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 welcome back to the a1 evening news there's been lots of activity in the community so let's dive right in and a highlight this week local tennessee man daniel richards known by a soon name howdy packet has returned from a short vacation to an undisclosed location in the backwoods of this great country while it is unknown what exactly was accomplished on said vacation accusations are ranging anywhere from hiking fishing and general four-wheeling horseplay all the way up to spelunking personally i think that not knowing is better because it leaves all possibilities to the imagination normally we would check in with aaron weiler for the weather but i'm assuming he would just tell us that it's much nicer where he is than the rest of us be sure to check in at the bottom of the hour for sports with andrew laptop actually it's just a live view of andy hanging out by his pool but hey he's really into that thing also later on we'll go through the community wins none of which are from me of course but hey that's nothing new for now let's kick it over to the a1 chief fermentation officer aj murray to lead us into the 50th episode of the art of network engineering thank you tim i am aj murray welcome back welcome to episode 50 we are so excited to be recording our 50th episode uh it is a a momentous occasion for this little podcast uh so without further ado andy how are you doing man uh you're on location at your uh your vacation spot i am i am in seattle city new jersey i was on the beach all day today i feel weird because i'm relaxed yeah i think that smile i think that smile says it all are we are we talking to zandy right now is in sandy is that andy yeah yes i believe you are and i hope he sticks around when i get back to work we'll see just pretend that pool is uh beachside right yeah yeah tim how you doing i am well so we all uh experienced father's day this last week and you know how we all have the the joke of you get socks and ties right oh sure yeah well i did receive those socks uh one pair of socks per kid however these socks had each kid's faces all over the socks wow oh that's cool so so in our uh you know in our community we have the uh the faces of the journey so now i actually get to wear the faces of my journey on my feet and now that i say that it kind of sounds weird but hey i think it's pretty cool that's face of the journey while you journey yeah i like that my wife did the same thing for me on my on my first father's day right on nice that's pretty sweet shut him off at the office but i don't think people got as big of a kick as i did one of these days dan you're gonna actually have to give us the mystery of of what you did on this last vacation it was a bunch of uh trail riding and stuff like that um just doing some off-road stuff you know stuffing things so i was partly right yeah yeah we didn't do any fishing or anything like that but you know it was hot i went crabbing yesterday and i'm going fishing tomorrow uh we caught we called two babies we got two baby crabs in a minnow it was a slow day it was low tide you're supposed to go at high tide apparently so tomorrow high tide 9 a.m we're in nice gotcha year we we uh we go down to where my wife grew up which is in gloucester and the rockport mass area and uh one year we were down there like walking around the beaches and i found a little tiny crab and so there's a picture of me like holding this little thing like look i made a friend too bad your friend was like probably scared to death probably with my gorilla hands grab it onto him no seriously he loves me i swear what's up with aj this week uh i i got some refreshing news today on that on that massive project um okay it's here it's being put on hold for a little bit thank goodness so so i'm going to be home for a little bit so what's uh what's a little bit though uh just just like a month we're going to reorganize re-strategize uh the customer and and the the contractor team are going to come together and uh work a little bit closer than we have been to date a little bit more collaboration collaboration uh so yeah yeah it'll be good it'll be good that's good so and i've been assigned to some other projects um so i i'll be load balancing a little bit more and mixing things up and i got some exciting stuff so a lot of a lot of sd access sd-wan and aci coming my way here in the future which i'm super excited about exciting stuff and all that stuff yeah really exciting stuff aci boys over here yeah better you than me so yeah good stuff all around speaking of good stuff we got a lot of wins this week fellas yeah that list is grown yeah i was looking at that and i was like man aj did you pack your coat i was just going to say i'm on the road and i did not bring my goat i apologize i'm bringing it out i should have my goat i i mean i mean he could just like fit in your pocket i got it i got it in my pocket oh my gosh i just want to like do a recording of this thing so that way we can just play it into the show rather than having to have it and you know yeah it's like a it's like a dj at a radio show where he's got like a sound board you know and right he's got a drop yeah now we got to use dan's voice of the screaming goat yeah yeah in the recording now yeah all right here we go with the wins uh this week king doss passed their ccna congratulations nice dog awesome it guy blake accepted a new position as an enterprise uh tech support engineer for a spectrum very nice congratulations nice uh here's a name we don't see in the winning channel too often bill murray passed his linux essentials yeah congratulations bill it has it's been a long time since we heard bill murray on here uh pits to bites landed his first networking role holy poop and he credits the podcast and the discord for his success i had a great conversation with chris after that i am uh certainly taking it back for him to to credit uh the podcast and the community but he he said you know if i you know he he said he knew himself well enough that without the podcast and the discord to keep him focused he probably would have given up halfway through his ccna but he got a ccna and now he's landed his first networking role so he's super excited and well deserved congratulations i think that's i think that's a win for the community too you know oh yeah that that you know they helped motivate him to you know push through that's awesome that's exactly what we wanted you know when we started yeah it was neat to watch that day because he was like chronicling the whole thing on twitter when he when he got through an interview was waiting on a call back and all the interaction there that was really cool yeah oh wow all right little shep 99999 pass their a plus exam another another linux essentials win uh from siren congratulations siren now is the linux essentials is that is that like linux plus or is that different no i'm honestly not sure i i i think i've heard of it in the past and it's one of those things like i gotta look that up kind of thing but i keep forgetting to do that wait i'm gonna dive back into that what's linux what's linux rap guys all right man that's a wrap and andy got fired when his boss heard this episode uh k mon accepted a new position as an infrastructure team member team uh part of an infrastructure team in healthcare nice okay very nice congratulations on that name quite a bit uh robin c robin canelo passed his a plus congratulations robin i didn't know he was working on his a plus yeah he mentioned it was part of uh part of the program he's taking this oh that's right yeah yeah i forgot about that yeah he's really doing that right because it's like the the program is you pay x amount per term and you can take and do as many things as you want and it's just the same price so he's just knocking it out and fitting in as much knowledge as he can okay uh network charles and bob steele412 uh so they they won a cisco press contest so cisco press was looking for some uh hints