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 at new blinky blinky on the twitters and this evening i am joined by lexi lexi how you doing jay i'm doing great learned a lot today so i count that as a win that's always a win anything fun uh that you're learning about that you can share with us um i learned about uh hang on let me make sure is it is it radiation again it's radiation again isn't it no not ionizing radiation this time i learned about air breathing propulsion is what it's called wow i won't get into it mostly because i don't know quite enough about it but um i was researching fairings and then it turned into you know the rabbit hole that you go down whenever you're like looking up stuff on google wait what what the hell is that word what's that word okay let me look that up you know and so i ended up on uh air breathing propulsion wow though that that could be everybody's house talking to google now today for what it's worth you could have told me something random and i would have believed you it that you know air breathing propulsion to me sounded like a when i say it out loud it sounds like a made-up term but it is not so or what that's worth i learned a little bit about it today um learn something yeah yeah so that's exciting so uh as as we live and breathe and record this episode it is the thursday after we released andy's episode and uh i just love the reaction from our fans about your joining the team i thought that was so cool so yeah i hope you i hope you've been seeing that i know i've been seeing it it's been very touching it's been very sweet i don't i don't think i said it enough guys the last episode but like i am so incredibly stoked to be here with you it's such an honor to be able to you know talk shop and hang out with y'all every thursday stoked to have you here thank you excellent uh tim timbertino at tim burtino how you doing hey uh i'm doing well it's it's shaping up to be a pretty exciting 2022 already um it was just announced um throughout my company i've accepted a new position within my existing company so i'm going from a thank you going from my senior network engineer position to a systems architect uh covering the network and communications teams so technically starts monday but i've kind of been getting pulled into more business level meetings lately and that kind of thing so it's it's really exciting it's where i've been wanting to take my career for a little while now so ready to go that's very cool thank you congratulations tim that is fantastic what's up with aj i gotta hear it all right um you know not not a whole lot at the moment i i've been studying for the data center design exam uh there's a pluralsight course i've been working through so that's been good um just continuing to work on various projects at work having some fun there got to sign some new projects today another core switch replacement i'm doing a course switch on a campus a pair of cat 9500s and i'm doing a pair of nexus switches uh data center core as well for the same organization so that should be fun wow good fun projects yeah it was i was interested because you mentioned that recently that you were gonna start the uh data center design track so that's that's exciting i needed to call out the uh the plural site too because you you would turn me on to the enterprise design pluralsight course for to try to get me towards ccmp and i i've been loving that so far it's been really really good content yeah yeah that's good stuff y'all are both making will enjoy the pluralsight courses for sure i haven't i haven't experienced pluralsight yet but uh it sounds it sounds pretty great you've been singing it's pretty good you're good i i will say like some of them can be hit or miss uh i have taken some like this data center design it's a different author than uh the guys that do the enterprise design it's it's good but it's not as good as the other one that i took so you know what was the other one you took sorry the one that tim's doing right now which is um the enterprise design yeah cool all right good to know yeah and now it's time for some wins winning in our discord channel this week is the complete noob i love this name the complete new past the aws ccp congratulations not not really a complete noob anymore now nice justin miller justin miller passed the az104 the azure administrator congratulations justin timothy mcconaughey passed the aviatrix certified engineer associate congratulations i see aviatrix cert's popping up all over the place lately yeah we have to go get one of those this is a cool one casey valdivia i hope i said that right i probably didn't i say names wrong all the time uh they got a promotion to osp design engineer and i had to go look up what osp meant that stands for outside plant so like the cabling outside of the building very cool yeah very cool so osp design engineer congrats casey my fellow cable guy he's killing it uh stephen mcnutt passed the ic i uh isc 2 ccsp the certified cloud security professional it's a mouthful serious congratulations and kyle cleveland passed the az900 that's the microsoft azure fundamentals exam congratulations kyle there are no new patreons joining us this week but if you're interested in joining the patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge and we'll shout you out here as soon as you sign up and just a friendly reminder we're still doing our listener survey so if you have some time go to the show notes click the link and fill it out for us we could really use the feedback and there's still time to vote for your favorite content creators in the networking area you can go to the cisco it blog awards link in the show notes or the link in the description and vote for your favorites we would appreciate the vote thank you so much vote for me andy's in there i'm in there i'm not you don't have to vote for me you're not yet i'm not showing for anything today all right now back to the show excellent well i am very excited to introduce our guest this evening uh we have the pleasure of interviewing nick russo nick thank you so much for joining us how you doing i'm doing good thanks for having me on the show absolutely uh nick you are all over social media you do an awful lot of content uh you you you put out courses through pluralsight which we were just talking about funny enough um you have your own blog and uh website where you host white papers and post a number of other study guides and and you just put a lot out there so i don't know where we should start with you and so i admit maybe we just start with what do you do now so these days i am a technical leader at cisco and that's a fancy way of saying i i'm in a role where i don't have any direct reports so it's not like a people leadership role but it's a role where you are doing higher level work so really equivalent to an architect type job except my job is it's less about high-level solution designs and more about optimizing existing technology automating existing solutions working through extremely complex problems uh occasionally you know i hate this term but i can't think of a better one parachuting in to solve dumpster fires i do that occasionally but for the most part it's a senior engineering job with a very broad uh scope of work to do and i've been i've been in this role since technically i think since early 2019 so it's been about three years now that i've been doing that wow so is is this a you know customer facing kind of professional services role do people pay for your time or is this like part of an account team the interesting yeah so it's not part of an account team and the role was initially designed to be almost entirely internal so like an overhead you know job you know again like from a billing perspective much like a manager uh basically helping the front line troops do delivery but over time it's turned into kind of a hybrid of billable work for customers leading complex projects and doing behind-the-scenes process improvement work so just to contrast those uh you know for the past few months i've been working directly on a very complex customer issue as the lead guy which is billable time on a large project but i also do a lot of enablement for new technologies so automation work cloud work i'm responsible along with several other technical leaders like me for develop enablement plans and such within cisco which is all overhead to get people who don't have this experience to to put them in a position where they're they are more easily able to transition from being a traditional network engineer only to having competence in cloud or automation or whatever else that they think is going to be suitable for their career paths so that's a big part of my job as well wow wow you have a huge scope of responsibility is that your job it's yeah yes and no um i'm responsible for assembling those plans and helping do a little bit of coaching to get people there but because no one reports to me if people don't do those things or if you know we we fail to meet targets or if projects that i'm not directly supporting go sideways it's usually the managers that will feel the wrath uh so i'm not saying that i you know i don't get to dodge all responsibility i'm still a conspirator on a lot of these things that go wrong but it's not um you know with that with that broad scope there are some areas where i have a really deep touch like on this project i've been doing for two months if that goes sideways it's gonna be a bad day for me but the on some of the other things there are you know it's like a committee when there's 30 people involved whose fault is it i don't know no one's or everyone's right so the the blame and the credit gets shared on some of these things they're very large multi-people complex efforts that involve even sometimes different divisions of the company so i work in u.s public sector we have our own vice president he has his own profit and loss statement it's its own you know nine-figure business or whatever but then but but the u.s public sector isn't the only place isn't the only group of people i have to talk to there are other theaters that we have to coordinate with so it can be it can become a very expansive job and before this i was more of the you know i worked on site for a customer as a senior engineer i did delivery for that customer my scope was very focused on them and even though i did a lot of things for that one customer i didn't care a whole lot about what was going on in the rest of the company because i didn't have to so this job was you know just like most jobs where you take a higher level promotion of any kind and tim if you haven't experienced this yet you will very soon is that your scope is going to widen enormously and maybe that will be um maybe that will be compensated for by a reduction in depth but oftentimes it never happens and you just end up with a a larger scope of responsibility and that's usually fair because you're a senior and you're getting paid more and the expectations are higher but it can be kind of a shock if you're not expecting it yeah that's a good point it's a wisdom for tim um so nick are there average like sizes or time frames of engagements for you right now or does it vary yeah it it's weird because initially it was okay nick's here for four hours let's make the best use of his time and solve this problem and that's kind of what you would think it would be like but what it's turned into i remember you know i got a call from our principal engineer there's only one in the whole division super sharp guy good friend he called me up in like february or march of last year he's like hey we have this urgent problem it's a public school district they have a huge wireless network we need some automation done to solve this one thing you know i spent you know a week writing some code i delivered it i presented it and i was done i was like great that's exactly what i would expect but but people came to expect that and then i started getting pulled into bigger uglier longer term projects which is okay but over time the director i work for is like hey i need you to i need you go take a step back and go back to wide scope because that's where you add the most value so there's sometimes a tug of war and it's not just me there are other engineers who are just as good who get pulled in that same direction where project managers or senior engineers on projects want to pull you in because they know that you'll be a big value add but at the same time now you've now you're kind of pigeonholed into a project for several months when in reality all the other things that you're responsible for or have input into can oftentimes suffer a little bit so like with most companies there's a balancing act between do i focus on this one project and get it out of the dumpster and how do you even measure that like how do we measure from this project that goes from really bad to just tolerably bad that can be managed