this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers introducing the a1 summer vacation series this completely fictitious vacation package takes you across the usa to meet each and every art of network engineering co-host start in sunny california and catch a padres game with aaron next be sure to pack flip-flops snow boots a raincoat and a hoodie as you might need all of them within a 24-hour time span because you're heading to nebraska have you ever seen a snow tornado you might get to after the corn feast you'll head south to the great state of tennessee for a grand old time of camping and off-roading with dan heck you might even get to go on a wedding photography ride along when the wedding's over jump on one of those airplane jawns because you're heading around the philly area plenty of pool time and barbecue to be had with pit master andy just please mind the lawn finally you'll get to make your way to no blinky blinky land itself for a luxurious stay in vermont the maple syrup flows by the keg and you might get to see a gaggle of mooses mooses mooch nice moosai anyway you'll have a great time this entire trip could be all yours if it was actually real anyway welcome to the art of network engineering i you know tim when you describe nebraska i thought you were also talking about vermont so yeah i thought you were talking about tennessee too it is interchangeable i suppose but on july 4th it was colder than it was on christmas in 2020 what yeah on christmas it was 65 degrees and on july 4th this past week it was 63. welcome to summer 63 i am aj murray at no blinky blinky that was tim burtino at tim burtino tim how are you doing pretty good i am thanks for on vacation this week trying not to look at email too much and uh so far it's going well excellent excellent i too am on vacation this week right on i i love it because i am getting two or three phone calls every day from the same guy i i love him let me let me preface that i love him i work with him he's a great guy must be a listener and he starts every phone call with hey man i know you're on vacation but i hope you're having a good time is it is it taylor no no it's not okay taylor knows better no i'm just kidding you guys have heard of boundaries right tim's not checking his email too much on vacation aj's actively taking work calls on vacation well i feel bad because you should make this window that's happening tonight that you know i'm not around for that i feel like i probably should be around for but i'm not gonna be around for it because one i'm on vacation and two i'm recording a podcast so not gonna do it and my excuse is that i've never learned how to be zen andy there's only one thing the definition of vacation is not working speaking of zandy he is at andy laptop permit ip andy andy andy how are you sir hey i'm good man i was in the pool today the water was the water oh i forgot to tell you when i was at the beach last weekend these planes fly by with the messages you know like drink this beer or do that thing oh yeah and i swear one of them said something about something something wooder w-o-o-d-e-r it was gone before i could get my phone to take a picture but i'm like i got to show the guys they teased me about water yeah anyway i was in the pool today it was 92 degrees i threw a whole bucket of ice in thinking it would help did not i didn't no know that explains that picture yeah but i'm good man sure enjoying things got a maintenance winner tonight all good excellent oh well we shout dot hole we don't want ems your maintenance window uh we got time dan howdy pack it dan howdy howdy how's it going pretty good and you sir i'm i'm doing well today was a good day i got some uh aci stuff knocked out today tell me tell me tell me yeah i love you i was just contracts nothing nothing special but got it i had quite a few of them knocked out so nice that's always fun a contract andy is like does it push policy or something like what what is it yes so ci contract do it's kind of like their version of acls right like ah this epg can talk to this cpg over whatever filter you allow it so all i know is epg from michelin so i'm trying to fill in some more epg is endpoint group yeah yeah no i got that one i just think oh okay so all right cool it's an acl i think we'll do an aci episode sometime oh that'd be fun yeah well we do have a guest this evening we got some intro to get rid of uh get uh get through first before we introduce our guests so uh stan stand by guest stand by i know you're itching to talk i can tell um no wins this week i know i i think i think it's a holiday week let's hear a goat scream for relaxation the goat is sad and uh celebrating the birth of america go ahead can we do a goat scream for no wins i think relaxing and america's birthday is it's good scream worthy yeah that's a i feel better thank you i feel better i always do well i i know everybody's working hard on stuff and no doubt we'll see that thread uh fire right back up i'm sure everybody was relaxing and enjoying hopefully hopefully most of y'all got a nice long weekend and i know i did i i too as i said earlier i'm on vacation so i i'm not looking forward to going back um this episode of art of network engineering is brought to you by you our listeners uh we had a fantastic response to our merch store last month um so that was very exciting thank you thank you thank you we will have some very exciting giveaways coming soon because of all the purchasing that you all did for us we are rapidly approaching our 100 000 download mark uh as of this morning we broke 97 000 downloads we are averaging 500 downloads a day thanks to everybody listening streaming downloading the podcast uh and so i have no doubt that by the time this episode airs uh next wednesday that we will probably have hit the 100 000 download mark by then which is just mind-blowing uh and it will be before our one-year anniversary is that when i get up my tesla no no all right just i don't know what number we gotta hit for the tesla folks but keep downloading but i will add another zero to your paycheck thank you so many so many zeros so it'll be seven figures and there's a decimal point in there i'll let you figure out where i put the decimal point oh my gosh but i digress anyway uh thank you so much for your support uh please continue to uh support download listen and give us feedback we we take the feedback uh and we we put it right back into the show we love hearing from you guys so tweet us dm us slide into our dms as the young kids say uh because andy slides across his screen and yeah well the open gear giveaway is coming up too so yes i expect that year to be finished any minute now and as soon as it is we will start the giveaway trust me those are going to be exciting all right so i am super excited to introduce our guest this evening he is a huge contributor to our community uh we've seen some pretty amazing and exciting things come from him this year and so i can't wait to hear about the juicy details uh please welcome robin cannella robin thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you guys for having me it's really exciting to be on here we are excited to have you uh he is at robin canelo on twitter if you're not following him you should we will have all of his socials in the show notes so look for those there and make sure you subscribe to them uh robin let's let's start in the here and now what do you what do you do now what are you up to these days these days okay but these days i'm actually working as a cyber security engineer that's a sexy title yeah yeah something i think that's a highly sought after title sounds kind of dirty before i got hired my hiring manager he asked what do you want your title to be i'm like uh cyber security engineer heck yeah robin that's cool and everything but i feel like you could have shot a little aimed a little bit higher there i was just gonna say cyber security architect i'm surprised you didn't sneak batman in there somewhere right nice so that's what you're doing now what did you come from the right uh previously before i did cyber security i was a voice engineer no that seems like a big leap yeah how did how did that transition happen i know it is a big leap it's completely different completely different arena when i compare voice engineer to cyber security engineer and actually the way it happened was my mentor um so i got a mentor last year first time i ever had a mentor how did you get the mentor because i still don't have one and i'm trying to figure out how to get one so someone that i work with i just reached out to him and i said hey i do you do mentorship would you mind being my mentor and he said yeah somebody look up to yeah yeah someone i looked up to that's awesome yeah it was actually my wife had a mentor for a long time and i asked like what's that like like what's it like to have a mentor and like that must be pretty cool someone you can talk to about your career um so i had a mentor and then through the conversations i had with my mentor we spoke like once a month he he actually reached out to me through conversation and he offered me the opportunity you know he he uh he knew it understood right i didn't