and tricks like what do you do with your with your studying and uh they both won some free books from cisco press so oh congratulations yeah really cool giveaway from those guys uh and sneaking in moments before we press the record button tonight kingpin smitty he's trying to get into it from an aviation background and today they passed their n plus exam so congratulations well good job you're one step closer that's right that's right so that's all of our wins for this week congratulations everybody it's awesome so are you guys ready uh i i gotta tell you i'm i'm there's a lot of questions here so there it is for anybody just joining us this is our ask us anything episode this is episode 50. uh over the past couple of weeks we've been putting out on social media and uh talking in our episodes that we want people to send us your questions anything at all and we'll answer it and we got some really good questions most of them are tech focused uh there's a couple of you know just you know not really tech related just want to get to know us a little bit better kind of questions so uh i think we're gonna have some fun with this one fellas and uh we actually had some people record on video uh and they sent us some videos so we're gonna splice that into the episode for the youtube version uh and then we had a couple of people send us just like recording snippets only so pretty cool stuff i love the engagement from the community and i'm super excited to answer y'all's questions so we're going to hear and see fans ask us questions right that's really cool yeah wow come a long way in 50 episodes boys i got to thinking about that that's like that's just insane an episode a week for you know almost a year now it's a swab we had a few roadblocks too it wasn't all what do you say tim it wasn't all happy fun times yeah super happy fun super happy fun times i don't know why i keep saying that i like it yes i do it's it's it's got a good ring to it i am proud of us it's been uh yeah it's been awesome wild ride fellas good job boys i love it love what we're doing well uh without further ado should we jump right in yep let's do it yeah i'd say we just all right knock this out uh jacob from twitter is asking what experience made you realize you wanted to get into networking and what makes networking interesting to you i would love to take that one aj at least to start go because i'm sure everybody wants this one this was the this is a juicy one so i actually got into networking and kind of got bit by the bug even before my career started back in college i was going through i was trying to figure out i knew i wanted to be in it but trying to figure out what place or what was even out there so i went in as computer science as a lot of us do because we don't know what else is there went through the math went through the programming courses i was starting to get a little nervous because you know some stuff wasn't clicking and i wasn't putting in enough time and doing enough justice and then i sat in that first cisco netacad class and things just literally and figuratively clicked like the you know the ethernet cable it it's just making connections layer two layer three things just made sense and when i was sitting in other classes and struggling with things that just didn't make sense that did and that's when the light bulb went off and i just i had to pursue it so yeah it was it making sense made it exciting and i've never looked back nice i think i think i want to answer this one too if you don't mind yeah go for it um maybe some of these we can we can all answer but some of them just take you know one at a time but um so for me which you know i kind of mentioned this in in my uh in my was it our first episode or was it the second episode i can't remember now but we were kind of talking about like what got us into networking and all that yeah fun stuff um yeah but just in case people haven't heard uh it was it was halo so playing video games so that was that was what got me into it and specifically was on my 16th birthday um i hosted a if you want to call it a lan party basically we had four xboxes we had a hub and i my my dad rented um these like flat screen tvs which was a big thing when i was 16 years old okay so it was those uh we they didn't have flat you know big flat screen tvs or if they did they were super expensive but anyways um so he rented four of those tvs and rented four couches and so we had all the tvs back to back and there was like 16 of us and we were doing like halo tournaments all day and uh but what was cool about that was hooking all the xboxes together and it was like oh wow i can make all these talk to each other you know and like we could actually play a game over that and then it turned into like playing call of duty and halo on pc and stuff like that and you could actually host dedicated servers and i was like well this is cool like i want to figure out how this works and so that i just dove into that and i went to uh i know you guys talked about computer science majors and stuff like that i i went to itt tech and they had a computer networking systems degree and so that's what i went into and it was it focused on servers linux uh hardware and then also networking they had a ccna type course there so yeah that's that's cool that was like a real light bulb moment and yeah just saw that and and took it off from there that's really cool so so that that's my answer andy how about you uh i i don't think it was one moment but when i as a cable guy was putting all these devices on the network and didn't even i kind of never thought about it just i was just doing my job and then i got introduced to the ccna program and then when i sat in on the cisco networking academy class the teacher let me come in and just sit in on a class it's like oh wait a couple things just kind of started to come together i'm like wait a minute i think i think i could probably you know do this but it wasn't like one light bulb moment just i had a job connecting stuff to you know this isp network and i honestly i think the people that introduced me to the ccna program probably played the biggest role in like that would be my moment this guy randy uh and this other guy his name i can't believe i can't remember right now um if they didn't tell me about the ccna i'd you know i don't think any of this would happen so andy do you remember how that conversation started i i guess i i'm just trying to figure out how you're you're talking with work people and that just kind of comes up or was it over time i joke with my wife i'm annoying question guy i've been dog my curiosity i've been dog by curiosity my whole all right how do you do it right i've been plagued by curiosity since i was a kid so you know i always wanted to know what was going on like i'm putting a cable box on a network right and there's an out-of-band channel sometimes a break like there's just all these different things that you learn about to get things working when they're not but now i would say you know i want to get further up the stack but i wanted to understand like what are these things talking to them what is the head end and what how are these modems talking to this thing called a cmts and how does it actually get to the internet where's the internet so i just kept asking people questions the one guy was a lineman so he had more experience than i did on the network and he was able to but yeah just asking questions i think curiosity you know kind of like we've talked about when you get a new guy at work and he's just all you know fired up and curious and asking all the questions you want to help him along and i think these guys saw that at me like you know what this poor guy we got to get him out of the field here's a ccna kid yeah nice aj do you have one moment yeah what's your day uh one moment i don't i don't know i think it was a combination of things right there there was always that curiosity like you know a buddy of mine and i we would always play like pc games