by other people uh to you know when does that happen what are the exit criteria um and recently i know i'm blabbing a little bit here but i helped to build a policy within our company and again tim this might be useful for you is when do we engage our senior most engineers so what's the entrance criteria and then equally important what's the exit criteria how do we get those people off the project to put them in their their initial roles so the job is interesting because like i said there's an architectural component there's a leadership component there's direct delivery and there's also shaping our corporate governance and how do we engage with people how do we put people in the right place and how do we pull them back out to make sure that we don't become myopic on certain problems wow that's great so you actually gotta sorry go ahead go go ahead sorry oh i was just gonna ask i you know i can kind of relate a little bit to what you said about like having to you had to just like create guidelines basically for how to use your senior engineers more efficiently basically right i mean that those guidelines weren't there before and people get spread too thin you know that kind of environment yeah it was more of a it was more prescriptive because it was like if you want a technical leader you have to go through this process and we didn't want to make it so painful that no one would do it but we also didn't want to make it so easy that everyone would do it if that makes sense yeah you need to you need to go through your director here's the form it's not that hard talk about what your problem is the skills that you need why you think you need it and also clearly define what the exit criteria are it's like okay we get to the point where for example i was helping a large u.s city do migrations and they were at a point where they were doing everything by hand you know i do some automation that helps we get other people trained up and once we had other people trained up in an automated process and a clear flow of how we were going to do migrations i was able to leave the project about six weeks later because we met the excuse me we met the exit criteria and if we hadn't specified that criteria i would have never been able to leave um i mean i you know it i may have but it would have required a you know a high level fight between senior and senior bosses at cisco and nobody wants that so those are examples of of how that policy can come into effect and be helpful and again these are the things that you know architects don't often think about because it's like okay yes you know you're gonna have a wider scope but how wide does it does it only include architecture are you only interfacing with engineers and customers and sales teams and tac and business units or are you also talking to the people managers in your organization and various other stakeholders on the vice president's staff that need to come up with policies for how engineers are engaged on projects and pulled off and and all that other stuff that comes with it so there's the whole the whole aspect of of running the company is a big part of it no i don't you know i'm not a bean counter i don't i don't get pulled into you know uh trying to strengthen our balance sheet like that's not my job at all but at the same time i do follow how our business operates and how how we look on financials because oftentimes that's going to impact how our division leadership is going to respond to different events and that usually has a direct impact on the senior engineers in the organization so there are a lot of things that come with that senior role and it's more than just being really good at technology you know without sounding pompous i think i've demonstrated that years ago that i know what i'm talking about and nobody really challenges that but all these other new things that are continuously challenging me they're not really technical yes sometimes i stumble into things i don't know that i find hard but the harder thing is how do we govern this technical organization this 100 million or billion dollar business to remain profitable at a time when cisco where i work is undergoing a very rapid transformation most of you know that we're trying to do a lot more with software now you might remember we had product announcements i think it was either i think it was 2019 or maybe 2020 where every single product that was announced was software except for one and you know that was when chuck robbins did his um his kind of traditional product announcements everything with software except for one thing and not only is that you know a clear signal about the direction of cisco in particular but with that change it's more than just product development there's an entire ecosystem of support that has to change to meet that need and we're kind of in the in the in the in the storm of it for lack of a better term so you you touched on on something a minute ago where you talked about how important it was to set expectations and set those guidelines now from a person's standpoint do you think that's more on the architect or the engineer themselves or do they need to lean on management to do that what what makes sense i think it has to be kind of a mix because i mean as as an individual you need to you need to be flexible but also stand your ground a little bit again these are there's no hard answers on these things you need to use your judgment like today is a good example we received a completely ridiculous unsupportable and unfair request from a customer uh and the pm called me and he we but we were in complete agreement about how we were going to respond to that so we didn't have to drag in anyone else because everyone was kind of aligned on it but oftentimes you know alignment with pms is not always there and you need arbitration from a senior manager or something so we find at least in cisco and i think this is true in most large companies where you know one of the benefits and it may not sound like a benefit but in my opinion one of the benefits of a large company is that you do have corporate governance it's not just a bunch of random people at a startup running around doing their own thing is that there's a way to do things there's a paper trail for things that happen and that clear process can oftentimes keep you out of hot water i know it's not cool to say that you know it's cool to say go fast and break stuff like okay cool we do that sometimes with our product development cycles and we do it sometimes on you know for automation and ci cd like that's great that has a place but when it comes to engaging engineers assigning resources to projects delivering on customer commitments and doing so with high customer satisfaction you can't go fast and break stuff that's how you lose trust and that's how your product sales slump so here the the real challenge here is you know when i go to my boss he understands my value and he understands where i work best and if he sees me getting pulled into things that aren't good for me he'll use his influence to pull me back and honestly i think that comes down to a mix of good management and good you know good people management on his part but also the policies i talked about earlier that help protect the engineers from from being consumed on projects like that and it doesn't always work sometimes there are executive overrides or concerns around the business that necessitate a different course of action but those are rare as they should be so i don't know that was kind of a long-winded answer to your question but hopefully no you answered it i appreciate that nick we got a good question from one of our patreons the traffic network so in the type of work that you do is this a job where you get called in by either other business units or you get assigned certain projects or are you able to kind of pick and choose the ones where you feel like you're going to add the most value i'd say starting mid last year my choices became i i used to it's probably the short way of saying that so through most of 19 and 20 the answer was yes through most of 21 the answer was no and i think that's not that's not because of any you know personnel differences or anything like that i think it's just the nature of the projects that were undertaken because obviously we know what happened in 2020 with kovid and i think this is my speculation is that the work being done in 1920 or at least in 19 was mostly business as usual so i was able to have a lot of flexibility on what i worked on sometimes i was assigned to projects and cool no problem and at least through the beginning of 2020 people were still able to execute on the plans that they had you know supply chain yes there were problems but the but the bull whip effect had not kind of completed its cycle at that point so people were still able to complete projects even though things were remote and happening uh a lot of things did manage to stay on track and plus there was a a burst of new um business you know i remember the whole zoom explosion uh pretty much every online collaboration product set including like webex saw a big burst over 2020 and i've worked on a lot of uh webex type stuff even though i'm not even a collaboration guy so those kinds of things where we're kind of kind of a mix of i choose to do this because i know it's important for the business and i've been assigned to do this um into 21 i think by then you know people had been dealing with covert for a year you know the the pain of the staffing issues started to show up people had been you know where we had been doing remote support for a year i think that customers still kept to their same schedules and still had their own challenges so for example the city i was working with even though our support was remote they still had to put people to different sites and doing that with coveted restrictions and not to mention getting access to buildings and timelines and coordinating schedules that that's hard anyway you know we've all been through that um and those projects tend to go south a lot faster because when a customer comes up with a crazy schedule and you try to meet that schedule even falling back a week or two jeopardizes a lot so i've gotten pulled into those kinds of projects a few times and frankly i needed to be there or someone like me needed to be there it's not because the engineers on the projects were incapable of doing it it was because their specific knowledge was around building the architecture and helping implement it but what this customer really needed was a large scale repeatable process for doing this continuously which screams automation and sometimes the engineers on the project despite their skill set may not have that specific skill set other projects i've been brought into not for my technical skills but simply for my ability to be a technical leader i'm a relatively articulate person most people think that i'm credible so for me to be the face of cisco and speaking to customers where other engineers may be you know they may be brilliant on a keyboard but they're not quite as comfortable speaking you know they don't have the poise for lack of a better term uh so sometimes i've been put in that position to be that the spokesperson which i can do okay you know that's fine but i'm not gonna do it for six months do it for six weeks maybe so those are the kinds of things that happened um broadly speaking though i do get to choose a lot of the work that i do and when i do choose an assignment the vast majority of the time i have tremendous flexibility on how the implementation goes it's really rare that i get pulled into a project and get treated like a subcontractor it does happen once every couple years that's just the nature of life sometimes but broadly speaking i have a lot of flexibility there all right very cool well i i think from here i i'd like to kind of go back you know one of the things one of the first questions we like to to ask our guests is what got you into network engineering like what what was the start for you yeah so i went to so my my uh degrees in computer science and i earned that degree in 2008 and i had very little network skill at the time like i i knew just like at a basic level the difference between tcp and udp that's really all i knew as a computer programmer um you know having done a little bit of data communications programming in school and after joining the military i was commissioned as an officer and became a communications guy and in addition to commanding a platoon of about 55 marines i was also the communications officer for an infantry battalion which is about 600 people and my job was everything from tactical radios which aren't terribly technical to uh kind of traditional uh circuit switch network telephony equipment to packet switch networks you know routers and switches and wirel you know wireless communicate what you know basically wi-max links things like that uh satcom