have all the skills needed for cyber security but he knew i that i was a very passionate person about technology and i was willing to make effort to learn so he said the first person you thought of was me wait who was this your mentor offered you the position yeah damn i need a mentor so he actually got a position as a sizzle right deep information security officer so huh so now was he in security when you were in uh collaboration yeah yeah he was in cyber security okay two different companies correct so we actually worked at the same company for a while and then he worked for you know he started working for a separate company and he reached out so he was your mentor at the same company he moved on yeah and then he pulled you with him yeah and the way it happened too is that you know i was kind of reaching the end of my the road i guess you can say for collaboration i was kind of getting tired of it i wanted to do something else so i actually just started applying and you know i told him this i told him i started applying for other positions and eventually you know he came back to me and he said hey by the way i know you're are you still looking i was like yeah like oh i got this great opportunity for you if you want it that's how it happened wow so i mean before we get deep into the the security aspect of it i kind of want to go back further what got you into collaboration was collaboration your uh your first foray into it or was there something before that i guess maybe we can kind of define what collaboration was for you what your functions were in that position yeah sure so i actually i kind of just landed on my plate not something i chose just something i was yeah i hear that from most people in collaboration like it sounds like nobody chooses collaboration it just you know they got elected to be the collab person and here we are yeah so i got my my intro to itf i was actually not i was doing retail before i t and i also did uh utility locating i don't know if you guys know what that is yeah they mark the utilities yeah exactly that's what i was doing i did that for a couple years so so like dig safe is that like a thing is that we're talking about pa one call they call it something different i think in vermont they call it dig safe so like if you're going to do some excavating building or something like that you call 800 number and they show up and they mark out the utilities yep correctly yeah do they give you two little rods and you like walk around and try to find water lines are just visual really i didn't know that until i did it water and sewer you just look at the other water line and you just mark a line straight there because they don't curve they just go straight ah yeah yeah i guess that makes sense interesting yeah yeah it was interesting so i did that for a couple years um you know i worked at retail stores toys r us um hold on hold on how do you locate the different things in the ground do they have like what i like so i have gas electric water coming in here so or so like all right i get the the water you just follow and sewer follows that like how do you find gas and electric is it one of those locator joins what's the difference between gas and electric with the locator jones are they two different john's no same thing so electric it just you know electric naturally produces energy so actually what you do is with your transmitter you connect to the power or the power source right and then you just kind of just trace it with gas gas is untraceable so you need actually a tracer wire you plug into the trace wire and it's attached to the pvc pipe and then you just follow it like that so when they install a gas line they put a tracer wire for this yeah okay cool and if it's broken you got no way of tracing it you just you just spray the red line and hope for the best you have you have depending on some manufacturers you have like their plats you can kind of see where it is but those are not 100 reliable you know so i did that for a while and then a buddy of mine he did i.t and he knew i was inside he was like the family id person family nurse everybody's computer right yeah yeah family thanksgiving you don't look forward to it because everybody's oh robin oh i got this pop-up my phone this thing still isn't working can you help me i got a new phone can you set my email up on there i got this new router how do i hook it up plug it in anyways so i was a family i.t guy um and it stems back from like growing up in high school i was a big pc gamer i was in irc chats you know i built my own computer so then i got to learn how to use computers build computers and a buddy of mine was like why don't you apply for a job doing this and i'm like really people get paid to do this doing what building pcs just like troubleshooting pcs okay and i was like okay i'll try i put my resume out there i kind of you know spruced it up a little bit you know kind of exaggerated a little bit the stuff that i put on that i knew how to do you know i i knew how to do it but you know i didn't have any like professional experience so did you say you like worked in it at toys r us is that right i tried to shoot people's computers all the time but i got a call from like a you know like a temp agency and i actually got a position as a contractor for a really large government contractor in virginia doing doing what what was that pc imaging okay yeah just like the first pc job you were talking about yeah i worked at a pc depot i don't want to glance over that gem that you dropped though that you hadn't been paid professionally to do things that you you knew how to do and you'd done for free for people yeah and they're valuable skills but so i i think there's you know i think that's a good little tip for people who don't have the experience and are trying to get in you know not necessarily lying or embellishing i don't know what the right word is but if you have the skill you know how to do it you've done it for free for 20 or 30 people i'm guessing you wrote it up that it was an actual job somehow right like yeah but i also did volunteer i volunteered at my church right i helped with all things electronic so i got involved in like av stuff computer stuff so i helped build up my my knowledge and confidence and you know when i got the interview and i explained what i knew you know they really they were impressed and they offered me a position awesome you know i think that's some underrated avenues there right like the volunteer thing like everybody's a part of some sort of social organization via the church or something like that they always need tech assistance jump in and help out that's experience the contract work you know like when you're young and you're looking for experience and you don't have a family to support you don't have other stuff going on in your life taking contract work is a very feasible way to get some good experience you know there's albeit some more risk in there maybe it's not like a long-term position but it gets you the experience you need to get your foot in the door somewhere else for that longer term position um and so i think those are really great nuggets of of information and then of course the slight embellishing of your your resume to highlight your experience but you have the skills right it's just nobody's got the skills you can talk the experience and you can back it up i think that's really yeah i don't think it's falsifying anything which wouldn't be right you know it's i know how to do this stuff and then you get in front of them and you show them you know that great guy notice what he's doing bring him in i didn't mean to sidetrack you robin so you started that that pc gig yeah so yeah i did that for it was a it was a rough time though because i was so stressed because my contract was only for one month and i was like you know what i'm gonna take it better than what i'm doing now yeah but luckily they kept extending it and eventually they gave him a full-time position wow okay nice what was your thought going into that i'm gonna take the the one month contract and as soon as i get that i'm gonna start looking for something else or did you wait until the contract was over before you really started looking for the next step so i was not actively looking um the person i met because as a contractor you have the contracting company and then you have the company that you're doing the work for right so i actually met both managers where i interview with both managers and they both really like me and the manager of the actual company right not the contracting company he said i'm gonna try whatever i can to get you on board so with that being said i kind of like okay i don't have to put too much stress into looking for another job as long as i do a good job that's all that matters and i did you know i worked as hard as i could i learned as much as i could i remember at that time it was just imaging pcs i don't know if any of you have any experience imaging pcs yep that's all we did all day just image pcs use pcs new pcs and i think on average everyone did around eight to 12. so when i came i was like you know what i need to raise the bar i was doing like 12 to 16. uh-huh so just