together and you know we'd always just kind of talk like how does this work connecting computers together like this and um you know i i hooked up a network in my home you know when i was when i was like i don't know like teens uh and then when i got to college um i didn't really know that i wanted to do it i didn't really know what i wanted to do because i had to make like a big career you know pivot like you know what i what i thought what i was gonna do change completely and and uh and so i'm going to school just doing a general education degree i took a programming class i said well this this it stuff's pretty fun but i don't know if i can program and later on i took a networking course and you know i i would say i relate to a lot what you were saying tim how you know you just get it like right like it was it was fun it was interesting and you know for me i saw it as like a sustainable opportunity because you can do a lot with a computer but you can do a lot more with a network connected computer so i just saw that as something like i'm interested in this it's fun and it's never going to go away you know whereas before i was looking at being an aircraft mechanic in high school and and that took a huge hit the industry took a huge hit you know 20 years ago uh when september 11th happened and then you know it took a big hit last year with a pandemic so uh i'm glad i found uh i'm glad i found networking yeah we're glad too aj yeah right you just reminded me aj during that time things were coming together for me i also remember reading that the number of you know wireless devices or network connected devices in each home was like doubling each year like you said like it's not going away i thought oh wow like i could see the growth just it was exponential i'm like this might be a good thing to get into this isn't going away any time soon right exactly uh why don't we jump to our first video question oh let's do it hey guys uh in the world of networking obviously cisco's a big player uh so i'm wondering what some of your favorite non-cisco networking technologies are you know aruba wireless juniper switches anything other than the 800 pound gorilla in the room thanks i'm in a ton of juniper lately and um yeah there's certain things about junos that i i really enjoy but they also confuse me like in a cisco box as soon as i put a command in it starts doing something and juniper until you commit it it does nothing it's like the candidate configuration they call it so that i had i had a maintenance window last week where i was on boarding in dc on our new mpls network and i'm freaking out because i couldn't get a protocol to come up and after like 10 minutes somebody jumped on he's like dude you haven't committed your change i'm like commit because in a cisco you put it in and it just starts working so just boom yeah yeah so i think like in junos yeah i think for mine is the palo altos i like those and same concept andy that you have to commit your changes into palo alto so i don't know if you've messed with palo alto's or not but not yet i'd like to i've seen panorama remember yeah if you're in panorama you have to commit and push yourself zones and policies and bands showing off the security time how about you uh one thing that i've messed around with over the last year is an application from a company called seven signal it's called uh mobileye so it's a soft a lightweight software agent that'll sit on a windows or a mac device they've got some mobile agents as well uh android i'm i'm not sure that they're there yet on ios but on those platforms it's just an agent that runs and it's for wireless devices and it really just it does reporting of monitoring um so it'll it'll constantly check the rf spectrum to see if there's any uh any co-channel or adjacent channel interference um it'll check and see one thing that's really cool is it'll check to see if there's roaming issues so you know you can see that hey the device is connected to an access point with a really low signal strength but it can see another access point with a really good signal strength but for whatever reason the client's not moving so you know that's probably an issue with the client and then it can also do active checks it can do ping tests and download tests to things in your network outside your network it's it's a really neat uh little monitoring and reporting tool so does it matter what you're running wirelessly like like meraki aruba cisco no it's completely uh it's completely independent from the environment it just runs on the client i got you well that's really cool i like what's it called again uh the product itself is called mobileye and it's from a company called uh seven signal okay interesting aj do you have one nice uh yeah so uh a buddy of mine has his own business and he's been doing a lot of uh uh networking work he he's he's not a network engineer he just owns his own business doing electrical and security and they ask him about networking stuff and he'll usually defer to me when he asks questions but he's been selling a lot of ubiquity and they have these really cool point to point they call it air fiber and it's rather impressive so last year during the pandemic a local movie theater was trying to figure out how we gonna make this work and so they set up an outdoor venue and they wanted to get internet out to the venue so they could stream movies so we hooked them up with the ubiquity air fiber uh and you know to try to get a baseline of how this how well this works i did a speed test inside hardwired connected to switch in the movie theater uh we moved outdoors we got the dishes pointed at one another we verified we had good signal on the on the ui and so i hopped on the switch connected to the remote end and did a speed test and i got the same exact download speed nice and we're talking this was a gig internet connection i was getting like 966 down on both ends wow that's unbelievable so it's like i wasn't you know that the air fiber didn't make a difference it was beautiful as long as a bird doesn't fly in front of it you're fine yeah what happens if a bird poops on it you know so a serious question like would rain affect that oh sure yeah totally totally it was definitely a beautiful sunny day you know kind of thing but you know rain snow all sorts of stuff will bother something like that and those things will work at very long ranges um this was a shorter range it was going you know probably across a large parking lot kind of it's amazing to get this kind of speeds over the air that's crazy yeah it was yeah i was expecting you know some sort of degradation of the signal um of the internet connection but there's nothing yeah so like if you if you move your head in between the two satellites or whatever you want to call them the dishes could you hear anything can you hear the internet well about the dial-up tone not to do that oh okay i'm just curious like what is it what does a gig feel like going through your head i think i think it'll sound like taylor swift dan if you put your head between it i think you hear taylor swift check it out my friends is awesome next question please yeah quick quick rf story i i've been a ham radio operator since i was 13 years old and i used to love to operate satellites ham radio payloads on satellites yeah and they make this really cool antenna called the aero antenna it's made out of arrow shafts and on one side of the beam it's it's two yagis together so if you can picture that two yagi style antennas together so on one side of the beam it's two meters which is 140 some odd megahertz and then the other side is 70 centimeter which is 435 ish megahertz and so a buddy of mine who is also a ham radio operator where uh on top of a small hill um we're operating satellites and we didn't really pay attention to where i set up with the radio and where he set up with the antenna and where the path of the satellite was going and as we get towards the end of the satellite pass i key up to start talking