links um and the maintenance of all that gear as well we had a repair shop and you know how do you fix all your gear so those were kind of the entities that fell under my command and when i deployed to haiti in 2010 in afghanistan the next year on those deployments i started to see that some of the traditional telephone switching technology was being used less and less and even tactical radios especially in static positions was being used less and less and it was pretty obvious that the direction this was you know more than 10 years ago was going towards this new you know everything over ip type approach which you know everything you know that whole concept is like of course everything over ip right but you know 10 15 years ago that wasn't really at least in the military that wasn't the that wasn't the norm so we started to see more of it and you know after working with it for so long i started to started to really enjoy it even though i was terrible you know like my skills were i mean i could barely subnet i could do a couple commands on a router but i thought it was really cool because i saw firsthand how powerful it could be when deployed correctly and then when i left the military in around christmas time 2011 immediately you know i did what most people do i immediately bought like a ccna book started studying that i got a job as a systems engineer at a company in my hometown in rochester new york i did that for a few years managed to improve my skills there and then you know from that point forward i became a contractor down here in maryland working for the army then a few years later i joined cisco and here i am wow that's the impressive scope of work that you were doing in the military um all right i've you know heard from a few other uh people who are also in the marines and um they also had you know we got a lot of experience right up front with a bunch of different systems different types of technologies it just sounds invaluable to uh experience as a an engineer of any kind but definitely a network engineer for sure yeah i mean it was the thing about it is that in my role it was a pretty hands-off technical role for most people i mean when you're you know you're in charge of 55 people so think about you know who in your corporate job has 55 people under them it's probably like a director or senior manager yeah and that person is probably not in front of keyboards too often even if they were in the past um so i didn't do i don't want to pretend like i did a lot because i didn't um i had marines that were much smarter and more capable with these kinds of things and i allowed them to do it you just kind of pay attention to what was going on i mean you were exposed to it you had to learn it at some point right in order to lead people yeah kind of i mean there's it's it's kind of like yeah the exposure was there that the knowing how to do the general design was there and being able to brief the command on what we were doing and how it supported the operations was there so in a way it was kind of like a mix between being a people leader and a platoon commander and also being an architect but the architecture was much more high level like you'd make out you'd make a uh you know a management level powerpoint and then i would go to my my senior marines and say this is what we need to execute how should we do it and we would talk through a plan and then other people would implement and test it because i i simply didn't have the knowledge them but i was exposed enough to it to understand you know generally how it worked and the problems it could solve even though my ability to actually implement this technologies was lacking yeah like you said earlier you know you you saw the power of it so that right had to have influenced your view of things that's pretty cool certainly yeah that's why i did it i mean i like i liked writing code and i was good at it okay but i didn't love it and i wasn't great at it you know i'm still i'm still a decent coder but i'm not great you know i still like coding but i don't love it i really enjoy doing networking stuff that's why you'll see even despite all the automation work that i've done the vast majority of it is network oriented and yes even though i have done a few projects that have nothing to do with networking at all those were more like hobby projects like things that i enjoyed for another reason you know i didn't i i'm not i can't just write code for fun there has to be a reason for it and when that reason exists and it's something i care about then the code comes naturally and it doesn't feel like a chore i feel like there's probably a lot of network engineers out there who feel the same way who may have dabbled in automation here or there and just sort of went networking is more fun yeah i think so um i think we may have seen that we've i think we've also seen people make hard shifts away from networking um you know there's some people i think who started off with networking expertise they did a little bit of software and they realized that that's where their passion lied and they made almost full breaks from it and i think that's i think that's great you know i'm all for people doing what they want to do in a valuable way um but for me you know i think uh evon popelniak does it really and i probably said his name wrong i apologize but he does a good job of explaining it in a nuanced way where he says basically you know i've got 30 some years of networking experience i know this stuff really well but he's also developing really cool automation tools in support of that knowledge so he sees it more of an augmentation rather than supplementation and that's how i look at it too because i don't want to it's not just a matter of sunk cost like it's not like i feel like i spend all this time and money i need to use it that's not how it is i actually enjoy networking a lot and i'm not willing to allow that to go by the wayside to only do this new thing that's cool because the new thing that's cool can support everything i've already learned it's just another skill set i need to continue managing it's kind of like you know when you go to the gym and do a workout and you find a new exercise you like there's a good chance you're not going to abandon the other things you were doing especially if they were working for you you're just going to do this new thing in addition to your workout find a way to include it and that's kind of how i look at this as well you know rather than you know just abandoning everything i had done before continuing to build those skills by using automation to improve it and this has been useful i've actually learned more about networking uh by having those out by by having that it's forced me to dig deeper into how certain things work just today for example a few months ago i published an mtu discovery tool uh using uh python script and you know i it got some engagement on twitter today i gave a deep dive of it internal to my company and even though i have a pretty good understanding of how all those protocols work writing software to implement that algorithm forced you to look even deeper the individual flags and the individual types stuff that you knew before but you didn't ever have to like the only reason you would know that you know an icmp v4 echo reply is type code you know type 0 code 0 you might memorize that for an exam but it actually matters when you're writing software so those are the kinds of things that force you to go back to your networking skills apply that knowledge in service of a real goal and then the outcome is something that's actually beneficial i have a really hard time just sitting in the corner and writing code for fun i hate labs i find that i mean let's let me take that back doing labs when you're explicitly studying for a test i think is fine and somewhat enjoyable but just sitting in the corner and doing labs i have a really hard time with that it's a lot easier for me if i'm solving something that i find interesting i feel you yeah absolutely i love that point that you just made though about you know using whatever you know whatever sector you're interested in whether it's the coding side of things or the networking side of things you know use the one you're less interested in maybe to supplement the one that you are interested in and you know you can grow that way it's not like you said it's not a zero-sum game you know they can contribute to each other and that's that's great it makes you a stronger you know worker employee you know more rounded person in general right and i know i mean i have the i have the i have the wherewithal to know that if i tried to go and be like an only network automation guy i probably wouldn't be very successful like i know that i'm good but i'm not great but i am great at networking and i'm known for it and i know i've proven it in my work at cisco and beyond that this is this is definitely the career for me and i can augment that by having knowledge of automation and software so for me i mean i'm lucky that i was able to figure this out and you know even through my professional career i've really you know of the if we go back to when i got commissioned in the military that was 14 years ago in those 14 years only about 18 months of that time was spent in a in a bad job total so that's like what like 10 so pretty pretty low amount of time because those jobs were you know i was able to get in determine it wasn't for me and leave and go to another job that did help me grow pretty quickly so i was very fortunate to to be able to have those opportunities as they came and even though the jobs i sometimes accepted weren't always what i thought they were with a few exceptions they were all worth having because they taught me something about what i wanted my path to be and i was better able to zero in on it and so far i've been i've been happy where i've ended up so nick i think we can all agree to put it extremely lightly that you're a very high functioning individual we've got a question here from chris denney and it's do you think you being a very driven person is what drew you to the marines or do you think being in the marines made you a very driven person it's a little chicken and egg so it's hard to answer so keep in mind when i joined the marines i was 18 years old and it's i don't think a lot of people at that age i mean i'm not saying that people at that age can't be really driven and talented but you're a high school kid you know that's not it's not the kind of thing where you're really certain so i joined the marines mostly well mostly for the challenge of it i think and the fact that i just thought it would be something interesting to do i didn't have a whole lot of you know i didn't really care what my job was i just wanted to do it i'm not sure what the allure was at the time it's kind of kind of fuzzy to me but when i first joined i was an infantryman i carried a rocket launcher like bazooka infantry was my job so nothing to do with communications at all so that was you know a few years of that and then obviously i was in college it was in the reserve so i was in college at the same time and uh you know i got commissioned and then i you know halfway through my initial training you get to basically you know choose your wish list of what jobs you want and i put communications towards the top number one because i knew no one else wanted it so it'd be easy to get and number two because i was like well if my degree is in computer science and i get this job it'll help me when i leave the military so even though i was still pretty new newly commissioned i was already thinking about my exit not because i hated it but because i wanted to make sure that i picked a job that would allow me to remain technically skilled when i got out i have other friends who were really smart you know had computer science degrees and everything and they you know they decided to be infantry or artillery officers or tank officers and that's all cool uh but and a lot of them now we're doing great but they're in roles you know leadership roles consulting roles um you know i don't want to say life coach because that's a little bit demeaning but they're they're in more uh management type roles than technical ones and maybe that's what they wanted to do i'm sure for a lot of them it was but for me i knew that i wanted to be technical when i got out so i didn't want to choose something that would give me a skill set that would push me towards something non-technical if that makes sense i can think of a few times where as a network engineer i wish i had a rocket launcher so that i think those two can i was gonna say you were kind of anti-communications before your communications yeah i mean i'll tell you it's really heavy and it's really loud so just keep in mind there are some drawbacks to that particular weapon system very cool very cool hey a1 fans aj here for an ally you ever heard of netally 