for listeners who don't know what imaging is is that like loading the operating system and applications and stuff but it's it's just all one image right you're not doing like one program at a time yeah so how we did it at that time was we had a little usb with a custom configuration for windows and it was essentially hard in the system right with disabled stuff enable stuff like features and stuff like that and it would make it so it's a baseline that that company approves as a government contract that you really had to follow a lot of like government restrictions does this government work it was this government contract there so they were involved heavily involved with the with the government right he's going to government employees or these like retailers okay our consultants i work with the government well you know we have compliance that we had to follow in so it was really neat i mean at that time i it would take us maybe two three hours to image pcs but we had huge stations so i can put like eight machines at a time and image them all it was pretty cool i learned a lot of things like iron mountain we had complete like hard drive backups which i haven't seen until since then like i've never seen companies really do a hard drive backup i'm sure they do but nowadays most people just back up their files right like onedrive or sharepoint or whatever these are hard drives they were completely backed up and you can just restore it it was so simple like just a mirror image somewhere right yeah okay pretty neat stuff so yeah that's where i started and then from there i just kind of learned and i moved on to a different company doing desktop support and eventually i be um so i ended up happening how i ended up in collaboration was uh this company that i worked for had about 200 employees give or take in the office but then they made a they sold a portion of the company to a much larger is a fintech company they sold it to a larger fintech which i believe andy works for um and then we had 40 employees left so they were like hey we don't need two desktop guys anymore so we're eliminating your position but we're offering you this position which is like a conference systems engineer or whatever mainly doing like webex oh yeah i became the webex guy and then from there they were like hey it doesn't make sense for you to be in the desktop team so let's move you into the network team to join the other voice engineers but at that time they did everything so they did networking they did servers security collaboration it was just one big team that did it all and once once i joined the team they were like hey you should learn networking you should learn servers you should learn this that's how i got my start was that exciting or did that feel like a burden it was actually really exciting the reason why is because as i was the desktop engineer the sub support technician and i worked with like some of the network engineers some of the architects these guys were just i mean my perspective they were genius they were really smart people and i don't know just it just it was really inspiring whenever they would get stuff done you weren't intimidated at all okay so and they told me what to do like hey if you really want to learn networking here click buy a couple routers buy a couple switches or we can send you some if we have some and you know learn about the ccna that's what you want to go for so this is why you were in desktop support and they were trying to groom you for some networking stuff coming up and is that because you expressed interest in networking yep okay yeah so i expressed interest and then one of the architects at the company he really likes that when people express interest he is willing to help them to succeed and you know that's really i don't know if it's difficult to find but i felt like it's very difficult to find someone that is willing to help you at that level um so any question i had any little question i had i would ask him and he would help me are you the question guy you're like the passionate question guy like does everything see i i think at least from a lot of people that i know if you find somebody like that you want to help them they kind of like when i find someone they remind me of me that you know it's just like oh my god what's going on this is amazing i wanna you know teach me teach me that excites me like that's great you're in an environment that wanted to foster that and elaborate and stuff so so let's put some time on this like how how long is it now from when you first started doing that that um imaging contract to to where we are right now is that like a year a couple of years six months let's see i started desktop support maybe 10 years ago 11 years ago yeah and i did desktop sport for a total of like five years so five years in that's that's when you switch to being the webex guy yeah so did you have any like education background or were you working on any other certs before then or during that time this is gonna sound kind of silly but i had no idea about this whole certification stuff sure no idea for a long period of time a lot of people don't it's it's interesting yeah i would just hear the names right come to i didn't even know who cisco was when i first started working now people mentioned cisco i'm like who's cisco what's come to ya so for a long period of time i didn't have any like i guess any kind of structure like oh i should study this and this i was just kind of like just do whatever i can on a day-to-day basis to eventually get paid yeah so from an education standpoint you've gotten most of your training is is on the job up to this point yeah okay and the reason i wanted to highlight that is that we we've talked about this multiple times and it's you know the the college path isn't the only path to to get into the i.t industry there's there's multiple ways at it i mean you had made it as far as you had without any of that you know post-secondary education so yeah i just wanted to highlight that yeah it was something i uh when i would compare myself with my peers i'm like man i'm the only one that only has a high school diploma everyone else has a bachelor's and you know at one point i'm just like maybe i'm not good enough but then i'm like oh well i'm here so there you go you don't you don't need a bachelor's to do this job nice have you never had imposter syndrome are you one of those that's guys daily thing yeah all right nah imposter syndrome is something i think i think we'll never escape but for me personally i don't think i ever will because i'm sure there's someone out there knows more than me yeah but you got to be confident in your ability to do stuff so yeah then after five years i did collaboration stuff mainly webex um and then i kind of did a little desktop support here and there but then once they moved me to the networking team they were like all right you need to learn more than just webex and i was like okay cool what else am i gonna learn like okay you need to learn the ucm right physical unified communication event you need to learn unity right cisco unity and at that time we use uccx right the unified contact center contact center and well we had e sorry enterprise edition um we had i i am in present and we had expressways they were like you gotta learn all this stuff and i'm like great what version were you when i first joined yeah 11 is 11.5 oh okay all right i i did that stuff i i got brought in on and like yourself i didn't like choose it i was chosen for it my first help desk job that was like the first big project that i got to be a part of and we were going from like a traditional digital pbx system to to voice over ip and we were implementing the whole you know unified communication suite so like you said call manager unity cupsy or i'm in presence we didn't do contact center um and it was all version seven which was like a huge a huge facelift a very big change over over some of the previous versions so that's i got my start on seven so i i'm picking up what you're throwing down and i i kind of miss it but i kind of don't yeah so that that was and then on top of that they also involved me in networking so they were like oh you have to learn as we were one team my main focus was collaboration but i also had to learn networking i also had to learn like security like asdas and stuff like that okay um but it was just a small percentage it was mainly focused on collaboration and eventually the company decided executive leadership decided it doesn't make sense to keep all these groups together so they actually split all the groups into their own separate groups and they like oh you know most about collaborations that you go here that's what ended up happening so did you get siloed at that point yeah what ended up happening is a lot of people were unhappy with the decision and we lost a lot of architects oh wow yeah a lot of the architects left because they like the whole cohesive unit because they can all work together um but once the split happened you know politics involved and yeah we lost some good architects and a lot of them went on to like cisco and i mean at the end it was better for them was that a relief for you