that for a few years decided to come back to massachusetts it took me a while to find a tech job back in massachusetts at that point that was probably like 2004-ish but yeah i did tech support for like a small retail shop for a little while and that was really basic like windows supporting you know fixing the occasional like big phone problem things like that so i've had i've had my hand in a lot of different i.t stuff like yeah i've done windows server i've done sadly i've done exchange which you know i don't tell people yeah i know i don't tell people that work that i work with about that because then they'll try and get me to fix exchange you know i remember one time where it was one of these uh like back when the pro lines were compact before hp bought them if this was is this big white like probably 6u box you think it was really really old looking thing and it was running exchange server and one day this it just died completely did not do anything by some miracle i managed to like technomancy resurrect it from the dead and got it to boot up and that's probably one of my worst best exchange stories ever and after that point i'm like you know what i'm gonna go back into networking because i don't really feel like dealing with windows anymore and it kind of turned me off windows support for for quite some time nice can't imagine so in the first role i guess i forgot to ask this but like were you doing networking for that role or yes yeah that was pure network engineering that was strictly you know setting up client routers and you know because we would send we would set up these 2600 routers and send them to client sites we would provision point-to-point circuits from our data center to the client site that would then connect to those routers that we owned and that would give the client a direct line into our data center so that way our software could pull the financial information from it gotcha so what i'm hearing is like as soon as you got out of college you got a networking job right away pretty much i got you so you did it yeah 2002 2003 was like you know unreal you know i never had to i was you know knock on knock on wood i was very lucky to uh to never have to go through that kind of helpdesk sort of you know okay grind that so many people have to deal with gotcha so how long did you do the exchange for well that was actually funny so after my you know after i moved back to massachusetts i you know ended up moving to australia for a few years which this a really long really long story behind that which you know probably for another day but when i was over there i ended up getting a job at like a digital web agency and they hosted everything that they made like they made a content management system like cms and they hosted it themselves which i don't know why you know this is way before the cloud this is like 2005 2006 2007 era kind of and they had a couple of racks in the colocation space and two very very simple racks but you know it was a pretty complicated network setup for what they were they had dual homes like cisco routers running ibgp between them you know they peered with their isps and they didn't really have anyone who knew that type of stuff so i was doing networking for them but um but i was also doing some of the windows in you know some of the server support and that exchange from the dead thing happened at that australian company that was at wow and it was it was funny because that was like really late at night because they had an office in sydney australia where i was living at the time and they also had an office in london and they're complete opposite sides of the world so during their day time was like middle of the night and it was the london office that i complained about their email not working for some reason so you know i logged in saw oh crap the email server is dead went into the office and i think i spent about 24 hours straight in the office trying to resurrect this thing or at least resurrect some sort of email solution so that they could get email and then i can you know eventually you know rebuild or you know get a new server something like i don't know how i ended up doing it but i managed to get like a postfix server going so that way they could like directly get their email and you know use pop3 it was it was like a total mcguide or something you like paper clips and bubble gum oh paper clips no i i often you know i use macgyver all the time in my networking career because that's kind of how it seems like sometimes i always end up with the problems that just require that sort of solution yeah yeah yeah so and we ended up replacing that with a completely brand new server with brand new version of exchange and you know when i when i left the company and left australia they were in good hands but i was the only i.t person because only like a 10 20 person office so you'd only have you don't have more than one it personally so i mean i was doing the networking i was doing i was coordinating all the bgp stuff i was maintaining their firewalls and their switches and whatnot but i was also doing everything else too yeah were you like installing printers and everything too like that unfortunately yeah or maybe not installing them but messing with them no no i did the scene from office space so did i hear you right you say you lived in in australia i did yes oh my gosh that's cool yeah i was there for about almost five years oh wow let's talk about that like yeah that's a major i mean that's such a huge that that's a huge move right like that's an incredibly long plane flight from new england to australia 24 hours straight on planes oh sure so how did that opportunity come up well that yeah i'm not gonna get into the details of that but that would stem from a now failed relationship oh gotcha gotcha okay aj's like let me close that back up um don't worry my husband knows that story already that's that's so cool i mean i i just have this personal interest in like australia so i think it's so cool that you like you lived and worked and did network engineering there for instance yeah that's awesome i highly recommend i highly recommend australia i loved my time there it's very expensive like don't be wrong like you think boston prices then you just like bump them up closer to san francisco and then we're talking about yeah it's expensive and it's probably gotten even worse since i've been there and i've been back here for like 11 12 years now okay all right yeah very cool so what did you do when