and i felt this intense chest pain and i look over and like my buddy's just pointing the antenna like right at me because that's where the end of the satellite pass was it's not he wasn't intentionally trying to like fry me with the radio signals he felt it but yeah i definitely felt because that you know a yagi antenna is a very directional antenna and so it's like the full force and i wasn't using like super high power it was like 10 watts maybe but they supposed to let me know i want to know what this feels like well dan when you come up next month i'll be happy to point it at me okay it's like my body's ready aj hit me tim they're going to be tasing each other and shooting each other with satellite radio waves god help us i don't even i don't i don't even have words right now i want aj 5g aj i have to say one thing about juniper that i love is rollback oh yeah no matter how much config you jam in there and break stuff one command rollback and you're right back to the last state you're in it's gorgeous is that all there is to it i'm not familiar is it uh is it is it you don't have you don't know you don't have to know everything out like a cisco if you put 500 lines of code in and you want to take it out in a cisco it's going to take a while yeah 500 lines of code in junos and you got to back it out because the hell breaks loose you just type roll back i don't know if it's one zero i forget i don't even know if you got to commit it that's how bad so it's the code history right so roll back zero is like is the current running config roll back one so roll back one you probably won't okay so you so you look through your history and see how many lines that you put in and then you roll back whatever that number of the lines are no changes so you you make a bunch of changes and then you commit it so the rollback is the the history of the config so dan now you're talking about show pipe compare where it'll show you everything you added and removed from the config i'm telling you juniper's got it going on but i'm sorry so we probably got work some of these features are starting to show up in nexus version 10 version 10 recently was released and you can look forward to seeing some of those cisco ripped off juniper on to the next question uh dylan sent an email in dylan asks where is the best place to start for a young adult who wants to get into a network engineering gig at a big company like verizon or google he says he's already getting experience as a support tech and he's already gotten his n plus but he's sort of at a standstill as to where to go from here any ideas on indiegogo i'm i'm gonna say andy's probably gonna be the one to answer this because he's probably at the largest company out of all of three or four well i was my first thought was i didn't get in to this stuff until like my mid to late 30s so i don't know if i fit into the young adult category this cat might be 17. but i i look at it more of like when did you start i.t you know what i mean like because he the age really isn't i don't think uh in the question he's just now getting into it oh what's in the question i think a young man i guess it depends though because if you're young do you have a family do you have you know you have a wife or kids because if if you don't have a wife and kid you might be able to travel a lot more and get a lot of hands-on experience you know to work towards getting into a job like that we've we have a family so what i'm sorry we've pounded questions like this ad nauseum i mean there's no there's no one answer i don't think there's no one path you talk to 50 people they do it 50 different ways yeah you know to get no verizon or google you're going to have to have some pretty serious skills i mean so like i know um uh cisco panther he got into like aws and the reason he comes to mind is like he got into this big old company and their networking division but he's a heavy hitter like he knows probably 10 pretty heavy-duty technologies including all kinds of programming to like get into that level you know i put aws up there with like a google or verizon so i don't know if you're a young guy trying to get into a monster shop you i my i would say skill up like you're not gonna get hired at google with a net plus and you know a couple years experience at a knock right like so you're gonna have to know something have you ever if you've ever listened to him cisco panther tell his story about getting aws he says something that kind of really sticks out like trying to get into a large company like that be persistent keep keep applying keep applying you'll eventually you'll eventually get a job interview and you'll get in there and you'll learn from them like what are the skills they're looking for what are the technologies they have like if you get a chance to interview at a company like that you go in and you ask those kinds of questions and then that's your takeaways like you probably won't get the job because you don't have the skills or experience with what they're looking for but you take that information away and you go learn it i think you'd have to be damn good at networking and i think that you'd have to probably know python and or ansible and some like automation platforms like at minimum but to get into a shop an organization that large similar to where you work andy there's there's going to be teams of network engineers and there's going to be teams of devops or automation engineers so having a good understanding of that stuff is is going to help but maybe not necessarily knowing it as deeply if it depends on i guess if you're probably not talking or trying to do the network engineer thing probably not deep but i'm not sure i could get my job right now like if i applied today just that's how big automation and python has become where i'm at i don't know if they'd hire me which oh my bosses aren't listening but yeah but didn't they like spring that on you guys like they they were like hey we're full sending automation now yeah like so right it happened there but yeah to get it they've literally like they've legit said we're not hiring people without automation skills from this point forward so you know i'm learning them um they haven't kicked me out the door and i'm learning but yeah i would say you know to this person i would say you better know your route switch really well and you better get some automation like you said aj you probably don't have to be you know a genius at it but you better be able to get your way around python and some ansible i think right right yeah i'd heard a tip recently from uh david bomble and i i think it plays kind of to these bigger companies and it's to keep an eye on and and follow and skill up in those industry trends if you're trying to get into the you know the bigger shops the cloud the automation all that fun stuff i i think especially in those those bigger uh hyper scale type companies security yeah you need a specialty right like i talked to brittany not too long ago and you know our resident recruiter and like route switch is the basis you got to be good at it and you need a specialty whether it's aci or security or python or you know it might not have to be automation but you need to you need a specialty and you need to be good at it i think to compete at that level i gotcha i think all right uh next an audio clip from connor hey guys my name is connor and i'm an avid listener of the show i'm currently an rn at a busy trauma center in the er here in lafayette louisiana but i'm looking to go into network engineering so my question to you guys is from someone who is completely new to the industry looking for possibly a help desk where even there's a knock technician position available near where i live what's something i can do to help holster my resume so that i can get that initial job take that first step thanks and my vote was for winston by the way that was the that was the correct vote you chose wisely i like this guy i like him already that's funny so that's an