personally to be able to focus on collaboration or did you not like being taken away from the other stuff you were learning i didn't like it at all yeah it was cool you know you get to learn like these fear like that's on the server side right and on the networking side i was able to touch like a lot of different technologies and you know they just implemented aci when i was there it was you know it was interesting i didn't know what it was at all i mean even to this day i still really know it i mean i know what it does from a high level perspective but it was just cool stuff and i was like man i get to play with this stuff dream was shattered so how far back did you decide that it was potentially time for a change and and how specifically did you land on security i know you talked about having the mentor and and getting the offer to do that did you have any other aspirations for security or did it just kind of happen naturally like that i did i mean i always thought the concept of security hacking right i always thought that was cool who doesn't right who doesn't think is cool right right um so actually i started with this new company in april but i was actually interviewing with a var a value-added reseller since january i know it's a long stretch back i had like six interviews oh wow until april right so this whole time i'm making this decision you know i'm gonna go with this var for network security right focusing on cisco and palo alto and i was like yeah i'm gonna make this transition eventually right when that hap when that hiring phase opens up because they they didn't open until like april but then in april my mentor reached out to me and i'm like oh so i can do network security or cyber security and i chose cyber security what's the difference i think network security is more focused on like the engineering perspective like deploying appliances you know and i think cyber security is more like the info stack more like policy management stuff like that i would say that that's my understanding from the difference of the two no that makes sense that definition yeah that makes sense when you dissect it like that yeah it was i gotta say it was a tough decision though because i'm like man i want to work for a bar like that's cool you get to see stuff new stuff all the time then i hear stories from other people that work at bars and they're like i hate it travel dealing with customers and i'm like okay i really gotta think about this do i wanna deal with customers and travel all the time or do i know do i want to have a comfy position at home and i have to deal with people and you can get into this you can answer as much of this as you want robin but this wasn't if i remember right this wasn't just a new position for you this was a new position for the company you were going into right they didn't have anybody like you before correct yeah they they didn't have essentially they didn't really have a infrastructure infosec team and that wasn't scary for you at all no actually opportunities excited me i'm like i get to build stuff from scratch but you have no infosec background or skills right not at all actually wait wait wait wait wait wait wait how does it go how does it come here we go how does a company decide we're gonna bring in an infosec guy and by the way he has no experience no skills but he's gonna we're gonna create this position for this guy his mentor was the hiring manager it was like somebody trusted right like they knew that robin was convinced by not having like you know the the experience on paper or whatever they knew he was very capable of you know dealing he knew i was easy going and i would be willing to learn yeah he didn't want to deal with someone that may have had all the knowledge but we're not willing to change their ways or maybe they come with a methodology of a large company and they're like no this is the way it has to be you know i've heard that a lot robin a lot of my the job that i have now the guy brought me on he's like listen i've hired some real you know what and you know they know everything but they're super abrasive and nobody wants to be around them so yeah you find like you said an easy going guy with a good personality he's a go-getter he wants to learn you know somebody you can groom that you like as opposed to the guy with all the skills you just want to punch in the face yeah i've heard that a lot something to be said for the soft skills and that personality type right yeah you're easy to work with and a go-getter and people remember that too so you know the soft skills supersede i would say yeah you can have all the talent in the world but you're a jerk to work with you know it's hard to recommend i i think that the i.t network engineering any any sort of the verticals in it like there's no possible way that you could know everything so when you get to a person that acts like they do that's not fun to be around you know because they're they're not open-minded enough to understand like there's still more to learn there's new stuff coming out all the time there's challenges before them you know and so it just makes that whole the whole relationship abrasive from the get-go the problem with those people and what they do to the culture is they get mad at you for not knowing everything they know and that's a really difficult environment to work yep at least that's been my experience sorry bro i don't know everything you do my bad like i'm just because i'm quite i'm question guy right i want to ask questions i want to make sure i don't break stuff how does this thing work and guys like what do you mean you don't know like all right this is the conversation we're having now buddy here we go here we go yeah so i don't want to gloss over this uh because i think it's a pretty big thing you're doing but you're spending quite a bit of time on uh something else going on in your life do you want to get into that around education yeah so i actually went back to college you go which is very awesome i actually started at wgu western governors university let's start with 2021 is the year of robin i looked at your blog i'm following you on discord on the socials like you really i was just taking notes you know 2021 a new new me right i mean you got a blog post about it so tell us about 2021 all the things i mean there's more than just college what have you done what is this new me what's going on because it's really it's been sparked the uh the decision for new me let's see okay let's start at the beginning of the year actually my wife and i we were trying to decide you know like do we want to continue 2020 sucked everybody knows that yeah and being home like i just felt like i became a different person yep so like i got lazy and i was just like very irritable you know having to stay home see the same people watching do the same routine day after day and i was like you know i'm really tired and i really don't want to continue to live this type of lifestyle i know the circumstances happen right but i really felt like i learned a lot about myself during those during 2020 and i decided you know 2021 i wanted to be different you know i want to go out and explore and i want to just you know just change like my personality not my personality but just change my lifestyle and yeah 2021 we made a big decision we actually decided to sell our house in virginia which you know we bought it brand new we constructed it from the ground up right we picked all the little nooks and crannies right it was one of those right pre-built home you picked the backsplash in the kitchen and everything yeah backsplash the flooring right what type of like what type of uh i guess protection you want like under the carpet how thick you want it like all these things we picked right and essentially it was like our dream home right yeah um but then you know we decided it was a pretty large house just me and my wife and our dog like um 4 500 square feet including the basement big group um yeah including the finished basement because that was the unfinished part and it was nice comfortable but at the same time like we just both weren't very happy and it was not only you know the house and stuff but also like some relationships got strained as well and we were like you know what we should just go and try something new like what's holding us back we both work remotely and um in october of 2020 we actually just came to phoenix just to kind of see what it's like right and we fell in love why phoenix how did you wind up in phoenix did you heard about it did you just was just random like let's try this out heard about it but also it's kind of like go away from the colder climate and somewhere nice and warm really warm but it's a dry heat exactly yeah it's still hot tell you that much that's about uh that joke right uh so yeah we just decided we sold our home we post we put it up on zillow or whatever you know we had a realtor and seven days we got an offer yeah wow it was awesome you know we sold our house in seven days did you have a place in phoenix to go yeah we we actually just picked an apartment online okay cool like crazy yeah well we can see it in person and that looks like a good place and i'm guessing