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 net ally is here to help netally simplicity visibility collaboration visit netaly.com today now back to the show so so nick i i'm aware you are a two-time ccie and you have your ccde so i'd love to explore your ccie and ccde journey if you could yeah so i i blogged briefly about this in a in a ccde blog from about four or five years ago um but just to briefly summarize i actually did three completely different strategies for all three tests and part of me did that just for the purpose of experimentation but i also proved that you can do different you can you can achieve the same goal different ways so for the route switch one was my first i was heavily reliant on one vendor in e i basically follow their you know i went through all their learnings multiple times countless times did you know i spent every possible dollar you could spend with ine thousands worth um did all that did very little studying outside of ine and managed to manage the past that way so that's kind of option one is the vendor driven you know put all your chips in one basket kind of approach for the cci service provider there was no content for it it was a new test it's also not super popular the old content was kind of useful i watched them you know some i still had an ind subscription so i watched some of their older videos which were you know helpful for the core stuff but there were 40 new topics on the exam blueprint that's where i wrote my own book and that's the first book i wrote super proud of it even even six years later uh still sells and that was basically me 100 self-study with a you know i read a couple blogs i didn't really read any books just self studying blueprint topics making up my own topologies my own labs and then just writing a book at the same time i managed to pass the test that way and also for the i should mention that for route switch i went to the ind boot camp for two weeks which was fun it was mostly review for me but it helped build my confidence so i had a little bit of interaction with people for sp i didn't speak to a soul i didn't know anyone in the world studying for it i thought i had this again a kind of a fantasy that i'd be the first person kind of silly but i wasn't but i was one of the first but i had this idea that i was the only guy doing it didn't talk to anyone about it nobody helped it was just 100 me my own labs and i passed it so two completely different and it's not i'm not saying that's a brag i'm just trying to illustrate the strategy two completely different approaches for ccde i took a very i took the opposite approach we had meetings every saturday from 7 a.m eastern to 10 3 hour meetings so people you know people in europe it was the afternoon for them we had some people on the west coast so like 4 am people would join and then we would prepare things to talk about somebody would be on the hook to present designs or talk about use cases and we would go through and debate with each other about different things that was useful we would also you know in our study group we would some you know sometimes we would pair up in twos and do extra meetings you know we'd i'd go through we'd go through a scenario separately then we would come together and debrief and compare our answers and debate with one another i did that with a few other people um most of them are at cisco now but if you are beyond cisco and generally for that exam i read a number of books so for route switch i think i only read the ocg for sp i didn't read anything and for ccde i read maybe three or four books i don't remember exactly so again one you know one approach vendor driven one completely by yourself one very interactive and participatory with other people all had successful results so when i tell people that it's like i've done it three times with three different tests three completely different strategies and they all work so don't focus so much on you know the resources and the labs and you just gotta you just gotta do the work it almost doesn't matter how you do it doesn't matter how many people you're talking to could be zero it could be ten obviously there's going to be a difference in the test like ccde that's an exam that i think benefits from more communication than just reading in my opinion but we did have one guy who passed on his first attempt the same day i did and he barely if ever participated in our study groups but he read 20 books and he passed so he took the hermit approach and it worked so my point is generally speaking there's the tests even though you need a strategy you don't need the strategy like you come up with what works for you but when i say works for you that's not a license to to be lazy right works for you means it actually has to work for you it can't just be this is convenient for me so i'm going to do it it has to be this is how i learn best and this is you know compatible with my existing work and family commitments and it's something that i can commit to for the next six to 12 months because that's what it takes for each of these tests i i'm curious do you have a personal preference on which one of those styles you enjoyed the most um i it's hard the route switch one was um it's interesting because i think i it's actually a really hard question let me think about it um i think the sp1 was the most motivating because i'd wake up ever i was writing a book i was excited about that so that was motivating and i also was extremely confident going into that test because who could possibly know more about this than me right um that was a little bit too cocky and i managed to fail the test uh the first time but um that was you know i say that one was was enjoyable the rod switch one was a little more mechanical because that was just other people doing labs from a vendor going through the training um you know i gone to the boot camp which was a good confidence boost um but it really felt like a grind um and it was my first one too so there was a lot of stress to just get over the hump the ccde i think was probably the most enjoyable because not only did i make a whole lot of new friends but i saw that by talking to other people about design things there was a lot that i had never considered and what was interesting about ccde is that you learn pretty quickly how much you don't know i mean that's true for all the tests but particularly with ccde when you're you know i remember remember playing this day we were going through a scenario and the topic was about some like traffic engineering question with bgp and one of the options was to use nat and i laughed it off as being ridiculously stupid but it was the right answer and like 75 of the people got it correct and i was like well maybe i'm you know maybe i shouldn't be here kind of thing so it was it was kind of a wake up for me it's like you don't know what you think you know even with two ccies and a book published um and that was a good you know that opportunity wouldn't have happened if i were sitting in a corner just studying on my own so i'd say that was the most enjoyable obviously you know i've got lifelong friendships out of those studying you know we had a you know guys you see on twitter all the time daniel deeb malcolm boudin mike zigga all those guys yusef alfathi they were all part of it they were all major contributors um and they all you know they're all ccds now so that was that was probably the most enjoyable because i walked away with more than just digits from it so so when you were going through the service provider uh exam was the plan from the beginning to write a book about it or is this something you just kind of you know because you saw that there was no there wasn't a lot of content available for it is this an idea you had after you started it was kind of it was you know these things are rarely sequential they intertwine in weird ways it's like sure you're like okay there's no content so i'll start learning it but what if i wrote a book on this okay let me write it let me start taking notes on this thing and it just kind of built up into that over time um broadly i would say you know it was a mix of seeing a market opportunity for it but it was also you know me but even before i got really serious about the task i needed to learn a lot of those things for a work project and it got to the point and this was you know it was false but it got to the point where i was like okay well i've already learned all this new sp stuff there's only a couple more topics and i'll be ready for the test eight months later you know writing the book um but yeah it was it was an enormous extraordinary effort i mean there's almost a million words in the thing huge effort um so that was uh it was tough but once i got going it was one of those things like it never seems like it's going to end you know never i mean it was 3 000 pages and now imagine how many pages you have to write every day to finish that uh and i did it in six months so it was an extraordinary effort i don't think i could do it today um i'm just too i'm too old i'm too tired i've got too many other commitments i could i couldn't do it yeah here we go today but no it was go ahead what's the title of the book it's uh uh it's got like a long bureaucratic title it's like cci service provider version four comprehensive study guide something like that okay all right yeah it's hard to make sure um but uh yeah it's aside from that it was nobody's done it i can do it even if i'm not the first i'll be one of the first to pass it and i'm going to wait until i pass to publish the book because that's going to give the credibility to it that was like the biggest thing and even though i finished the book right around christmas of 15 i didn't pass the test until march of 16. so during that period and i and i had to you know just a little bit of trivia i started working at cisco in early january and i had to have the book done before i joined the company to avoid any issues with copyright intellectual property okay so i took three weeks of excuse me three weeks of vacation over christmas and it took me that long to read the book cover to cover made corrections um you know got it published well i technically didn't have time to publish it i wish that i had uh that's a different story for another time but i you know i did the old post office trick where i mailed copies of it to myself on a cd so i have the official uh reception stamp so if it ever came to arbitration in the courts i could say here's a copy of the book unchanged dated the day before i started at cisco in case there were any disputes now fortunately that didn't happen there were no disputes but just fyi that's a a trick that um that you can do to protect your to protect yourself uh but i did get approval to publish the book a few months later and then did so uh once once all that all the paperwork got done for it um but it sold like i remember in the early days you know it would sell you know two three four copies a day and that's just extraordinary i'll be lucky if it sells to a two a month now but back then you know it was it was it was the only thing about a year or so later um a couple of my friends from poland also brilliant guys they published a workbook and you might have noticed that we actually decided to team up so no now we have a bundle that you can get both at a reduced price rather than compete now that might that seems a little bit monopolistic but considering the price is low and we didn't gouge anyone we don't really feel bad about it and it sells really well so fantastic that's awesome so not only did you get a cert out of it that you were really proud of but you also wrote a book that you're really proud of yeah man yeah i was proud of that i remember those were those were good days you know yeah that was a good that was a nice uh a nice high i rode for a couple weeks in there only a couple weeks i never forget i took the test on like a tuesday and i like went to work like the next day if nothing happened you know nobody cares but it's just you know it's not it's not like in the movies where there's like this write-off in the sunset and happily ever after it's like no you just go back to work it should be so what was that first roll with cisco and what what drove you to cisco um so the job i was at was actually a great job uh i decided to leave i'm thinking i have to think now why did i even leave um i wasn't really upset with it i think it was just a matter of the opportunity presenting itself like hey we you know i was working with the cisco sales team at the customer they're like we really think you'd be a good person to have inside the company and well we'll work to open that job for you so you can stay here and support this same customer for a few more years but rather than be here for two decades you'll have an opportunity to do something else and that's exactly how that's exactly how the story went so i started working there in early 16 