you got back uh i stayed with my mom for a while in the berkshires nice look for work in boston there you go there you go did you land another network engineering job it was more of a general i.t job yeah but very network heavy gotcha okay gotcha yeah so there are a couple people on the team is for a very small like alarm company and i did a lot of like general i.t stuff for them but very heavy on like did that network stuff they had theater routers there were um i tried to remember what firewalls they had um i can't even remember those so long ago i think there were a couple of cisco devices but most of it was like you know just you know like the yada or something or something else i cannot remember i can't remember yeah so how long did you do that for did that for a couple years and then ended up getting a job with the hitachi data systems i think they've renamed themselves now but i was doing a lot of network stuff for them with hitachi i was there for a couple years and they had like the what i was my job was was maintaining their development lab so they developed a storage product like you know kind of like a big data sort of product this is like 20 10 11 no 2012 maybe you know we're going back like the decades here so you know fucking in the brain you know old lady brain here i understand i was going to ask you if they were making drills there because they're like i like hitachi drills they're their tools no this this is this was a storage product there and my job was to help maintain the development lab in there okay and so they had that was where i had one of my most fun experiences with uh cat os they still had a 6500 that ran cat os oh my gosh and i'd never touched cat os before you know before that i was only touched like you know standard generic ios you know they the job my financial job had some 6500s and i only logged into maybe once or twice there was a whole other like team that kind of dealt with some of the core stuff but this you know this this pair is just like me and me and this you know ungodly behemoth of a 6500 chassis running catalyst so you know i had to figure out you know oh i have to use the set keyword everywhere in order to actually do anything okay i've never had to experience cat os but i've you're lucky yeah what i was gonna say i've heard that uh that's a good thing that i haven't so yes it was honestly though it was kind of a it was a good experience because you got to see some of the history because the 6500 like is probably one of like the what's the word i'm thinking of you know the quintessential switches of a network engineer's career especially people who are closer to our age you know ev everyone's probably got a story about a 6500 they've dealt with you know that's you know still running 15 20 years later or hey this thing's still running cat os i feel like when you get around some older network engineers it's kind of like the guy that has the 68 you know uh um dang it left me uh the camaro 68 camaro yeah oh yeah and they're like yeah i had that puppy purring you know that's kind of what it feels like sometimes yeah and actually it's funny it reminds me back going back to my uh you know just at a college job that they had a team of people who managed that open vms cluster and at the time you know i was like 21 22 years old then but all of those people maintaining that were you know in their mid 40s you know early 50s you know because open vms had been around for so long you know you needed people with experience in order to maintain that because the newer folk we don't know where from vms is you know what is that you're new to us it's funny yeah and i think i think you know the old school 6500s are very similar to a network engineer's career we did eventually replace that with a refurbished chassis and that did not run cat os it was still it was actually what is it the xe i think it's i think the refurbished chassis was called the xe okay yeah i don't remember 6500 yeah i cannot remember but there's like a refurbished one that uses the uh the supervisor 720 modules okay instead of the uh like the old school supervisor twos that the the older 6500s used and those strictly ios you know there is no catalyst involved it was just you know like the layer three switches that you see today gotcha okay and it's much much more seen same piece of equipment but even then you know the 64 that that 6500 series was like you know end of sale you know i barely like supported for like another year or two hmm gotta love them oh man yeah they make they make good side tables right here yes there's a lot of people on discord to talk about that i i eventually want to turn that 4500 into something like that like like a little mini fridge or you probably make that into something really cool yeah i don't know what that'd be cool okay it's a little bit too big to be a paperweight i think yeah aj can i put a mini keg in there like the log yeah yeah side table with a lot of drawers nice oh yeah that's pretty funny oh man it looks like we're oh we're getting a whole bunch of people here now yeah nice welcome welcome picking up but yeah now that that was that was the fun just to be able to experience cat os um and even then um we had oh that back then we had pix firewalls this was bright as asas were coming out and oh yeah yeah i got to play with those yeah it's they were fun yeah i had some pix firewalls when i first started where i'm at um definitely we migrated over the asas now we're at palos but yep yeah yeah no so but i remember back then so one time i think it was right around the time where they redid the pix os to they totally redid the way they did in that so the net configuration in one version didn't port to the version up so it was i think version 8.2 to version 8.3 they completely redid the way like the nat configuration was so if you you couldn't copy and paste an older pix config and put it into the new os like then that just was like nope configuration error so you wouldn't have your now you had to redo it all manually and there wasn't an easy way to get your nat configuration into the new format yeah you want to know how i learned that i learned that the hard way because we had a consultant come in and do that migration for us and he left the day so we installed him one night and this was over the weekend and uh and then he left that weekend and went back to where he came from and he was like you got it man don't worry and the following monday everything just nothing was working properly and i