interesting uh uh career jump right there going from an rn to wanting to go into networking can i say i would love to i would love to have that conversation and find out what what tied those two things together yeah connor i was either going to go into nursing or i too oh he should be on the show for sure so when i was a cable guy i was either going to go into nursing because i knew some nurses making bank or rit and i just can't handle gore and trauma and stuff so i it was it was pretty easy but i tell you i tell you what i think one good feature he'll have is you know we've talked multiple times about uh keeping cool under pressure and if he's a trauma nurse he said he was dramatic that guy is it yeah yeah so it's like at least nobody's dying i mean you know i'd have to talk to this cat because he's making good i.t money right like nurses you come out making good bank and with overtime you're killing it like over six figures so i'd be curious why you know he'd want to get out of of what he's in i mean he's got to start from scratch right like what do you do yeah ccna and like i mean i don't know i can't imagine having that kind of job with that kind of money and then just starting from scratch in it that doesn't sound fun i think we need to reach out to this guy aj yeah all right we're gonna say i will do that but why don't we offer him some advice first that's my advice i mean why you know it's he's got a good job he's always going to have a job he's making great money what if he doesn't like it though i mean well he must not like it and money's not everything well does he like maintenance windows and outages and you know what i mean maybe he likes that kind of stuff he might like that more than like you know it's not all super happy fun times over here an interesting trend that we've seen in the past year that you know yeah doctors and nurses and people that work in that field took an oath but a pandemic happened and will another one happen again hopefully not for a very long time but that like that takes the the oath to a whole new level right then you're taking it home to your family and all that i mean he's got us he's got a cert up right i mean that's the answer i think is you got to go get some search you got to go build some skills i'd start with the ccna if you're looking at networking automation build some experience and i think the best way to build some experience when you don't have experience is look for volunteer opportunities and in tech you know there's there's the american red cross there's a lot of organizations that look for it skilled people to help them out with stuff uh and it's a great opportunity to get some experience when you don't have any what was that volunteer organization you mentioned aj yeah you've done one haven't you yeah yeah so i recently started a volunteer with itdrc which is information technology disaster resource center they have a really cool program going on because of the pandemic so if you live in an underserved area or if you're a community organization or a library or something like that in an underserved area you can apply for and receive a project connect wireless access point that will be installed by itdrc and they'll you know put a unsecured open wireless network out for people in the community to be able to come up and use uh around your your business or library or whatever the case may be and one was actually installed in my local town here uh and they reached out to me as a volunteer and said hey we're we're having some issues with it the library's having some issues can you you know go over and check it out yeah sure no problem uh and then i just got tapped the other day to go troubleshoot uh another one of those project connect ap's so um yeah i i would say check it out it's it's definitely worth it okay and those those organizations like itgrc like they're they're getting retired gear retired enterprise gear okay and sometimes they're they get grants to buy brand new gear and they're buying stuff like meraki or ubiquity or or and it's not terribly far off from enterprise type gear so it's it's good experience it's networking experience for sure yeah and and i always try to be like half funny there but you know i would tell this cat to reach out to us i mean we could talk to him you know and give him some i mean i'd be happy to talk to this guy and try to help him out right and get him down the line join the discord like you know all that stuff that you know we got plenty of people that can help him there's a path he can follow um yeah you know we can help him get there well i will definitely reach back out to him and see if he's interested in doing an episode with us all right um back to our friend jordan hey guys i have a question for you about anxiety especially around changes i've been in networking for about 20 years now and something that i can't seem to shake is just this anxious feeling anytime that i'm getting ready to make a change sometimes small changes but you know the larger the change the more anxious i get and sometimes to the point where i have to back away from the keyboard take a beat take a breath and then get back into it so i'm wondering how you guys deal with uh change anxiety or if you even have change anxiety because it's uh something that i struggle with pretty frequently thank you mr burton this is me i i relate heavily with this question and one thing that i've done over the years as i've matured in my career i can't even believe i just said matured but because that's that's not the right word for me but over the years what i've done especially um in the last few years is i i really focus a lot and hammer a lot on the planning yes planning and testing planning and testing planning and testing and i know it may sound um a bit over the top but i've looked at some of my recent change plans and it is just bullet line for line i've got show out put in there of what's expected and and what to do and to me having that in front of you having that script if you will is just makes the process easy it it doesn't leave things to chance and that makes me a lot more confident and when i'm more confident i'm more calm so to me it's it's all about planning and uh having support is good to have somebody else look through your change plan that kind of thing but yeah planning is is my number one thing to try to combat that uh change window anxiety yeah i'll definitely echo that one tim so i do the same exact thing when i'm working for a customer i i will you know lab it lab the crap out of it until i'm comfortable with it and then i'll build a document that's exactly you know here's what i'm going to do exactly the order that i'm going to do it i'll put verifications in there and just like you you know i'll type out what am i expecting to see in this verification i've even got a rollback plan so if i if i get somewhere and i'm not seeing what i expect to see here are some things that i can do to troubleshoot that if it's just not working here's what i got to do to roll back and do the same exact thing definitely helps what's really helpful beyond that too is if you can get like a peer review with a senior you know somebody who really really knows what you're touching because that you know my guys find mistakes in my scripts frequently on you know on these but but the planning and the labbing is huge and i and i do the same thing with those you know what do i expect to see because at three in the morning you know i'm just running commands and i'm being free you don't want to think about it yeah exactly and then if something weird happens it's like oh no was that what i was expecting so yeah the planning is and labbing is huge even syntax like when i first started i was terrified of every maintenance window and i was winging it i was a cowboy like uh see you know here we go because you know when you're new you don't know and somebody gives you the job and they're like all right man you know and people peer review it but they're all busy and like