and by you know late 19 i was on my way out oh before that i don't remember what year it was but a couple of years later i was on my way out and it timing worked out okay so my first role yeah to answer your question more directly i was a network consulting engineer i used an nce if you've seen that term they changed all the names now i think it's just consulting engineer now but i was i came in at that level and worked on site with the customer i used to work for on-site i sat in the same chair that seemed like really you know i kept the same laptop yeah so i managed to just switch badges um obviously things changed a little bit you know i wasn't allowed in certain meetings anymore and you know some people treated me a little bit differently which was fine but for the most part i did similar work for them just under the cisco umbrella i did that for a few more years there and that allowed me to have a smooth transition out while also not leaving my customer in the lurch so it worked out okay so you got your ccies before going to cisco what why did you decide to pursue the ccies in the ccd um well so just the timing was a little bit weird so the ccie route switch i definitely got before cisco the the service provider if you remember i had to publish the book before i started at cisco so that that the same december that i left my old company was the same december i finished the book so that ccie actually happened in my first couple months of being employed at cisco all the studying happened the year before but so that one happened kind of right at the junction point um the reason i went for it it's almost like joining the marines where you know looking back at my reasons for doing it they're a little bit unclear but i just wanted to i thought that having it would not only be useful for my career but i knew that the journey would be helpful and having that expertise would open up opportunities for me and plus i enjoyed doing the work a lot so you know looking at it from a it wasn't purely let me get my digits so i always have a high paying job i've i've you know and you'll see even on on twitter one thing i've i don't personally do is talk about how much money i make and how i'm chasing all these big jobs that's just not my style again i don't have anything against people who do that um that's just not my style because i don't chase money the money comes the money looks for me because my skill sets will command the money i don't need to go and beg for it that's just my take um and by having those skills people will want to bring you into the company and they'll want to assign you want to assign you to their projects and that is what makes you attractive from a technical perspective it's not just the certifications but it's the expectation that you have the knowledge entailed from those certifications and i think this is where my general strategy and my personal strategy around my body of work it's all mutually supporting um that's why i'm very care and i talked about this i see i saw eric chose in the comments there i talked about this a little bit on his podcast a few months back is that i'm very deliberate on the things that i do and don't do you'll never see me sell and again this is not i'm going to be completely clear i'm not knocking people who do this but you won't see me selling t-shirts and coffee mugs because that's completely orthogonal with the brand i'm trying to build so when people see me i want them to think high functioning expert that should not be trifled with like that's the brand that i want for myself not like in a jerk kind of way but in a in a way where my influence comes from my technical ability my writing skills and my content creation not so much from my um engagement my personality type things you know i try to be i like to be personable and helpful but it's not like my primary purpose in the community so that's what you know i'm very i guard that very very closely well i love that about you nick and i want to point out to anyone who hasn't visited your website yet that um it is like pure information there's no bullshit no frills i mean you even say why right like you wanted to be as accessible as possible and that i think is amazing um i didn't know that um until i actually was looking for con like i was looking for some information and i found it on your website and it was just like you know i i love that approach because i've never seen it from anyone before and the fact that you specifically want your stuff to be accessible and you're all about the knowledge um that that's great because that's the opposite basically of gatekeeping and i know that's kind of a buzzword and everything right now but i mean it you know you you're making your stuff accessible and your knowledge accessible is quite possibly like the best thing that you can do for you know the networking community and and that's wonderful that you do that yeah and i try to and the way the way i look at it is you know every everything this is you know i had this conversation with with eric too ever you know everything that's part of your personal brand and your reputation it just it has to be consistent you have to be ideologically consistent and i'm not saying that you have to be like me that's not what i said but you just need to be consistent if you're if you if you're if your thing is no frills technical content then everything that you do should should support that goal and anything you do that doesn't support that goal is is waste and it just gets in the way but not everyone you know other people are gonna have different goals you know they might be more about community engagement or they might be more about uh everything from you know engaging racial minorities or women like i support all that stuff but if you're gonna do those things just make sure that the specific actions that you're taking on social media in your business in your work environment all mutually support that point because it's like we you know like we say in relationships mixed messaging that's like the worst thing you can do either give me closure and say that you don't want to be with me anymore or do the opposite but you the mixed messaging can confuse the people who are in your sphere of influence and they can leave them confused about what is this person really doing like when i think of when i think of topic x who comes into my mind first and the way i look at myself is when i need to learn about developing a complex architecture where can i find resources and documentation who's the guy for that and honestly the answer right now is probably yvonne papelniak because he's just great like he's you know and i acknowledge that he's been around forever and he his body of work is just extraordinary i want to be up there like that at some point i might be another decade or two but my point is that when people think about those kinds of things i want to be one of the first people in their mind and the same can be true for you know any topic whether it's a social effort or a technical effort or a business effort you just need to be consistent with your strategy and be deliberate to the point where it almost seems repetitive this is it's like the most important thing i love it we all contribute in different ways right and and being consistent i love that principle that was exactly the point i made on yeah on eric's podcast i i contrasted myself with network chuck who i love his value proposition and the things that he does are completely different than mine but they're all aligned when you want a certain kind of content or you think about a certain thing or you see a certain logo or an image or you see something that is aligned with what he does he's the first thing that comes in your mind because what he's selling and maybe that's not the right word but what he's offering is very different but it's also very um it's also very clear like i don't think there's any confusion on what network check what network chuck does and i think that's true for a lot of people out there and i think just network chuck has the longevity of having been doing what he's doing for so long that he's had time to refine it and grow that market penetration whereas other people who i think are towards the beginning of their journey uh that clarity isn't quite there yet and that's okay because when you start off and you build your strategy and you identify the core values and the manner in which you will provide value to everyone else it's never going to be clear i wrote my first one in 2018 which was two years after i published my first book so clearly i was producing things long before i had even thought about what the strategy would be but it started to become apparent to me that if i were going to start doing live courses and pluralsight contracts and writing more books and doing webinars and going on podcasts i needed to be a little more deliberate about how i was going to present myself because otherwise you could just go and do every willy-nilly thing you know and then it ends you just end up confusing like okay what does this guy do okay he writes a white paper once in a while and then he sells hoodies and then he goes and you know advocates for a social cause and then he does this other thing like what is it i don't even understand my opinion is that you can do those different things they just need to be mutually supporting and i haven't really found a way to to tie in merchandise with the work that i do and i don't think i ever will if i do find a way then great but i don't think i will so i'm not just going to force different items into my brand because other people are doing them or because it's going to put another 17 into my bank account every month don't don't go down that road it's a dangerous road the money will come to you if the market thinks you're worth it there's a reason i don't talk about money i'll leave it at that it's very fascinating how do you talk about that it's very different from what we see you know especially on social media there are a ton of for lack of better word influencers right out there who who do kind of this it's the same playbook right it's what you're saying like you know sell the hoodies and t-shirts or whatever you know we've got some flash we talk about money um you don't often see somebody with the approach that you have and that's refreshing that's great yeah that was yep yeah and i'm not yeah i'm not like against any of that stuff i just you know again i like to be extremely clear on this because i think some people may take this as an attack it's not it's just if you're if you're going to be an influencer you need to just be laser focused on who you're trying to influence why you're trying to influence them what your end state is going to be and why people should think of you first on that particular topic that's it like if you can answer those questions definitively and execute against those decisions then you're going to do well but if you have a general like i want to influence everyone and i want to like you're going to hurt you need to be very specific on the kind of people and the kind of things that you deliver yeah i think that self-awareness highlight was one of the biggest takeaways i got from the episode you did on eric cho's podcast and you had brought up an example of youtube like you had tried the youtube thing for a little while you found out that it really wasn't your thing and you didn't try to force it you said okay this isn't the medium that that i want to use um at least a whole lot to produce content and you focused on something else that you were willing to be strong in and and i think there's a lot to be said for that yeah that's exactly right you know and i haven't you know i did i did a short video in late september and i haven't done anything since um because again it's just it's it's so hard for me to compete in that space you know you look at some of the you know you guys know how the algorithm works you know the thumbnail of the you know you got to have the the big block letters the weird facial reaction like that's required and that's okay and i'm not mad about that like i just sent it i resent it i'll just say that publicly i'm gonna represent the face that you have to have on you hold on hold on hold on she says that after she knows the thumbnail that dan chose for andy's episode last week and i gotta tell you that's one of the best like i said on his podcast youtube is television and when you're when you're a tv guy or girl there's certain things you need to do to do audience capture and that's just it's hard for me and it's not authentic so i just don't want to do that and you know you guys talked about pluralsight earlier the reason that i was attracted to pluralsight over you know the other companies that that could have gone with is because not only do they have really high audio visual standards but they're also very meticulous about the length of courses the length of each