called up i called up cisco tech and the guy's name was nitesh i'll never forget that dude's name because he was the coolest the coolest tac engineer i've ever had on the phone before and uh that guy just he was on the phone with me for like nine hours straight uh oh my gosh basically a problem would come in and i'd be like all right here's the here's source destination here's what what they're trying to do you know they need to be added to this or whatever and he was the along the way he was pretty much showing me how the new nat worked on there he was sharing documentation with me and uh that that that was a very rough uh way to learn it but i i figured it out after that that's for sure yeah that was like that's definitely a trial by fire sort of thing i think we tried at that job this is when i was at hitachi that we tried multiple times to upgrade to that new version but we just didn't bother and i think and i ended up leaving there before they either ripped and replaced it or upgraded yeah i don't remember what happened there but man that was nothing probably a good thing yeah because yeah yeah definitely oh my gosh hey y'all it's lexi aka track it piecer as my most recent burner account hater described me quote she can't configure a switch for shit i'm really sorry to interrupt you in the middle of the podcast but i have a cool story to tell you and it'll only take a minute and then we'll get back to the show okay so i come from a knock background i started out in a knock and the most annoying thing that would happen back then is when a user would come in complaining about a problem blaming the network but our network monitoring system was showing zero signs that anything was wrong and suspend your disbelief for just a moment and we're assuming that the network actually is at fault okay sadly most network monitoring software really only pings devices and shows you utilization on maybe a few interfaces but overall this doesn't really help us in the end what if you knew everything that your network equipment knows like everything path solutions actually has a product that does this and it's called total view it provides automated root cause troubleshooting of the entire network i'm talking monitoring every interface on every switch router gateway and firewall it also goes deep collecting performance data 19 different error counters qos cdp ldp and poe on every interface the whole kit and caboodle totalview is also smart it has a built-in heuristics engine that analyzes the information to provide you the user with plain english root cause resolutions to problems that other nms systems really wouldn't even be aware of you're responsible for the entire network right so shouldn't you have visibility that matches your responsibility visit passsolutions.com today to learn more about total view and get total network visibility on your network now back to the show uh so what's next where do we go after that oh verizon oh you're for a provider yeah well i was actually working for the terramark division so they were making like a there was the short answer is they were trying to make a cloud product that rivaled amazon and google and whatnot and short story you know tldr it failed miserably the verizon cloud is a very short-lived sort of thing there are two sides of it there's compute cloud and there's storage cloud and one of my my job was to do the networking for the storage cloud thing that was that was all a roosters which was actually kind of fun because i've never touched a races before and you know i can i can see why cisco ended up you know in some litigation with them because of the config similarities nice yeah but um but no they were actually a decent fun bit of hardware to play with you know something a little bit different you know because i up until then i had always just been cisco cisco cisco cisco cisco cisco because that's what i knew and that's where you know what everyone had where i went so getting to play with something a little bit different was actually a lot of fun they actually had their edge routers were actually junipers and i didn't get to play with them too much but i did get to tinker with them a little bit and that was that was my soul experience touching anything juniper related did you like it it was cool yeah i might remember yeah yeah the one thing that stood out to me at the time was the fact that you can make a configuration change have it not come into effect until you commit it cisco did not have that capability right yeah i don't even know if they still have i don't even know if they have that capability now no i don't think so but yeah like they're one of the first you know network vendors that i'd even heard of that had that capability in it and i was like you know what that could save so many outages you know how many people would fat finger you know like you know a route or you know mistyped a subnet or mistyped in that mask or you mistyped the next hop or a route metric or something you know mistyped the bgpas number things right yeah you know you guys want to have that level of safety because we're humans and we're not perfect we're gonna we're gonna screw things up yeah because if you're not andy you know just copy and pasting out of your notebook i do that too though you know you can definitely you have a potential for error to fight like you said fat finger or something so you can you can put your config in and then kind of review it and then once you feel safe after that point then you you know pull the trigger on it but exactly yeah i like that because you know palo altos do the same thing yeah and so i i like that but i will tell you i was so used to like cisco as soon as i click something and it applies it uh that there's been a few times where i've made a change told a developer like hey try it now i think it'll work you know and then they're like no it's still not working i'm like what are you talking oh i forgot to hit commit yeah it's bit me that way too so oh oh yeah definitely absolutely now we use ouio's palace at my current job and yeah i think i ran into that a few times because you're so used to the the instant nature of neo doing something in a cisco like it can be a blessing and it can be an absolute curse if you make the wrong configuration all right yeah but no like that arista was was a lot of fun to tinker with but and after i was with verizon for a good couple of years and then you know after the product do so well you know a lot of people were laid off and i