your wife had a similar experience with you in 2020 right it was rough strained it was like she you guys were in that same place mentally like we need we need a fresh start here yeah gain weight like it was just it was bad and we just decided you know what let's just sell our house like what's is the house really holding us back did you have family down there because it's the only reason i live where i live it's because i got family around here that's it where in arizona well no like did you have family in virginia that you left um well my brother lived there but he just moved to west virginia right right for another job so technically i didn't really have anyone left yeah i mean that makes it easier right like yeah you're not leaving your peeps so we moved across country uh we drove across country wow we we sold almost all of our stuff so we had just one trailer and the truck bed full of stuff and we drove across country we took our time right it took us like five days to drive and how was that it was rough oh okay i remember you had an incident with one of your labradors now wait was she supposed to drive he's scared because of the trailer okay yeah okay i get it yeah because it does feel a little different right when you're driving with the full trailer you can feel it pulling the truck listen if i was her i would have used the same excuse robin you got this buddy and we did have an incident like aj was about to say uh we were parked at a hotel in tennessee by the way so someone actually broke into my truck bed cover it's like a it was a stop cover it has rails but someone pulled out a router right i had a router there luckily what's this hey bubba what's this can we can we make whiskey with this thing they threw it in the ditch oh yeah they're like so you know what it did i had no idea so i was walking my dog and we kind of went to the ditch and i was like oh look that's interesting there's a router the 2921 router you know wasted huge wait that's my router but at that time i was like oh this is so hilarious someone else what a small world there's a router in the ditch oh i could add that to my lab wait a minute oh yeah walk back inside my wife's like all right let me go back to the car and she calls me and she's like did you even check the truck i'm like yeah everything's fine she's like no it's not i'm like what are you talking about i come back i see the gash and i'm like oh that's my router so yeah then i had to drive to oklahoma to get a new truck bed cover i had to be there within like oh the next day 8 a.m or something please tell me you got a hard top this time it's it's it has like aluminum rails yeah yeah and it rolls so it's like a flat profile but it's really really difficult to get through nice did they get anything else besides the router or was that uh the only loss that was it that's all dan had time to grab my hands it's probably sitting right behind him it took a beating though like i guess they dropped it but i was like i think nothing happened to just the face cover came off a little bit it's a 2921 man you can beat the crap out of those things so i drove across country um got a new job got my motorcycle license something i've been wanting to do that's pretty dope um i really got into fitness so actually i lost like i think so far maybe 30 pounds wow all right dude yeah it's a huge huge difference um sorry i i exercised i kind of slowed down a little bit uh but i exercise about four to five days a week now how do you feel i feel great yeah i don't exercise in the morning um and the reason why is because i work east coast hours so get up around five five thirty i usually log in by six i'm off of work by like few o'clock so then right after work i go to the gym okay and yeah it's so let's see what else did i do this year what's up with the books started school school oh the books that's right yeah that's right i'm on my 15th book right now you made it so you made a what was your post you wanted to read 30 books 30 books yeah this year wow exactly what why just just like i like to read and this is part of my reinvention of myself so so what's on robin's book list is it like fiction nonfiction cert guys what are we reading so how do we include cert guides right there they're not really um torture devices fiction non-fiction um like self-help book stuff like that um right now i'm reading i'm finishing up the barack obama promised land oh nice do you have a favorite of the first 15 one that stands out or they're all pretty great so far um why we sleep is really interesting um that really also changed my perspective on sleep so i will always skim on sleep like five six hours and i'm like oh i'm good yeah i read this book and i'm like i'm not good yeah i need to sleep now seven hours now were you were you supplementing with caffeine when you were doing the five six hours yeah yeah yeah like 24 or 32 ounce caffeine a day um i do drink it black no cream or sugar but still that doesn't help right are you drinking less caffeine now that you're sleeping well and exercising yeah i'm drinking a lot more water yeah i kind of tracked my water intake yep so it feels so much different i mean i still drink coffee but just not as much like 12 ounce maybe you don't need it to survive through your day because you're exhausted yeah so yeah i started doing all these challenges and i'm like you know i'm gonna just change and just everything that i've wanted to do or things that in the past were like oh i can't do this i'm like no i can do this so little by little i've just been adding stuff as i go along college is part of that too right yeah it is i started may 1st and uh right now i think you need 120 credits to graduate i have almost 60 in two months whoa you got 60 credits in two months yeah so wgu is competent based so if you already know the material just go and take the final you don't have to like sit through the whole class now you can sit through the classes if you need to but if you don't you can test out yeah if you want yeah and like the last course i passed was the so i had two courses for the 8 plus uh one thousand one one thousand two only reason i took it um but it took me five days to do both so kind of just i already knew the material because of my desktop support days so it sounds like your 2021 is much better than your 2020 and all the changes that you've made i mean you feel better you're sleeping better you look better your health is better yeah right yep i also grew a beard that's something different yeah as dan rubs dan's still working excellent so talk to me later pardon uh pardon my attention span if you already went over this but did you make that move before the new job was on the table okay so you were still working with the same company you were already working remote so it was cool wherever you lived and then you got to arizona and that's when the conversation with the mentor started about the the career change okay yeah yeah it was uh yeah we moved to arizona just to move it wasn't like that wasn't for the job yeah it wasn't for the job or anything so what was the driving force in getting the bachelor's degree uh i guess it's something i've seen a lot of other people have and actually my me and my i have two older two older brothers and our parents immigrated from the dominican republic so we're first generation americans i guess you can say um awesome so my parents don't have like college degrees either so i kind of felt like maybe i should be the first one lo and behold my oldest brother is getting his bachelors too that's awesome all right so are you guys like racing right now a little bit i'll be honest i'm pretty competitive so i'm like i'm gonna get it before you well yeah you're getting a bachelor's degree in like six months dude that's crazy i won't tell you how many years and how much money it took me to get that bachelor's robin you're killing it same yeah so what's what's really cool about wgu is that you just pay flat fee for six months and you can take as many classes as you want okay pretty different any new hobbies um not not really have you been have you been taking any pictures of anything oh that's true i forgot i'm on your blog it's all right i've been i've been taking pictures in maybe two weeks now i like what you've been doing though man you've come a long way in a short period you know dan's dan's a professional guy i dabble i'm you know amateur but i really like you've come you've come along man your images are looking really nice yeah i try i've been reading i just like i got this photography course it was like 10 bucks it came with the book and i'm like oh well there's some good tips and yeah i've been reading a little bit about the book you know photography and enjoying it yeah yeah just kind of getting it it's just awesome to capture those moments that's what i feel like a little time machine yeah you're freezing time it's it's super cool i know that she's not on the show and all but i just want to ask like has has the move and everything you just talked about you know your wife's probably on a similar journey right like she's in a new place and doing new things and is she kind of she there with you you guys are both having a better