clip the amount of pause between every sentence like all that stuff is carefully measured and if you're not compliant you will be you will be asked to make corrections so if you ever if you watch one of my plosive courses you'll notice the exact timing between sentences is almost almost identical to the millisecond the beginning and the end of the clip the volume is a steady negative six to neg12db typically nine is the average there very very consistent because i want people to see this is what professional grade training looks like and that's why the course is you know you won't see a lot of speculation it's very to the point technical training with complex demos and labs because who am i targeting busy professionals who want immediate technical knowledge without the fluff that's consistent with my website it's consistent with my bearing and my poise it's consistent with everything i see on social media and it's consistent with how i operate at my day job all those things have to mutually support one another love it love it um nick you you do so much i know i know i've seen a few people ask this uh in in the patreon chat here so what what is your process you know how do you manage all of these projects personal work-related family related and otherwise how do you do it you know andy's not here right now so i'm just going to ask the question how do you do it yeah um you know again i said this on eric's podcast but i do like to do the most important things first in the morning so when i wake up don't touch your phone i mean yeah i mean i i hit the button to see what time it is and then it goes back down i don't you know it's on twitter or nothing like that um i get up and then you know after doing a basic routine i'll get to work on whatever is the most important thing i try to do the most cognitively difficult things right away when you're fresh so uh you know i might do some recording and a little bit of editing but typically i'll do the recording first and the editing later because editing is kind of mindless if you've ever done it it's time consuming it's not hard it's just time consuming you do need a little bit of focus but it's not that bad um the much harder thing to do is design labs troubleshoot labs uh write you know writing the white papers that that has to be that's very cognitively difficult those are the kinds of things i'll do first and then other projects through the day um you know based on their difficulty level will get done in in you know in order in terms of the you know tracking the projects i just use a simple kanban board with up to two tasks at once i never work on more than two things at once ever that's how you end up starting six projects and finishing zero so i only work on two things at once um obviously you know my work and personal projects are separate i don't i don't let those mingle because you know if i'm excuse me if i'm working on two personal projects i'm not going to tell my boss hey i can't i can't work for cisco right now sorry that's not that's no sure um but i do but i do keep separate boards for both jobs that allows me to stay focused and it also pushes me and says you know i really want to start um a good example over the summer i started writing my newest white paper on iptv which just published a few weeks back i started it in july and i really wanted to start except all these ideas and i was like you know everyone's excited at the beginning of anything right so i was like i'm ready to go but i need to finish these other things first i need to update these postman collections i need to go and do this maintenance on my website and my ci pipeline is failing for my political polling project from last year i need to fix that so i had to do all the i didn't have to do any of that but i'm a believer that if you're going to publish something you need to maintain it because if your website is just a graveyard of old stuff you don't get credit for that it's like that's just that's just you saying i used to be good like no no no you got to keep that stuff up to date if you're going to keep it public so um so i had to do all that first and then the reward for doing all that cleanup is i get to start the fun stuff and then i work on that for a few months you know get that buttoned up send it off to peer review for a few months get you know got the results back around christmas uh you know made the changes over break and then published it in early january so things like that you know and that you know once it was out for peer review i marked it as done done enough you know to work on something else um but doing those things in order lets you focus and i you know it's been written about a lot i'm not the first guy to figure this out but focus on a smaller number of things if you do that i can guarantee that you'll finish those things sooner and when you're halfway through a journey that seems impossible don't allow yourself to chase the new shiny thing until you finish what you were doing that's so important but it's also really mentally difficult to do but you got to do that and if you do that you'll end up not only finishing the thing you were working on but also the gift of being able to start the new thing that excites you because if you just abandon things halfway that doesn't you know to my opinion that doesn't really count for much it actually said it actually in my opinion it speaks more negatively about you than positively because it's really easy to jump ship it's really easy to start something new when you're excited and everyone's excited for you go on twitter and have someone announce that they're doing something new you'll get more likes than anything and that's i'm not against celebrating people doing new hard things but those but there should also be an expectation that people finish those things i tell people all the time be a finisher not a starter because one is hard and one is easy so it's very important to keep that in mind but i'm i'm feeling it you're right it's a very good philosophy to have because you're you're right if you don't finish something then what'd you do it for right but like we like to say it's all about the journey there we go that's right that's right i had to sneak that in there i love it i love it um so the devnet expert has come out in uh recent months uh is that anything that you have interest in putting on your to-do list um a moderate interest um one of the benefits of being at cisco is that i can take that test for free including travel oh so there's so so i'm gonna do that almost certainly um i know what it takes to pass these tests and it's a lot of work and i'm kind of at the point now where i don't really have a whole lot more to prove i've done i've you know i've gotten three i've written books i've done tons of training on devnet i've passed six out of the ten tests already um i could get the devnet expert it'd be another feather in a in the cap kind of thing i might do it um the time commitment is hard and just with my recent surgery and other uh physical issues and my age the physical you know back then it wasn't that big of a deal but you know my hands are starting to hurt is it really worth it you know what am i what you know in order to just to put it into perspective when i say that a ccie takes you know eight to 12 months this isn't you know just casual studying reading books and going on twitter it's hardcore water cooled speed typing like it's a lot millions of characters it's hard on your body it's hard on your back it's hard on your eyes it's just hard and i'm not gonna lie i'm pretty beat up from a life in the military to various other injuries and i look pretty decent but it takes a lot of effort and i'm not sure that i want to lose i'm not sure i want to sacrifice any more of my health that's really the simplest way to put it i'll probably take the test just because why not but putting forth the 30 hours a week which is the 20 minimum to study for this test and just be banging on a keyboard for that amount of time and struggling through it i'm not sure i want to do that be honest i've done it three times i know what it takes i know it's hard you know do i really need a fourth what's a fourth going to give me so i'm still kind of on the fence about that yeah yeah uh we had a great question in the patreon chat uh what does nick russo do to unwind and relax um that's a hard question especially recently because relaxing has been tough past couple months um generally speaking i mean here's what i've been doing i mean i go i do a lot of walking now uh now that you know my my choice of exercises has been reduced quite a bit so i do a lot of walking which is nice um it's hard to say whether playing games like chess or risk are relaxing because those games can be extremely stressful sometimes but i do i do play those games uh which is cool um sometimes i play a mud it's called materia magicka imagine dungeons and dragons except over telnet so i kind of like that it's sorry that's awesome i used to play yeah it's a pretty cool game just check it out it's free um so i play that once in a while you know like it's one of those things where it's really easy to get sucked into so i police myself you know you know towards the end of the night i might play for 20 30 minutes or so and that's that's the end of it um yeah other than that you know all this all the stock politician answers hanging out with family blah blah blah those all apply to um very cool very cool sorry that uh that brought me back to old school days muds are old school man that's awesome i've never heard anyone else say like i know there are me let me let me just tell you why i like muds yeah because again you you might you might not believe it but me liking muds over other games is completely consistent with the rest of my whole brand let me explain why yeah so you've seen me on twitter complaining that people need to read more you know that's and maybe complaining is the wrong word but i always encourage people to read more you know when i think about you know people having opinions on things they don't know about and then they go and listen to let's just say some alternative media on that topic i'm like why would you do that when you could just read a book or lots of books from different perspectives and actually get something a little more a little more refined so i do a lot of reading on a whole bunch of diverse topics you know my past couple books you know one was on uh if i go back like five books was on i am malala the pakistani girl who was shot uh by the taliban um the anatomy of fascism a napoleon biography i'm currently reading a u.s ulysses s grant biography these are a variety of writers from different countries some of them with very on a personal level some with conservative opinions some with liberal opinions but oftentimes when you read history books those opinions don't really manifest themselves in obnoxious ways and i think it's useful to keep in mind that professional historians and others do a really good job of presenting their research in a professional way and that's why i think you should always focus on those books first so anyway aside from that i do a ton of reading and even when i read fiction which i do i i like to read because you are allowing your mind to visualize what's in the book rather than have someone prescribe it to you in a picture and if you think about muds it's the same thing you're playing a fantasy game you're walking into rooms there's a text description of the room and then you get to imagine what it looks like there's no artwork and i like that because it's consistent and it allows me to think about what am i actually seeing rather than somebody somebody giving me the picture in their mind like i don't want to live your dream i want to visualize it for myself so that's why i like to play muds that's awesome very cool um for anyone who might be listening who doesn't know what a mud is i'm not really sure how many people may or may not but it's a multi-user dungeon is what it stands for okay i didn't actually even know that i just looked it up but it's a it's a text-based game yeah yeah cool i i used to play it i used to play this game back in 2003 and i stopped for 18 years and i just started over thanksgiving what's it called so it's like i you know so i haven't played in a long time and some of the people i knew back then when we were 15 are in their 30s with families now so kind of like me so it's kind of interesting that some people actually been playing for that long um but yeah it's it's it's cool my point is that if you if you do things that are you know again this ties into the whole thing is you know i like the reason i like to read is because it it frees me and allows me to visualize things the way i want to visualize them and the same thing is for muds and yes i realize like chess and risk are a little bit different um but at the same time it's you know i'm not really into you