hey man it's on you you know knock it out but you know as years go by and you break enough stuff you're like you know what i'm gonna spend more time on this up front and you know lab it research it and labbing is huge for me like if you're in a maintenance window and you're putting commands in the syntax is wrong you're not doing it right like you should have worked all that out ahead of time and i think one thing to be said too is is that that feeling of anxiety is really nothing to be ashamed about and it's uh and one thing that he had said in there that he knows when he's got to just kind of step back for a second take a breath um and then get back into it that's that's important to know your boundaries know your limits but again having that that even line by line i know it may sound uh repetitive and in depth in the weeds but it helps it's helped me and yeah plan and test i just say uh e hands in that sucker i was wondering why dan was being so quiet through that entire thing and said to have the last word hey there's still cowboys out there oh yeah that's awesome all right our our next question comes from chris on twitter he asks who is the industry who in the industry has had the biggest impact on your learning journey and why um two names for me all right i've got two i'm wondering if we have the same two who in the industry before i screw up the answer the question is what who in the industry had the biggest impact on me like on your learning journey and why yeah jeremy char and keith barker dang it dude you stole my answers i mean they were the you know yeah they were the guys right like when you're coming up and cbt nuggets and it's some of the best training out there and at ccna right there it's just some of the best ccna training i've ever run into that the people that came before me told me you know go to cbt nuggets you know jeremy and keith and i mean that's i think it's the best stuff that i've run into i mean there's a lot of other great content out there but for me they're my two they're my two guys yeah they they definitely kept me motivated watching their videos they weren't you know they're not dry during their videos and that was a big thing because like reading the uh the ocgs is just like i don't know man it's like uh nails on a chalkboard kind of thing but uh they you know jeremy is just over the top see am i right in my opinion just their content won't get you the pass but right right they you know they're bringing that material to life they're making it interesting they help push me through that awfulness of the ocg like you said it's kind of like a motivation right it it motivates you to learn deeper into like why something was working or why they were able to configure something the way they did you know they're like a smarter version of tony robbins well you know like they're motivating you but they're not just like hey man go get it like rock one let's get life by the horns right there you know they're smart guys who know technical stuff but they sprinkle that stuff in like hey you can do this let's go get it you know here's some neighbors isn't this great like they make this stuff interesting which isn't the easiest thing to do sometimes oh for sure yeah but i think it's they're they they just show their passion for this stuff right right that's a passion i don't think exactly like jeremy he just gets like super excited just about making an ethernet cable like so it's just it's it's uh what's the word it's infectious can i float a third honorable mention aj yeah aj it's aj knox okay yeah i i didn't come up on knox he's relatively new i think he's only been doing it a couple years so he wasn't around when i was consuming ccna material but but he's my newer newest kind of guy i go to he's got so much good material on such a wide variety of topics and it's all engaging it's got a ton of free stuff on youtube if you don't have a cbt nuggets like i when i'm looking for stuff i usually run into like an ox video how do i do this in eve how do i do this and like you know how do i do something in python or like whatever like ansible he's just got so much good material and he's he's engaging he keeps it you know entertaining so that's that's my third honorable mention there you go nice i do want to throw out one uh cisco press author and the a big reason for it was um actually outside the book and in its windowlodem so he's been writing ccna books for years and when i went through it the last time i got a lot of value from his uh companion website his search skills dot com i think is what it is and he just tons of questions tons of of labs for you to to do up so i think that was probably as big of a factor of my learning journey through the ccna as the the book itself was what about you aj um i i can't pin it on just one you know person or entity i mean for me it's it it's been my instructors in college it's been mentors i've had people that i've worked with the community you know like i get stuck on problems and i'm google searching and i find other people's blogs like hell that's that's what inspired me to start my blog kind of thing and so those are all the different things that have kind of helped push me contribute me or contribute to helping me along kind of thing and i i mean obviously you guys have named some fabulous resources that i will not dispute argue with it just you know for me it's been a combination of things gotcha that's good yeah i agree with that too awesome uh so gerard wrote in from twitter and asked what is the worst ticket you've ever had to deal with in your careers i don't have the there isn't a worst ticket that that sticks out in my mind but there is a ticket that i will never forget uh and that was uh was working at a manufacturing company and somebody from the engineering department submitted a ticket and in their ticket they requested that we unblock urban dictionary from our web content filter and the reason they cited was so they could understand and decode their co-workers that's weird yeah yeah so yeah was an that ticket gets assigned to the hrq right right uh yeah they were i think they were a little bit older uh you know they definitely weren't hip or cool hey but at least they were trying they were willing to learn yeah they wanted to see what the what the lingo was these days sure i do believe i received a ticket one time uh requesting that i reboot the internet so all right did you do it well i'm not gonna tell you oh okay yeah there's always the funny ones so maybe not the what's the the worst ticket i don't know if it's the worst ticket but so we used to use um a product called websense it was our content filter yeah way back in the day well we had this one lady she worked in the mail room and she she would get like ill right like sassy just mean mad whatever you want to say she would put a request in that she wanted to get on youtube and she started cussing us out in the in the request you know because because what you could do with uh websites is you could basically say like hey request you know this this page and then give a reason you know what i'm saying and and so we would get that email with that reason and it would just be her passing us out like you're blocking me you're trying to watch what i'm doing yada yada and it's it was like lady chill it's not me it's it's what you know it's the it's the uh the rules that management put in place you know we're just we're just like the enforcer but uh yeah that was probably i guess the worst ticket i've ever had to deal with uh so yeah about you andy you worked in a knock you probably saw a lot of tickets it's yeah it's just a two-year blur of awfulness there is every ticket's terrible nice yes all right here's here's a fun video sent in by a listener hi guys my name is andrew i'm tim's better half i was just wondering what your wives think of your podcast thanks bye oh nice that is awesome yeah i did did you know that was coming that that wasn't in the show notes oh my god i strategically left that