decided you know what i'm gonna try and look for something else and that's how i ended up at wayfair where i'm still at now almost six years later very cool very cool yeah and you said oh sorry go ahead aj no no i i you know i don't think we've had a lot of guests that have been doing network engineering as long as you have like right out of college all the way up through you know so i want to pick your brain on what kind of qualities do you think a person has to possess to successfully do this for a lifetime tenacity you you've got to have and especially you know i'm sure we could get into this later but especially as a woman in network engineering like you've got to have some thick skin you've got to know that you're going to come up against some hardships that you know the world changes the networking tech changes and business needs to be like oh hey there's this new fancy technology that i heard some buzzwords about on the internet the other day we're going to use it and make it happen you're like what and you you've gotta you know you've gotta you know somehow make that happen so you've gotta you've gotta have that uh you know the resiliency you've gotta have the tenacity to just you know keep up with it because otherwise it can seem really really overwhelming yeah for sure and i feel like especially in recent years the pace at which stuff is changing and coming out is just incredible it's insane like i think i have 10 times more gray hairs now than i did like a year ago just because of you oh yeah all the things that are changing yeah it's just it gets overwhelming of like how much stuff you have to figure out like in a short period of time right or you start feeling like you're behind like you're not as valuable as maybe the next engineer type thing right look look at kubernetes for example there's a whole networking layer underneath that entire implementation that seems like you know voodoo to most old school network engineers and even a lot of it is just a bit over my head like but uh because i haven't touched it much but it's there's still a lot of there's networking everywhere now you know look at sd-wan you know look at cisco aci look at you know anything with like your vxlan any kind of like the overlay underlay you know that's where the technology is going and i think that's what's generating the demand for the automation for you know the need to be able to configure this stuff because the technology is getting so much more complex yeah absolutely i mean it's a lot different now than it was you know 20 years ago when it was just like oh hey here's some eigrp you know configure the route you know advertise some networks here's a bunch of statics you're redistributing you know go to town there's a lot more now yeah well that was back then i think something else to add to that too with with the whole automation um is you know back back in the day and when i say back in the day i'm talking about like you know think of like in the 90s and then getting into the early 2000s you know when when you booted your computer up and it took five to ten minutes for the thing to even come on um you know people would go get their coffee they'd chit chat and then they get back and their computer be warmed up and ready to roll um well obviously you know now that's not the case computers boot within like 20 seconds if that but yeah but i think the same thing is starting to happen in in like the data center side or well not just the data center but the network side all together right because what's the what's the um what's the buzzwork time to market right yeah like when when someone needs an application built well instead of it taking you know a couple months to get you know whatever all the nuts and bolts ready for this now they want it to be spun up instantly right right and so now we have to figure out how do we make all this configuration that took hours and hours to do and make it happen in a click of a button or you know running a script kind of thing um and so it's just the demand of how quick everybody wants everything is just uh i don't know it's blowing that through the roof yeah and especially with the supply chain shortages that we've been having like i i don't i don't know you guys been feeling it but like 452 days nine 10 month lead times to get new gear now and you know at the rate that that that you know we've expanded so just to get to backtrack just a couple of years i joined wayfair in 2016. back then there are only about um like 5 000 people total in the company and now there's over twenty thousand so you've doubled down a few times oh we've had that that you know hyper growth that some companies get i don't know if you've ever been in a company that's had that level of hyper growth but it's insane to keep up with yeah yeah and it's still happening now like things kind of like we're calm like the first like bit of the pandemic and it's actually kind of good for us because a lot of people working from home now and hey they need furniture they need computers they need desks they need chairs to sit in you know they're going to be home like 24 7. you know i want my home to be good so hey we're going to do all of this business and so we did all this business and a lot of expansion happened because of it and you know me being on the campus networking side you know it's my job to get all these networks for all these new buildings you know warehouses call centers engineering offices and whatnot you know it's my job to get them up and running make sure they have the right network gear make sure they have the isp you know i have weekly calls with our isp providers and making sure that all like you know the dozens of circuits that we have an order are there you know make sure the redundancy works make sure the ips la's work know the failover and trying to do that for like a dozen sites at a time wow again it gives you gray hairs yeah yeah yeah my goodness it's insane yeah and then i think yeah like i said the supply chain shortages are just exacerbating that people and and people understand that there's supply chain shortages but they still want things now oh yeah and that's hard to keep up with sometimes that mentality never goes away the mentality never goes away you know even if you can't get things now now now it's like but how do we get this thing now now now yeah i've been getting it for so quickly so long and now you're telling me i have to wait like nine months or ten months like yes it's a one direction it's a one