know modern video games and stuff they're a little bit too you know they don't leave anything to the imagination and that's a little bit boring to me but enough on that i'm going to check that out that sounds like a lot of fun never heard of it hey a1 fans aj here to remind you about nordvpn.com nordvpn will help secure you wherever you go i use nordvpn on all my personal devices whenever i'm out about i just go into the nordvpn app hit quick connect and away i go nice and secure don't have to worry about prying eyes anybody looking at my connection if i choose to go work from a coffee shop locally or you know even while i'm traveling if i bring my personal device devices i will uh use the workvpn to help keep things safe and secure i'm using nordvpn right now and there's no degradation in my signal everything looks good when you guys watch us on the live streams so i can't say enough good things about nordvpn they have some great additional services included with their vpn product they'll scour the dark web for your credentials and see if they've been involved in any sort of hacks or anything and then if they have they'll let you know and you can go change your passwords and do whatever you need to do to help keep yourself safe and secure uh they also have a mode that will block any websites or ads known to possess malware and they they just have general ad blocking anyway because you know who wants ads as i record an ad anyway if you want nordvpn and you do go to nordvpn.com t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and you can get a really great deal 73 off two years plus four months free so again that's 73 off two years plus four months free of nordvpn if you forget that url just go to nordvpn.com at checkout you can use the promo code t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and we appreciate your support as well as nordvpn's support of the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show nick we have a lot of people that are trying to break in uh to a tech career or their early on in career so um i would love to get your take on you know any advice you might have for somebody starting out you know how would you kind of direct them to get going i would say let me think about this carefully um so my initial like uh let me you know just to recap what i did i got out of the military i bought a ccna book studied it every day did the labs from it and i kind of improved my skills now this was in 2011. twitter had been out for five years but it wasn't really huge back then so there you know there wasn't like a place where you could go online every day and talk about what you studied my recommendation is for people who are really new like you're you're new to the point where you you have almost no skills and you're you're trying to enter tech from outside of it first of all you should probably be watching someone like network chalk because i think he does a good job of of covering the more the social and transitory aspects of that and it's not just chuck there's other people who do a good job too i'm not trying to you know not trying to say only he does but more broadly i would say you need to be consistent with your studies you need to study every single day i know there's you know the uh the lab every day i'll do one i think his name is you know some people have entire brands around that concept and that's great but you got to live that concept though it can't just be a slogan um every single day for at least 30 minutes it's just like if you're trying to learn a musical instrument or if you're trying to exercise you know doing a really hard three hour workout once every saturday is going to be far less effective than 30 hours every day or five times a week or whatever same idea with studying be consistent every day a little bit every day you know is going to have a much bigger impact overall so you have to be consistent with it and if that means making other sacrifices and saying you know i'm gonna have to you know not watch this sitcom or or whatever then you have to make those sacrifices at least initially to get your knowledge up to a point where you're able to get a job and be a functioning individual at that job so be consistent study every day that's you know basically what it comes down to don't don't think that you can batch everything into a marathon cram session on sunday like you did in college because in college the goal you know if you were less serious about it you're trying to pass a test and that's fine but the difference though is that you're going to get a degree at the end of it but there's no guarantee you're going to pass your cisco test or there's no guarantee you're going to get that job there's no you know there's not necessarily a light at the end of that tunnel it's very it's much more nebulous so be consistent study every day i still i i really like that you brought up 30 minutes a day because i think a lot of people when they think about studying they they try to cram hours of studying in every day so um is there something about the 30 minutes that it that why you recommend just 30 minutes a day or at least 30 minutes yeah so if you know there's a there's a method called the pomodoro method where you know people will set a 25-minute timer with a five-minute break and then they'll do those iterations to be very focused for that short time and then step away because the way we function is we typically can't stay focused on a difficult task for more than 30 or 45 minutes or so so my take is that focus hard for those 30 minutes and then stop and then go and do something else before it turns before it starts to feel like a chore it's kind of like being in you know being in the gym where you know you're feeling good for the first you know 10 20 30 minutes but then towards the end of it mentally you know you're coming up on the end of it because you're starting to run out of gas and you know you might have a harder time putting in full effort at that point and then it starts to feel like a chore and then over time you start going to the gym less and less we see this is you know i'm using the gym as an example just because it's it's relatable but the same thing happens with studying 30 minutes a day is in my opinion very easily achievable i think most people can find a way to carve out 30 minutes a day without making huge sacrifices to their existing commitments and it it is prevention against burnout now if you're studying for ccie 30 minutes a day is nowhere near adequate you need about seven times that much and that's not an exaggeration um on average of course you know you won't be able to do four hours every day but you need 20 or 30 hours a week but if you're you said getting started and getting started in tech you have to build your tolerance up to it just like in the gym you know you're not going to show up in the gym completely untrained for three hours and do some crazy workout you're going to go for 30 minutes and be sore for a week because you haven't done push-ups in a year kind of thing so it's the same idea with tech start small but be consistent every day that's going to have like i said it's going to have a way bigger impact than if you batched all that time into one three-hour session on sunday i love it boy uh nick is there anything that we didn't ask you that we should have or is there anything that you want to share with us that we haven't covered yet um i mean some advice i give again i think i might have said this on eric's podcast and elsewhere but if if there's like if you have some technical skills to do something and it also happens that there's a hobby of yours that can benefit from that skill so a good example um some people like sports some people like music if if you if you like those things and you're also in tech let's say you let's say you're me i don't like sports but let's pretend that i did um i might go and write some code you know to pull down all the stats from a fantasy football team or you know track the you know something in the sports world by going to a website writing a you know interfacing with a you know major league baseballs api or just you know screen scraping the html text and you know whatever build something that you think is cool and that supports your hobbies because not only are you going to get some experience in writing software or doing whatever but it's also going to serve some useful purpose for you so two examples um i have more than two but you know back in 2020 um i you know once a day what i would do is i would check the uh political polling because i like the science of that and what i wanted to do is i wanted a quick aggregated way to see all the polling for for federal and state races so i wrote a stateless or a sorry a serverless application with aws lambda to do that which would pull down the polling and it would fit on one smartphone screen so i'd go to my i go to the the link the server i set up for it i'd go immediately see everything you know highlighted with the the differences who was winning color coded and if i wanted to drill in i could click each race and it would pull up all the details of it but most of the time i could spend two seconds i could look at the race i could put my phone away so now i wouldn't have to spend 10 minutes on the laptop looking at the data i could get the results faster and i learned a lot about lambda at the same time but that was interesting to me personally but i was able to leverage my technical skills to make that better you know recently for the mud we were just talking about this is a game that has thousands of items and you know there's food items in it there's like 500 and the different items have different capabilities that they give you you know they make you run faster or hit harder or whatever and what i've what i did is i put on my website it's hidden you all can't see it but i have it of all the foods in the game and their and their benefits so if i'm gonna go do something hard or i'm gonna go fight some certain boss or do whatever i can go there and i can control f in the browser find out which foods give me the capabilities i need click the link and go find out where to get them brilliant so it's like it's stupid it's kind of silly right like but it took me about two hours to write that python script and then publish an html to my website that i can reference to make it easier for me saves me keystrokes when i'm playing it makes the game more enjoyable and because i only play for a short i don't have a lot of time to play these games so because i only have a short time i want to make sure that i can find that information quickly so again it doesn't have to be purely productive like you don't only have to be mapping out and solving problems that are directly related to enterprise network automation go write a sports thing go do a mud you know do something for a game you like to play you know whatever i always encourage people to do that because not only will you gain experience but you'll be solving a problem useful to you and you'll walk away from it thinking you know i was able to tie in my interest in a new way that no one had done before so i always recommend people do that i love it yeah you gotta get you gotta have some skin in the game right and if you you can't find that in in the job portion of it or the professional portion of it to to find something to attach to learn to then you know finding it in a personal interest will definitely get you there that's fantastic advice yeah find out find a personal problem that would benefit from like especially on the automation topic or software you know find a personal problem that you think would be uh that you have the skills to solve and just just toy around with it it's a lot easier to focus on that and this is you know like um the hundred days of code challenge like a lot of people did that that would i have zero interest in that not because i don't like doing code challenges but to me they're just abstract they're just like oh here's this code challenge that someone else thought was cool do you want to solve it it's like no i got a million other ideas in my head that are way more interesting than that um but that's just my opinion right i'm not saying i'm not saying 100 days of code is bad or that everyone that does it is stupid that's not what i said only that if you find something that's interesting to you i can guarantee not only will you do a better job with it but it won't feel like work because you'll feel like you're building something that helps you like i saved myself time with those two things i just described i did myself a favor and i just happen to learn something from it rather than just do a code challenge that gets thrown away but there's no value from that and the implication there is also that like the ways that the methods everyone else is using to learn a thing don't have to be the methods you use right yep just like on the we talked about the ccie