out i got a wonderful message from my wife earlier today via instagram she sent me that video and uh she said don't tell tim don't judge me don't tell tim can i answer this question yes yes all right the reason i want to answer it is because i just talked to my wife uh you know 30 minutes before we opt on here so my wife doesn't listen has never listened and she told me she was going to listen and still hasn't listened but i wouldn't be able to do this without her support right so we're we're on vacation we're down here the place isn't big they're sleeping 10 feet from me um and i asked her tonight when i saw that the timing might work out tonight i said you know are you okay if i hop on tonight i know we're on vacation and like you know does this ever bother you like you know please tell me i don't want this to screw up our marriage our vacation right and um she says that really sweet like you know i love that you're doing this podcast it seems like you guys are helping so many people and like she's like i never once like get annoyed that you're doing this and like so i don't know it just kind of it it hit me tonight because she kind of gets it like what's been happening i guess and and the fact that that means enough to her that she's like man go do your thing like i mean dude we're on vacation we should be like sitting on a deck having a drink out front like down the shore but she's like you know i'll go in the back i'll read a book and so just the support of my wife i wouldn't be able to do this you know without that and it's just really cool so she's not a listener but she's a supporter i wouldn't be here without her support so stan very cool yeah so i i don't think my wife listened to a single episode she's uh actually going back to what i think it was conor that was the rn my wife's an rn and uh so she's not into tech at all uh but so when when we first started this i was like hey i'm uh i'm gonna be joining a podcast and she's like okay and i was like all right cool you know and so i mean you know but then i told her yeah right and then i told her like tonight you know i'm like hey you remember that podcast that you know i was joining way back when almost a year ago i was like yeah we just hit 90 000 downloads and she's like it's like the the meme from the office when michael scott's like hmm tell me more uh i don't know she she's definitely supportive of it you know she she knows that it's in it when i look at this is a selfish way for me to look at this is like an escape right uh i have fun at this this is a highlight it's one of the highlights of my week basically and uh hanging out with you guys and whatnot it's awesome so i think she sees it as kind of like bro time you know what i mean so she's definitely supportive of it though but you tim i can't she didn't she didn't say what uh how she felt about it tim i can't tell is your wife supportive of uh doing this podcast she helped make my bongos for the poem she did she taped those metal things together yeah she's she she's been incredible she gets uh she gets as excited as i do about about coming on here um and she she listens she she has been listening i didn't know that she was uh for a while but but she has been because she calls me out in some of the things i say which is good we keep each other in check but yeah it's it's the those intros you do that that's kind of weird you're kind of a nerd yeah that's part of it now she she's she's been incredible it's uh it's really been cool that it's not just uh uh okay yeah go have fun it's you know she asked about it she asked about you guys um it's been really cool tell her i'm doing good yeah i sure will and uh i'm sure aj's going to tell us i don't want to steal his thunder but i know uh aj your wife has been uh heavily involved too with with merch and whatnot and and helping us out so let's hear it yeah she she's been super supportive and um so she's she's recently changed jobs now so she used to be very customer facing working at a branch at a credit union here in town and she took a new job where she's now you know back office knowledge worker so she's not interfacing with people all the time so she's she's taking the podcasts uh and and she has finally listened to some of our episodes and she said a lot of that stuff is it's over her head but she enjoys listening to it and uh she's she's uh a super fan of tim's with his intros dang it uh the other night i was gonna i was gonna ask who's their favorite uh but i think i just got last night we were we were sitting on the back deck enjoying some drinks relaxing in the nice weather and she's just like play the intros play the interest so i like fired up some of the past episodes or tim stone extra intros and she's like do the one where he talks about stretchy pants that one's funny i'm just realizing we've been talking about like a blooper reel we're gonna have to have just like a tim intro loop you know people can hop on to and just yeah all the interest uh that's really cool is is she's asking questions about the podcast and um when when i share with you guys like how many downloads we've hit i very excitedly share with my wife and i i think like early on when it was like a thousand or you know i was like wow cool way to go honey but now it's like it's a it feels a lot more genuine like she's like wow like ninety thousand like whoa so yeah very very cool very supportive and definitely couldn't do any of this without her her support and love so appreciate it honey i'm so psyched that mrs bertino sent in a video message that's amazing that's pretty awesome that's that's above and beyond that you said this a long time ago i'm wondering if at some point we could make this work but i would love to do like a wives episode where they sat around and you know talked about their experience you know i think it'd be so cool to have the wives on yeah we uh i i brought that up to andrea and she she would be full send i think oh boy she's in i don't know i don't think shea would get on here but she well i think okay here we go we'll do the wives and dan yeah what we're gonna do is we gotta get together we'll leave them alone and we'll record the conversation and we'll just leave out some wine and then the rest will work itself out well right sort of sounds like a terrible idea actually i got my wife to agree but i have to provide copious amounts of wine oh right okay right yeah god help us i don't know what you'll say awesome all right uh next question comes from steel network from twitter what's your favorite snack um probably uh chips of any kind chips are like my kryptonite yep yep i i have two my my two favorite snacks i i want to start this by saying i never eat them together okay one is beef jerky i love love me some jerky and then uh the other uh i like to make this like a bowl of yogurt blueberries bananas and a lot of honey mix it all together yeah i wouldn't put those together no no i wouldn't either wait what kind of jerky do you like teriyaki do you like peppered steak what the there's uh there's a particular one i'm really fond of right now it's like a honey glazed kind of thing is it is it jack links or uh no i i would show you a bag that i keep in my desk drawer but i finished it just the other day i got a restock i'm a little disappointed that there was zero maple syrup in any of that yeah i guess you can add it after the fact well that's in every other meal i can't have it snacks are for indulging yeah andy got a snack ice cream is my kryptonite i got a problem oh yeah i'm with you brother yeah i i take a spoon of the container like there's a half a gallon i'm i got problems like i don't even bother with a bowl what which is there a flavor that you like over the other ones i love me some turkey hill chocolate peanut butter me some oreo cookies and cream ooh i love it i love me some strawberry cheesecake nice chubby hubby yeah chubby hubby now we're going to the ben and jerry's cookie dough you gotta love a good cookie dough i don't do toppings