direction only right like exactly you know if it was slower back then it only hey let's get a little faster all right let's get a little faster we went in a little bit sooner a little bit sooner there ain't no going back though people aren't going to have it they'll pay like 30 for something for it to be next day you know exactly you know and that's and that's where my coffee habit came from so yeah actually my husband got me into coffee i didn't before i met him i didn't drink a lot of coffee i was very much a tea person but okay he got me into coffee and now you know almost nine years later i cannot stop drinking coffee and i will never stop drinking coffee like it is a necessity it is one of the major food groups of course of my diet in my opinion yeah my my wife's uh grandmother is the one who got me into coffee my parents never drink coffee and so i never drink coffee growing up but uh when we'd stay with her grandparents she would always have coffee in the morning and i started drinking it with her and and then now i'm i drink coffee pretty much every morning so god that's the first thing that i do when i wake up make the coffee yeah exactly get you going it is yeah and big you know given how fast everything everybody wants everything now you need the coffee to keep up with it there's no way you can keep up with it without you know without coffee at least me personally i i need the coffee to keep going otherwise i'm just not a person more of like a potato yeah right right um so you you've mentioned a lot of tech so i feel like you have touched a lot and continued to work with a lot of uh different technologies what's your favorite one to work with oh man i don't know that's that's a hard question see i'm very much like i'm not a you know cisco person or a juniper person i am just a learn all of the tech person so i like to say that one of my hobbies is collecting hobbies so i'm very much the same way with technology i like to learn everything i don't know if i have a favorite i have things that i'm the best with and that would be cisco because that's what i've been doing with the longest but i enjoy dabbling into automation and learning like oh hey let's do some juniper oh hey let's do some firewalls and security stuff for a little while dive into the linux world you know there's networking going on at that layer too have you ever looked at an iptables configuration now how is that working that's just a firewall and you know in a weird text format sort of way yeah but i mean like road switch and you know cisco stuff is like my core it's like my bread and butter but i i wouldn't say it's my favorite it's just you know what i know the best i enjoy learning everything i'm like an information sponge you know if there's something new and shiny out there it's like ooh what's that that's girl right right do you have like an approach like you know when you're when you're faced with the new technology like is there like go-to's like do you do you hit like network field day first do you you know surf on youtube for information about it like how do you go about tackling something new that you have to learn i usually start by going to the vendor themselves yeah look at their white papers you know see what it is they have to say about the product and then kind of spawn from there you know if they like a lot of people will say hey you know these companies use my product so i'll you know read through that a lot of times they have case studies and say hey this is how we've used this product you know you know fix whatever problem we were having you know and you know tech blogs yeah i don't read a whole lot of them these days like way back when i used to be a big star reader these days it's more ars technica because you know ours has been around for quite a while and they've got stuff about like everything yeah yeah so very very much no and ours person but uh yeah most of us just you know google foo you know see how deep the rabbit hole goes and eventually you end up on stack overflow i like that so i mean i would imagine in a company that large you guys probably get some decent buying power right so if you start to have a conversation with a vendor about potentially going after technology are they quick to like oh we'll build a poc for you or throw you some gear to play with usually yeah yeah we've we've got our cisco team we've got you know our palo alto team we've got our group we use a rubric for wireless so we've got our team yeah and just just to give you a scope on our wireless you know tangent but um a lot of like we you know being a you know a furniture retailer we have warehouses full of the stuff that we sell and these buildings aren't small they're like million square foot behemoths and so one of our jobs is to make sure that every square inch of that million square feet has wireless signal because the people who are picking the orders and what not have wireless rf guns to scan the packages you know make sure that for the order that they're picking for put them on you know the conveyor belt for for sorting and whatnot and it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of access points and one of the one of one of the um i guess one of the struggles there is the metal shelving that they use to store the products to begin with because the signal the wi-fi signal will just bounce off of that if it's placed in the um the wrong space and one of my favorite quote-unquote things is when they decide oh hey we need to move a shelf somewhere and then the next day oh hey i'm not getting a wireless signal in this part of the building and you know they don't they don't tell us that they moved the shelves yeah they don't think about you guys right no they don't they don't no no but yet no but who thinks about the network people yeah really so i worked with a consultant one time who he was he was uh his specialty was wireless and i was asking him some of the weirdest issues he's seen and he brought up a similar situation like that where uh it was for an automotive company right uh but it was there it was their factory side i guess um or well i guess it was where they manufacture parts to sell for like you know repairs and replacements and stuff but anyways he said the exact same thing they had to redo the the wireless design because they they i think the company occupied this space and so then they started putting in their own shelving and everything like that but they left the the wireless grid basically the same right and when they did