year than last year yeah she's like man you changed so much like i should only be getting better not worse yeah i get older right get better with age thank you guys look at that space it's like a fine wine yeah i don't know what you're talking about you wouldn't young buck i mean technically i'm getting older though andy but but robin she's she's doing good and flourishing and yeah and that's one of the things too that it helped um you know for me i think the number one thing in the relationship which i feel like i lack a lot is communication my wife loves to communicate so she stresses that a lot so i'm like all right you know i really gotta make a conscious effort communicate let you know how i feel and it helps actually so this is like yeah i agree with you a thousand percent and it's just funny i'm thinking there's there's some kind of like stat out there i don't know if it's like women use six times as many words as men in the course of a day but the number might be higher even but you know they're definitely communicators but i i mirror that too man like when my wife and i first started dating we were very good communicators and both kind of hot heads and that made for some spicy arguments but no yeah you know yeah over time and learning some skills and working on our communication it's just really made our friendship slash marriage you know and family stronger which is which is huge and guys i don't think are natural communicators talking about your feelings you know what i mean it's oh yeah i just thought it was funny that he was a collaboration guy but then his wife had a second communication i have a career that says otherwise yeah his wife says we need to have a conversation and then next thing she knows she gets a webex invite in her mailbox there it is i'm a family meeting whoops quality of service packet dropped i don't know what you're saying that's great so it sounds amazing what's uh what's in the future i mean it sounds like you've gotten a lot done what's what's coming next for ramen so right now i'm actually i'm actively learning pen testing okay so what is that oh so penetration testing it's where you wanna essentially find out if there's any vulnerability in any system or application um right now i'm focused more on like web applications so are these tools that just slam like ports and they're just trying to get in somehow and overcome authentication parameters right yeah so there's like tools like you know you use different types of tools so you use like a tool like nmap for example you can scan like open ports and if there's any open ports you can also see if it can detect like any operating system version it's like a self-signed certificate it won't like right like that kind of stuff yeah so yeah map does more of like the networking portion so it's again like ports and protocols right but there's other scanners that look for like that other stuff too right like yeah okay you need a signed certificate from a ca and yeah exactly yeah so there's like this really cool tool that i use it's called burp suite and it's like it's for like web applications so you can like you know do brute force you can change like a post message a get message like you can just manipulate and just try to see what the browser would accept and and it will also like skip what the applications are and also like scan like to see if there's any active vulnerabilities so like if it's susceptible to like you know xss you know cross-site scripting or sql injection like these things will be detected so is the company work for a software company like what are you guys scanning actually so yeah it is a software company based on the like the food industry so it's actually really really cool i'll do it very brief but it's uh if you want to develop a product let's say you work in the united states but you want to develop a product in europe you may not be able to use the same ingredients and the same amount of ingredients in that country so how do you know you got to go through like all these legal regulations right you know in the us we have fda and so what our company does is we get all the information for you you input your formula and we tell you whether or not it's legal in that country that is really cool wow yeah so yeah so we were like certified we're like part of the non-gmo as well so you know a little butterfly so like we're active members i think the most active participant in like providing non-gmo to products there's a lot that goes into it so like you know if you want to be a certified like organic farms like you need a the process takes five years just for the farmland fertilized and ready wow yeah and then you got to go through an inspection so we have inspectors that come and inspect stuff and they certify you know they validate whether or not it's certifiably organic this is really cool stuff that's crazy considering how much like organic stuff i see around sorry dude go for it no no i don't go for it uh so so you're currently doing the pin testing now what kind of certs are around that we we haven't really talked about any kind of security stuff on here so enlighten us on what are some of the search that you can go for insecurity and i guess specifically now that you're working towards pin testing but there so there's the elearn security i don't know if you guys know about elearn security um they were actually just purchased i believe by ine okay there's not any yeah yeah yeah chinese like really focused on cyber security now and they purchase elearn security so they have like penetration testing you know application testing and they have all these they have so many servers they have like 12 on their website okay um and and then um i'm right out right now i'm currently studying certification from you guys ever heard of the cyber mentor all right so he actually developed a certification it's not it's called pmpt penetration network testing professional um and what's really cool is the format of the test so like kind of like the oscp offensive security yeah something certified professional that's like a 24 hour exam if i'm not mistaken and you have 24 hours to get a certain you know task completed and with that though it's like you have access to everything like you know you google that's normally like ninety percent of the job is googling right getting information knowing how to do stuff um so i really like his approach the pmpt is a five day you got five days to complete it and then two days to draft up a presentation of what you found and how to address it and then you got to present it to him and like someone else okay kind of cool stuff so that you got that oscp um i believe that's made from the same people that make kali linux security yeah um um you also have like the ec council you know like the ceh everyone knows that ceh um and then you also have comptia i come to you like security plus you know pen test plus you got the cysa oh wow i didn't realize that sure yeah they just came out with it i think the year ago i i don't know the exact date um but yeah right now i'm focused through school actually now there's the the curriculum that i'm following i will one of the courses in order for me to complete a course i have to get my pentis plus now of course i have to do my cysa plus i also have to do isc squared certifications they're the ones that create the issp i'm sure you guys heard of cisd so i have to get my cloud like security professional like ccsp or something and then my system security professionals like ssdp something like that from the same company so those are all like in the program itself okay and that's it that's that's bundled in the wtu yeah in order to pass this class you need to pass that certification exam okay i got you i got a classic andy question so you start work at five you work till two you go to the gym i see you at the pool when do you study when do you do all this school stuff that you're i mean 60 credits in three months like dude what are you up to how are you doing this weekend okay i have some time extra time on the weekends and so i don't start at five so i get up a little early to get myself ready yeah and i try to study at least an hour before i start working okay and then you know after dinner i'll spend like an hour to study as well how's that morning study going because that's a tim burt hack that i had employed for a couple months and i i found it helpful i think it's better to study in the morning than at night because i feel like you're fresh you don't have all these things there you're thinking about things that happen throughout the day you're kind of just focused you know and you get you can't get distracted like oh what am i doing but then i found like what am i doing for throughout the day like tasks that i'm doing throughout the day so i actually use notion to keep track of like my daily tasks or activities and i kind of like do it the night before so i have to think about it in the morning okay and is that like a planning app yeah notion is like an online like i mean it's like notes on steroids okay there's so much you can do you can put like databases that you know it's just it's very very powerful tool are you using it to plan your