journeys three completely different strategies one of which was total hermit isolation mode that's fine too you don't have to use the same methods as everyone else other people have strategies you know i have i have prescriptive study plans for certain tests that some people like you can do a little bit of picky choosy selection that's fine but some people like having their prescription just like my first ccie and that's fine too allowing people to choose the strategy that works for them and again the word works is doing you know kind of it's saying a lot because you know when i say something that works for you it's not pick what's easiest it's pick what's most effective yeah i think a lot of people choose the path of least resistance they might feel like they're getting work done but they're just checking you know modules off a list or something like that they're not actually studying i think everyone's done that i've done that yeah it's it's so easy to do that and it's easy to tune out especially when there's a way to track progress that way um so i've what i've recently started doing is when i'm watching courses i make sure to not check things and it sounds kind of weird but just mentally for me if i'm watching a video course and putting a check on it that makes you feel like you've accomplished something but i haven't accomplished a damn thing i'm sitting here watching a video i've done anything i don't deserve that checkmark so i don't i personally don't like to mark it as done and i realized i i realized that um marking it as done tells you where you left off and that's fine i just write down on a notepad where i left off and continue because i don't want to feel like i'm making progress because i'm actually not i don't make progress until i pass the test or i don't make progress until i write the white paper or whatever that's just that's that's that's more of a mental thing for me personally check marks mean success and i don't deserve check marks for watching a video from someone else it's just again my opinion on that um i don't judge people who do but for me i don't want to feel like you know again path of least resistance hey if i just plow through this course and check everything off i'll feel like i did something i mean maybe you did but those check marks are not an indication of you learning anything they're certainly not an indication that you are able to apply those skills that would come from doing a lab or applying it in some other way speaking of studying if i can plug your website again nick um i noticed that you have study plans actually published on there for certain exams and that's awesome i imagine that you get a lot of people asking you for study plans i've noticed that people will tend to message more visible people in network engineering or whatever like you know tech discipline that they're interested in and just say hey can you teach me how to like get this exam or give me study materials or whatever and it's kind of like it can be an annoying thing if you get those messages a lot um but i think it's great you know i don't have study plans you know out there i just like do whatever i can but for you to have something out there like hey just go to my website here it is for anybody listening if you want to know what you know nick i assume how he recommends studying or at least how you you know have used study plans they're up there on his website they're already there so yeah again those are all those are all very strategic you know if you look at those plans there's you know my own pluralsight courses peppered in with a bunch of other stuff they're all very low cost for a reason basically pluralsight's the only thing you have to have all the other things are either free or part of it so rather than make you go and spend 500 on books you should spend 30 bucks a month instead and get through it in a month or two so very cheap um they all tie in with the strategy they tie in other resources they tie in some of my other free products the the idea between them is like some people like guided learning i like got it i mean who doesn't it can be really useful to not have guided learning is really difficult sometimes so by having those plans it enables it helps enable more people to earn the certifications because there are a lot of people who i think are technically skilled and motivated who just need to be led in the right direction and that's that's easily done with a plan that's that you know like the ones i have like for me to you know yes it took some time to put the plans together record it and do the video but that's nowhere near the time it's going to take someone else to actually execute the plan and learn and do all the work so it's not like the people following the plan are lazy far from it they just needed some guidance on what to do and in what sequence from someone who had already walked that path and that's what the plan is for as someone who has a lot of trouble being structured in my studying thank you for doing that i i think that's one thing that we've seen in in this industry right if you look over the past 10 years we've gone from a place was that that was i i can't find any content to learn how to do name anything right and now we're at a point where there's so much content it can be overwhelming and you don't know where to start so i i certainly appreciate the study plans that you put out as i know many others have so um it's it is nice to have a learning path and and to be guided yeah i mean there's there's been a huge explosion of it and i mean that the problem is that the word content means anything yeah i mean anyone anyone who produces anything is a content creator right now i'm not i'm not a you know i'm not a gatekeeper on the term content creator i'm not i'm not over here saying that unless you do xyz you don't get to call yourself that that's not you know that's not what i'm saying it's only that it can be really hard to know what you're going after like again network chuck great example when you go to network chuck you know you're getting a very specific thing like mcdonald's and i'm not saying network truck is like mcdonald's i'm just saying like you know you go to mcdonald's no matter where you are in the world with you know a few you know cultural differences you're gonna get the same same experience right and that's right that's the power of branding and when you have that brand and people know when they need a certain very specific thing whether it's a technically technically specific thing so if i need kubernetes i know where to go nigel poulton um you know if i need a terraform where do i go ned bellevants you know like i just know those things because those are people i trust on those technologies that have courses on pluralsight that are great um but when it you know but sometimes it's not just a point technology but it's rather who can who can give me you know like you know in my case you know the free resources the study plans the white papers like i do that but it could also be more of how can i get you know career guidance or resume reviews like those are things i don't do other people do those things and other people will again comes back to who's the first person you think of for those things so if i said if all you wanted your resume was reviewed who would you go to you know you don't have to answer it but just in your mind think about that and if all three of you thought of the same person that person is doing great yeah i doubt that you did but if you did that would you know that would have been you know that would be complete success for that one person or at least a very good indication of it and you know when lots of people have content everyone everyone's try striving to to be recognized somehow but that recognition has to be it has to be consistent with your overall brand it has to be authentic i said i've said it a million times doesn't necessarily mean you have to be niche you know you don't only have to be really good at one thing you can be broad but you also have to be uh you also have to be good enough at what you do and consistent enough if you want to have if you want to have very wide breadth you need to be consistent with that and it needs to be part of your overall brand rather than just throwing punches in the dark hoping something lands and hoping someone notices you i mean there's a name for that it's called ship posting but you know there's uh being able to do a better job of all right yeah here we go no no no shots fired no i think i think i've i think i've said it a couple i've said it enough now that where people are kind of getting the point is you want to be you want to be someone that you know yes you're absolutely right you know lexi said you know people come to me asking for study plans all the time um you you know most of the time i'm able to point them to something that i have often times they'll give me requests they'll say hey i see you have a study plan for x and y can you give me one for z the answer is usually no because i'm not just going to make a study plan i will never make study plans on technologies that i'm not really good at i think that's just unfair personally not only would i never trust anyone who does that but i think it would it would cheapen my personal brand because you know people ask me hey what about data centers like i'm not a dc i'm not a data center guy like i'm okay with it but there's no world in which i would ever train data center stuff like unless i was like real unless i like spent like a year on it and nothing else i just wouldn't do that it would not it would not be fair to me or the viewers or anyone else so there's you have to be realistic about what people view you as and not just blindly giving what people giving people what they want because if i made a data center study plan it would almost certainly be worse than everything else now what does that say about me and how are people going to view the rest of my content because people who only see that data center plan are going to judge everything else i do based on that one experience and that's completely valid like i i am not complaining about being judged for my words or my actions that's how i want to be judged right those are those are the things that should govern how people view me so i want to make sure that if those are the if i want to be judged based on those things then those things need to be absolutely perfect by my standards because if they're not you know first impressions matter and data center people don't tend to follow me because i don't talk about that but if i publish the data center plan tomorrow a bunch of new data center people who don't know me are going to see it they're going to be like this is not this is okay but not great and they're going to be like i'm not gonna nick russo is not the first guy in my mind when i think about it training anymore so now that's not helpful that's not helpful for anyone my first impressions on a bunch of people who otherwise didn't have an opinion of me now may have a somewhat negative one you're talking about having integrity with the content that you post absolutely yeah i'm not gonna start i'm not gonna start telling people how to learn aci like i barely know it myself so ah nick this has been such a fun conversation i hate to i hate to wrap it up but i think we're headed in that direction um in part it's been a fun conversation because we've gotten some great questions from our patreon uh folks watching the live stream tonight if you're interested in being a patreon supporter of the art of network engineering you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge let me thank all of our patreons for their support of what we do here nick where can people find you if they want to continue to follow you after they're done listening to this podcast yep so my website is really easy it's njrusmc.net you'll know it's mine because it's just like a 1994 html page super basic um you can find me on twitter nickrusso42518 if you can't remember that just go to the website click on the about page and then you'll have links to my twitter my linkedin and my github and also a link that you can click to send me an email so really easy to contact me on on all those different networks fantastic we will put a link to your website and your twitter handle in our show notes for this episode so you can go back to your podcatchers scroll down to the bottom to the show notes and tap follow nick right away nick thank you so much for your time this evening this has been such a fun conversation thank you for joining us thank you and uh we'll definitely have you back for a future episode so we can talk a little bit deeper about the technologies you do specialize in yeah absolutely excellent all right well thank you so much everybody uh and we'll see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering podcast 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