that all those shelvings uh the shelving units were messing it all up right and uh and so he had to get there and like i guess line it down the middle of the aisle or something like that wherever they were gonna be at with i think they were using like forklifts with some kind of computer on them but uh yeah and i mean the ceilings in these places they're like 40 feet high so if you if you if we you mount the aps in the ceiling so if you need to get up there you need to get a foot like a lift take that lift over to you know drive it over you know to the right spot you know and hopefully you get on the right idf cabinet raise yourself 30 feet 40 feet up in the air and you'll figure out what's going on and it's i don't do heights so that i get a little is out when i'm on like a 12-foot ladder so i'm i'm worthy dan i am not a high scorer even as far as i am i just configure the things i don't actually go up there and do it and i'm and i'm short too like my little t-rex arms would not reach up there very well at all nice nice yeah but no it's it's it's it's just such a thing and then wi-fi is such a huge part of of retail space oh yeah yeah and this is not something that people don't really think about you know you even think of amazon think of how big their warehouses are you know anything any place at costco the warehouse you need wi-fi and all of that and these places are huge you know so i'm very glad like tools like echo how exist so we can actually do you know signal maps and you know make sure you're getting the coverage of where you where you're um everyone there and that's that's one of the biggest you know parts of my job when i'm building a new site is laying out all the access points well where are the wireless access points going to be where are like the key hotspots that people are going to be and if and um in offices you know conference rooms common areas like kitchens you know little collaborative areas things like that you want to place the access points there because that's where the people are going to congregate that's where the signal needs to be the strongest because you're going to have the most concentration of people there you know and there's so much to wireless and i never really dug much into it until i got to wayfair and became like hey wireless is a thing okay yeah hey a1 fans aj here for an ally you ever heard of net ally sure you have they came from the same group of engineers that brought us network tools from fluke networks netscout and now their net ally they know networking i'm a network engineer for a partner and when i go to customers and see they use netaly i know it's going to be so much easier to troubleshoot issues we might run into the name may have changed in an ally but the way they build tools hasn't changed a bit they ask what would a network engineer want to help make their job faster and easier and then they go build it just like this etherscope nxg netally is here to help net ally simplicity visibility collaboration visit netaly.com today now back to the show so let me let me ask you since we're kind of going down a wireless rabbit hole here i i've been kind of shocked by all the analytics that people are using from wireless uh nowadays um in your in your warehouse scenarios are they are they doing anything like that like with the analytics of the like what they're uh and and i don't know it in full depth right but it's they're basically like figuring out where certain clients are where the concentration of clients are like in a retail setting right like if you have you know a hot spot in a in a store well that's where they're you know the store might want to put their ads at right like in that in that hot spot where the most people are going to see it kind of thing yeah um and like what is it bluetooth bikini beginning that they're doing now and stuff something like that yeah i mean but i mean most of the the wireless products that we use like so we used to use arrow hive for a while and now we're using aruba but there's a central aruba management that will actually tell you all the access points how many clients are connected to them what their ips their mac addresses are you know what signal quality they're getting to each and every one of those clients so that way you can see at a glance all right is there a concentration of people in this one particular area are they saturating that access point do we need to make it more robust is the signal like good enough you know it's a signal going off somewhere else where a whole bunch of people are things like that because you can tune the um you like you could tune the access point you know broadcast the signal stronger from your one area or weaker in another area because you do get you know interference from time to time so it's it's a whole like i don't know like just invisible air wireless network thing you know it's like packets over air yeah it's all happening you just can't see it yeah i told my dad one time because he was like he he's kind of old school and he's like i don't know what you do and and that and i'm not really good at explaining to him what i do but i told him one time i was like dad i actually if you think about it i don't really do much anything in the sense of like physical right like you know i don't i don't like um what am i trying to say like like you know if you're a construction worker right and you go build a house or build a deck or build whatever you know they're like manual labor yeah it's like you can see see like ta-da this is what i did right and and i was showing him like or i was telling him a lot of what i'm doing is just data right yeah and so it's zeros and ones and i i configure this i can figure that but you don't really see what i do he told me he goes daniel i don't think i'd tell people then i know i know it's like it's literally like i pee over oxygen in the case of wireless know it's insane i think that's you know that's actually a good point you know that's one of the things that i think some network engineers struggle with is that the things that they do aren't necessarily as tangible as somebody who does a manual labor like building a house or building a car you know they don't have that physical product that they can see after it's finished and say hey i did that when in my case because i'm building offices and office networks there's a little bit of that most of the time i don't even go to these places i do everything remotely you know we've got we've got open gears we've got some