your days you said or like what you're going to study or okay yeah like i have my daily agenda you know i always put things that you know we have to do together and then i also have a study tracker which i can show you guys probably later just like uh my daily goals what i want to study every day and i have a calendar view so i can see my 30 days i can see i can plan like what i want to study each day is that a notion is that a separate app yeah it's a notion okay i might have to check out notion because i i i try to block all my stuff and plan my days just using a calendar yeah you know putting entries in the calendar and i i try to help or two yeah i don't know how i've joked with these guys before i wind up just moving from monday to tuesday to one like things i don't get to i push and then friday's just a hot mess yeah things i haven't gotten to the thing for me is when i put it through a certain time and then that time comes and i'm doing something else then i'm like then it just messes up everything else when i can't accomplish one task it just messes everything else so i feel like when i just put it as a daily goal doesn't matter when i do it okay you don't tie it to a time of day just i got to do this today yeah yeah right that makes sense i like that approach it's good yeah notions good it's it's a tool that aaron has uh espoused before he's a big notion user it's a good one i i've i've tried to use it and i do use it just not as much as i could or should probably but it's it's it's a great tool it's like there's like one note and then there's notion right like it's it's good so notion's a step above one yeah yeah i mean one note is great like i mean i think there's some collaborative parts too to notion two like you can share notebooks and work collaboratively a notion obviously one note's really good if you're you know office 365 user you can share notebooks with teammates and stuff like that but i i think that the sweet spot is for for notion it's like the personal stuff right like the stuff that you want to track it's good stuff for sure we'll drop the circle back shoulders and testing real quick robin so when you guys run the tests and find the vulnerabilities do you have to fix those or do you present them to the application owners like hey yeah go fix your stuff yeah normally you present that if you like developers or like if they're rolling out a new application they have to get scanned right and then yeah they gotta pass all the stuff before they can go prod yeah okay so let's talk about that relation because i'm starting to see this in my my personal career uh it it's kind of interesting that you know okay you're going out and you're looking for this stuff but then you push that off on you know the system owner of saying like hey there you've got these vulnerabilities uh you know you need to either patch or you know whatever d do you help like in the research of what they need to do and like maybe how to accomplish that or do you just basically give them the list and they've got to figure it out you know like how does that work because that's such a jerk move right yeah yeah that's i'm kind of dancing around it you know no um when we found um so it's pretty early on right we just kind of did it we actually have like a professional company coming in doing a pen test um and like i'm gonna compare results to see how good i did versus the guys who've been doing this for years well not only that but i think for certain compliances you have to have an outside do that right yeah yeah yeah so essentially too like if you have customers like how can they trust your internal pentas right is as accurate as you say um but going back to what you asked it's more or less the way we have the way we're doing it is once we get the results try to find out what the height because it kind of labels it for you like critical high medium low right and so we will go address from the top bottom and luckily there was no highs or criticals and we kind of just come to them hey look you got this vulnerability you know going you know we do a little google search you know do a little bit of research we'll have other companies done to fix this problem um been a lot of times on forums or github and trying to get information right and we come back with you know hey this is what we found this is where we find out how to fix it but you know it's ultimately ultimately up to the product owner as well they know what's different that's in your report robin like you offer okay that's nice that you guys try to dig in and say hey this is what we saw this looks like how you fix it that's nice yeah and you know there's no formal process at the moment um but that's just the way we want to do it like we want to come informed not just like this what we found fix it right that was the next thing i was going to ask are you focusing on the the actual technical penetration testing side of it are you looking to in the future write policies around we're going to do this kind of thing once a week once a quarter what have you and then we expect that critical level vulnerabilities get patched in the next amount of time high medium and so on are you are you gonna work on a policy as well yeah that's not i'm not looking forward to the policy writing but i do know it's an essential skill right understand right know how to write policy and understand how to read it right it's definitely a skill yeah but i'm more focused on the technical aspects okay and you know some touching on the policy aspects as well so i wear many hats to my company so i'll be doing both what is the policy like i'm thinking firewall policies but that's not what we're talking about it's kind of like vulnerability patching if you find a vulnerability that's critical you have this amount of days to fix it oh okay you know it's like here's our rules of like yeah what we find the level and how many days you have to fix and i like standards you know yeah yeah yeah right and there's procedures compliance stuff like that i run into you folks once i had to stand up something i had to stand up an application well you know so you know how it is right everybody's got their own pressure and timelines and what they got to do so i had this thing i had to roll out and it had to be quick right because everything's a priority and i rushed like hell to get it out and i get it all stood up and they're like oh you need a security scan i'm like wait what because i'm a network guy i don't stand up applications but this particular thing i had to so you know it was hell figuring out how to get it stood up i pulled in some vert people to help blah blah blah whatever and i get the scan and like oh yeah bro you know you're you're not good you're not good he didn't do too well just from the biggest networking vendor on the planet how can this application not be good and but it was really just a self-signed search that they didn't like but then i had to learn like how to find a ca and get a science certificate get it loaded and so it was it was a cool uh it's just a whole world i i don't know about you know the the cyber security folks and application scanners when when you so the people you're talking to are they coders like these are application development people right yeah so they probably know just like i would know network security and yeah like i i'm guessing they're expecting something to come back on your report like they're they're kind of leaning on you as as we did in my particular case like hey let's see if the vendor said we're good i don't know you know so fortunately you know your teams can let us know like are we are we safe here can we you know can we roll this out yeah it's great uh very cool very cool job so let me know what you mentioned certificate was that go ahead no it's because uh at our old company that was such a i don't know how you guys do it but tracking like when certificates expire now people send emails and that's just the best way to do it right these 15 certificates are expiring guys i think we had a one point uh a certificate expire in a production environment oh yeah um yeah customer facing right so the previous company we had customers that would use our systems right so what happens can they not get to it or they just get that annoying browser thing saying could not get to it okay the service is down so that it just goes down right what kills that access because like so my home server i have whatever the hell running and i don't have certificates but i can click that you know override security go in anyway so is there something that kills the client's connectivity when the certificate expires yeah when that certificate expires it becomes untrusted and then the application says wait a minute i don't trust the server anymore i can't use it yeah yeah there are some applications that will let you override that but so that's what i'm getting at what's the trust between the end user and the application it being a certificate yeah that ssl certificate when it sees the certificate expire that's that's when it says nope i don't trust you anymore but the client comes in to hit it there's an expired certificate they're like nah nope not good nothing sometimes