cards you know to do every kind of config that i need to do you know we're working with isps on the phone turning things up you know i don't i generally don't see these places but you do get to see the whole stack come up you know the whole site come online and know that hey the routing that you added for this network worked you know the configurations that you put on these devices worked so it's not as you know tangible as like a manual labor but you know i think i do think that's something that that tech workers in general probably struggle with sometimes because they do just work with ones and zeros it's not like tangible things right i mean you know you add an access list into something and and it's like well what did you do you know like it's like where yeah where did the work go yeah like it's like you made something work it's like wait a minute how did i make that work i just pushed my little clicky clucky keyboard thing and did some magic and boom all of a sudden traffic works again right yeah sometimes sometimes it does feel like they do it's like hold on a second let me show you how it works click it and people are now arguing about my internet's not working you know all right let me fix that for you so heather it's either the network or it's dns i'm curious it sounds like wayfair is a really big company how many other people do network engineering there is it just you oh no no we've got uh probably a dozen oh wow yeah well some of them are on the data center side and some of them are on the campus side there's kind of a split between that like the data center is the production environment so the website you know keep the website up and running and a lot of that's cloud-based now and um and then there's the corporate side which is the offices you know you know the people support type of network so they kind of make a distinction between that but i've done both sides of it and i can see that there is a point where those two meet so i mean you need your corporate offices to reach the website you know you need your vpn users to reach your internal tools and services so there's definitely overlap in where those two needs and i think having touched both sides of the house you know has given me some good insight into how that whole ecosystem works yeah absolutely do you have a preference do you like the campus stuff more than the data center stuff or i am i don't know if i have a preference they just have different challenges yeah yeah for sure that's good i mean i mean i think with like the campus stuff it's a very templated setup because we have different like we have different templates for different types of offices that we're spinning up so you have like your giant warehouses you have your really small like last mile that don't actually store product but like you know the the trucks for it you know to do the last mile deliveries you know get the products and load it and you've got call centers where you have a lot of people so voice traffic very important you know you need to make sure that the internet's a lot more stable and more direct and you know not not so you know laggy so that means because you know a lot of voice traffic they're taking calls if you know if customer service can't take calls that means we can't make money yeah right right yeah and the data center side of things is also it's it's more compact but it's also a lot more complex with the traffic rules like i there are lines and lines and lines of policy routes in some of in our data center switches that they make my head spin every time i look at them oh my gosh that's crazy yeah kitty cocky with my favorite keyboard switch oh i mean i'm i'm a cherry mx fan you know cherries are cherries are the gold standard there you go so you mentioned it before i definitely want to come back to it um with regards to being a female in network engineering i i guess i i would ask you like what would you say to a female today considering getting into networking well i would say do it yeah we need more people who are not afraid to stand up to the status quo and just go out there and be bold and be themselves and say hey i'm doing this because i love it i know i'm not one of many who do it you know you know to answer the question in the chat you know i am the only network engineer female and i have been that at every company that i've ever worked at oh wow i've never ever worked with another female network engineer which is this is unfortunate but it's very very common but again it goes back to what i said earlier about having thick skin like a you need to be really passionate about the technology you need to love networking you need to know that like this is what i want to do i enjoy doing this i love connecting data and making things just work and you have to keep learning and you have to be able to defend yourself and say hey no this is wrong or this is right or you know this is why you know just having it's hard sometimes like i'm not gonna lie there have been times in my career where like especially early on where i've been bullied for absolutely no reason because they didn't think i was a real network engineer because i came out of college with my np and like oh you're just one on paper you don't know what you're doing oh my gosh as a brand new network engineer that's hard to deal with yeah you know you're just trying to get into the field you know you don't want people who are trying to tell you no don't do that and it's turned me off a lot like i'm not gonna lie like back then it almost turned me off network engineering all together but decided you know what i love doing this too much this is the tech that i want to work with this is what i've made my career out of why would i turn back now yeah you know i question if those people are really even good engineers in a sense because you know the the people that i've come across that are very caring and very you know wanting people to succeed and everything like that especially the community that we we have it's just i feel like those people are two different people right you got the engineers that want to do the pissing contest and yeah and that kind of thing um i don't know i i just i question yeah i question why people would even be that way um yeah no i i think you know you're touching upon a good point there it's a lot of it probably in my mind has to do with insecurity you know they don't feel like they're good enough so they have to project their insecurity onto someone else who easier to project on to than a