they won't even allow you to bypass right right a good policy wouldn't let you buy pants right yeah yeah we were doing ssl vpn on our phones at a company that i worked for and we set up the initial rollout of this for just one year and we didn't set up a reminder on when this was going to expire and we had rolled out you know would it not like a ton of phones but it was enough for a small company and the small it staff where it was like a pain in the butt and these certificates expired and the phones stopped calling home and you even after we updated the certificate they wouldn't check in they wouldn't get the new certificate so the only way that we could fix this issue was to have them ship the phones back wow and then reset up the vpn connection there and then send the phones back out wow that would turn very ugly a bit yeah yeah yeah so that we we learned but i think a relationship with those certificates i think some monitoring solutions now have a certificate monitor as well right so it kind of like monitors the expertise they'll check and warn you right thing like when they're expiring i've yeah so whose job is that like does that fall under cyber robin like do you have to deal with tracking certificates and uh theo so we we don't do it now i don't know who does it now but my old job yeah it became such a problem that they put one dedicated person that's all they did that's part of a there's one guy at our place that does that's like half his job basically is to watch that that kind of stuff so you just run reports and it'll tell you when stuff expires and then you just gotta know that oh he sets up reminders in his calendar like when we yeah okay he purchased right he's the one who purchases the cert and so he keeps up with all that and he he'll since the quizzer gets fired you guys are in trouble yeah it's all just counter appointments in his outlook right that's a i think that's his workflow he probably has something to you know more that dude gets hit by a bus are gonna be like oh my god better make better make that a shared calendar yeah you might that would have built some redundancy into that system but uh so let's see here i yeah i think that now they're starting to come out with monitors like that i'm not 100 sure you got a question dan what was it yeah i'm trying to think now okay dan wants to know how thick you're going to grow your body no no oh i know what it was so you said your title is cyber security engineer right yeah okay so now let let me ask this how much of your job is doing like firewall maintenance or you know working in the firewall like doing gnats or you know that kind of stuff do you do any of that or are you that's network security but i've i've i've talked to people in the security realm and sometimes like what they might do is they might not do the natting they might not do that kind of stuff but when it comes to firewall policy rules now that's their baby you know um so i was just curious if if your current role are you doing any hands-on on like network gear or anything like that firewalls whatever it's funny you mentioned that because just this week i was notified we need you to take over our sonicwall firewalls now you're the firewall guy so yeah they were like we need you to go in there and like one thing that they're working on is mfa vpn so multi-factor right um so they haven't completed that so like all right we need you to complete this project and then just make sure that everything's up to date you know all the policies and i'm like okay cool oh and by the way you own it once you get that sucker you touched it yeah yeah i know right but a lot of things that i'm doing now is actually cloud-based like azure i'm i'm i'm really in azure a lot right now um like azure security is that because your applications are built there yeah uh well they're not built there they're built but they're planning to move everything to azure yeah um so we have some applications in azure and then some applications other right now like cloud-based solutions um which is crazy actually one of our cloud-based solutions was uh based in europe and it was a data center that got on fire oh yeah uh ovh i think right it was a big one yeah but i mean there was redundancy though right yeah but no biggie yeah that's the goal right to move everything to azure and um well maybe not everything azure maybe split some to aws and so that's that's what my focus is more learning azure security talk to cloud bar just pick one vendor and do one that's what he said when he interviewed him i forget what the analogy was but it made a lot of sense he's like man no because everybody goes multi-cloud just because reasons i guess but i think it's harder to maintain so you're getting in the do you have any like azure search have you i just got the fundamental easy 900 the only reason i did it because i got that free voucher um that was like that fundamentals course that microsoft does and it was how was that it was uh relatively easy i would say it was pretty easy i mean i finished in like 10 minutes studying or the test how long did it take you to consume the material a week okay okay yeah so and that's with like all the everything else going on that's kind of like right yeah i don't know i got bored too i'm like i'm watching netflix or something nice but i mean it's not very hard i don't think it's i mean it's it's a good foundation all right it's your overview of all the products that it has and stuff like that and has it helped you do your job in azure or is it really just here's our product line mm-hmm that one's i i would say not really right okay what worked more is like hands-on yeah right yeah awesome robin this has been a great conversation uh i am blown away and inspired by your your drive to change so much in such a short period of time uh and and i think i think i got to get going on some self help from my myself here get back get back to my old habits um before we depart where can people find you so i have a blog which has not been very active but i promise to fix that it's a great blog it's just my name robincanella.com very easy uh you can always twitter yep so last name is actually spanish for cinnamon very cool twitter right at robin canela linkedin robin canela yep they're very simple um i think i'm on facebook or instagram i can't remember but yeah just twitter linkedin and my blog those are the main three places you can find me and of course our discord and see that's right robinson you want to hit up robin you can chat with them on our discord awesome i will put links to those in all of our show notes guys any last-minute questions before we wrap this one up uh yeah um so robin are you taking applications for mentorships there's your 2022 and beyond project robin i think that's like the coolest thing about this show right is i you know we we talked to these amazing people that just the motivation is just insane and it it really makes me like think about my life and like okay where am i at what do i need to change and just hearing these stories and like so one thing i wanted to mention earlier um is your your ability to say i'm gonna do this and then you just go you know balls to the wall and do it and that's just like that's very inspiring so yeah i i'm gonna have to step my game up man because i'm very motivated by my stories like this yeah i just want to thank robin for coming on um i think we all had a similar experience in 2020 and i i can echo some of the experiences you had of like it really made me take a look at things and you know my decisions in my life and and what i want and and i've made some not quite as dramatic as you because i think you're like next level like you know kicking butt here but yeah like to be able to make some changes to you know make this year better than last year and it's been nice you know getting getting some of those benefits but um super cool talking to your first cyber guy um yeah i think i want to have your mentor on some day we just we just got to keep working up the cyber stack to like you know it's fascinating stuff it's funny i'll thank you guys for for your comments that's you know it's it's just you know here very often right and i don't expect her i don't expect the phrase you know i'm trying to stay very low humble to my roots you know that's at least that's how i feel um but one thing i've considered is actually a friend of mine brought this up is helping so i grew up in new york city very rough part in new york city and they were like how can you help people that were in your position knowing the steps you took to get where you are yeah but i've toyed with the idea of like maybe i should help mentor kids or you know people that live in bad neighborhoods are you'd be awesome yeah absolutely i think that's great dude yeah thanks for coming on robin i promise to never call you cinnamon it should be your new twitter hero at uh there it is there it is awesome thank you very much robin thank you very much everybody for joining us this week and come on back next week for the next episode of art of network and jim meters see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artoofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you