woman who is you know a minority in the network engineering space you know yeah because you know oh they're different you know they're it's probably them you know it's not me it's somebody else you know a lot of people it's hard to come to terms with your own insecurities you know i was even like that for a long time but you know now you know 20 years into it i'm more than happy to admit when i'm wrong more than happy to admit when i don't know something and i need to google it you know more than happy to ask somebody else for help because in the end we're all in this to learn networking and do our jobs and enjoy the process like what's the point of putting someone down what's the point of turning someone off a career you know somebody who could be a very valuable member of the networking community right now we need more people we need happier people we need more women we need more minorities you know bring them in yeah absolutely no oh my god i love it and it's and it's up to everyone to make that community welcome yeah correct um and that that's one thing like i want to brag about our community is they do a really good a really awesome job about you know trying to include everybody and whatnot uh i actually right now this is kind of a twist but uh we have a troll in our in our discord and it's funny because the we we kind of have like a staff section right and i've been giving them a hard time i've been telling them y'all are way nicer than i am because i would have already banned that person but they they wanted to they're like all right we're gonna give them another try we're gonna give them another try and uh yeah yeah no no no i mean that's one of the things that that when i because i i joined again left after twitter gate happens yeah and that's one of the first things that i noticed about this discard community it was just how welcoming everyone is and how engaging every was and supportive and it's nice and refreshing to have a space like that and even the twitter community after that whole thing happened everyone just you know brought up women engineers they brought up minority engineers saying hey look these are there's so many cool people out there who do network engineering we're not all asshats go talk to these people you know there's so many good people out there and so this actually kind of surprised me at just how positive like the total network engineering community is and again here in this you know art of network engineering in general it's it's good to see spaces like this happening you know i wish i'd had something like this when i was just starting out as a networking engineer so i figured if i couldn't have that back then make that community happen now for the future engineers so that way we can get more people in there so that way when you do get the occasional bully they'll be shot down immediately yeah for you know again being an asshat because we don't we don't need more of those people no right absolutely not well and you're super active in our discord so we appreciate that so yeah it's a great like i said it's a great place it's very engaging and it's actually kind of got me it it's keeping me going when you know staying into networking staying up in the new technologies you know because again you know it's it's funny like when you're younger you're so gung-ho about learning all the cool new tech and having home labs and you know doing everything you can to learn about tech to do good at your job but as time goes on you realize you know what my home life is very precious i'm going to go and do something else now yeah so it's and it's um you know it's good to just you know have a place that i can hang out like this during the day to keep up with the tech you know to have that enthusiasm but yet still be able to go away at the end of my work day and say all right i'm gonna go rock out on my bass guitar for a little while there you go i love your discord screen name by the way it comes from the ambassador operator from hell which is uh a web like a blog series on the uk is the register that was out in like you know the late 90s and early 2000s and it was all about disgruntled systems admin and his pfy pimply face youth junior engineer and the shenanigans that they would get up to as assistance admins and i was hooked from day one so i've just kind of made that my moniker everywhere nice yep that's awesome well i i appreciate it after aj explained it to me yeah and it's funny because it's it's known enough in the community but it's just obscure enough where i still get joy out of someone saying hey i recognize where that's from nice oh that's great oh my gosh heather i i cannot believe how quickly this time has flown by i know um it's crazy are there any questions that we didn't ask you that we should have asked you um is there anything you're dying to tell us i don't even know i really can't think of anything right now well i think we've talked about everything there is to talk about this this has been great uh i i hope you've been watching the chat i think you have a new friend in jordan yeah yeah yeah um we can commiserate about uh warehouse wireless probably for days and days and months on end if you want to join our patreon chat you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of neteng and you can hang out with us as we record these episodes every thursday night and we do occasionally record them on other nights of the week depending on guest availability but uh you know we're always doing some fun stuff in here and it's always a good time uh heather where can people find you where can we uh follow you you can find me on twitter at girl b-o-f-h and that's pretty much my handle everywhere you're going to go instagram twitter whatnot so you can find me there awesome heather thank you so much for joining us we'll put links to all of her stuff in the show notes and make sure you join our discord so you can chat with her more well thank you very much for having me this was a fantastic time awesome all right we will see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering podcast hey everyone this is andy if you like what you heard today then please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher click that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of neteng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes blog articles and general networking nerdery you can also see our pretty faces on our youtube channel named the art of network engineering thanks for listening you