i don't know yeah i don't really deal with toppings i don't need them and just all that stuff in there is bright ice cream yeah dude and the other thing i can eat an unlimited amount of are caramel creams you ever see those things that they look like i don't know what that means about the ones that come in the little uh they're like a little foil yeah just a little round john it's got the caramel circle with a little cream inside my wife gets me five pound bags of them a couple times a year and they're just trouble tim i think it's a uh an older generation i was gonna say i was gonna say peanut brittle great way to sneak that one in dan that was incredible you know i was going to bust all your call me fat man all right i had that one coming we're even again all right aj timmy oh you already said yours all right tim beer oh yeah yeah that's right that's a favorite um i guess i don't know if they're everywhere or if it's i don't think it's a regional thing but uh they're the little uh belvita uh little like breakfast biscuit things oh yeah maybe they're only around here i don't know but they are here there's like cinnamon brown sugar uh just little like breakfast biscuit things those things are incredible okay i don't i don't think i've heard of that before also cashews are really good oh yeah i do like cashews yeah salted cashews why why is andy laughing right now i don't know just dad just i like the banter oh yeah i do like cashews we could just talk for an hour and a half about oh yeah i like those two oh and those um yeah yeah just go down the line maybe maybe we should have ended on the snack question right all right uh carl from twitter in uh an office dress code for it what's yours an office dress code right is he asking my opinion or is he asking what is my actual dress code or or what should it be i'm not really sure what he's for me i work from home uh i've never done the working in my boxers thing but right now it's just shorts and a t-shirt i don't go on video very often so i don't really have to worry about looking fabulous yeah definitely like if i'm working from home just shorts and t-shirt kind of thing um when i'm at the office we do have a casual dress code at the office um we have to wear like a polo or a button-up shirt and then some kind of like khakis or dress pants i have those uh like dockers or something i don't know um and then we have to wear uh dress shoes we can't wear tennis shoes so okay it's a little bit more strict but my school my company is kind of an old school uh kind of company they've got they've got kind of an old school mentality so i think that's why i'm actually really comfortable in like button up shirts and khakis and that kind of thing so i don't mind all that but at home it's usually either that or i i try to do that for video calls that kind of thing not khakis obviously but that jeans and i'm also in the basement so it's cold year-round and so do you have like a little heater down there or do you put a blanket on your legs or how do you do that i i have not graduated two blanket legs dan no hey i'm just saying maybe maybe snuggies maybe i could do it is that still the thing i think so um just gotta be comfy man okay yeah i hear you yeah andy your ear of the work from home persuasion uh what's your dress code yeah i've been home for like three years now i guess i mean i'm always in a t-shirt you know shorts when it's nice probably some swishy pants when it's a little chilly you know those little whatever it is our little workout swishy pant jobs whatever the heck they are though i call them squishy pants i don't know what else they are no i did too growing up they were always swishy pants and squishy pants you know but when i was going in the office it was you know jeans and a in a whatever golf shirt sneakers do you ever have to go into the office no i'm never going to office again ever yeah nice i didn't know if they did like a quarterly get-together kind of thing i mean obviously not in the last year but well so yeah well now we're we're geographically separated you know i'm on a new team and people are all over the place auto macho is in omaha a lot of people are in hagerstown maryland they're just all over georgia i think we should do an episode on that some someday talking about like because because i that's that's so um what's the word that's so like dang it i don't wanna use a word like foreign that's so foreign to me working from home for like three years straight because like i said my the where i work is kind of an old school mentality and they like people there kind of thing oh i'm in i'm in finance dude they're very old school you know well so for the for the five years i was going in i was commuting three hours a day oh gosh so after five years or three hours a day bro i'm i'm good you know what i mean yeah cause all of a sudden like when my son was born all right never going on a rabbit hole but when my son was born i didn't see him in the morning because i'd have to leave to drive to the train station to get on the train to get to the city to walk seven blocks to the thing so i didn't see my son you know in the mornings for like the first six months of his life and i'd see him for about a half hour before i had to go to bed at night so i give him a bath you know every night just to have some time with him so that's why i love working from home so much is because that time now goes you know to my kids and my family yeah i think that's a good note yeah it's like that's like that's the the best number one on my list of why i've enjoyed working from home this past year is i've gotten i've been able to watch my kid grow up basically so that yeah that's been very nice it's huge i mean if i had an office 20 minutes from me i wouldn't have a problem going in but you know 45 minutes an hour hour and a half one way yeah i'm good all right we're getting off the topic here aj steers everybody answer today all right bring us in um let's go back to jordan hey guys i have a question for you around cognitive abilities so i'm rapidly approaching 40. i'll be 40 later this year and i definitely feel that i don't have the sharpness that i did when i was in my you know 30s or 20s when it comes to picking up new technologies it takes me a little longer when it comes to picking up a new concept maybe it takes me an extra day or so definitely longer than i used to in my in my prime so i know some of you are circling that 40 age bracket as well how do you handle that uh what have you found that helps you get through that pick up that new technology a little bit faster and and maybe make you not feel as behind as i might be feeling lately i'll i'll take that question i'll start i'm happy to start um i have definitely noticed that uh but what i have also noticed is that my brain is like a muscle and so the more that i practice learning and retention the easier it gets you know when uh if i go like a long gap not really doing anything and just getting into like robot mode not really trying to learn something uh and then i go back to try to learn something um the other thing that is not on my side is time right like we just got done talking about this answering the last question like we've got a family now i don't have a ton of time to dedicate to labbing and screwing around with technology that i used to when i was in my 20s you know going to college and stuff like that so that that certainly doesn't help but um yeah i i try to you know do some learning refresh do some labbing kind of thing um when i have the the opportunity to do it just so stuff doesn't go too stale all right what do you say grandpa who's he who's he addressing nice nice baby tim you all know exactly who i was addressing uh how do we deal with slowing down over the years is that what this cat's asking yeah as you get older you're not as sharp so how do you how do you keep that blade sharp i guess copious amounts of cocaine i had to wait because andy didn't laugh right away so that was my comic timing i was waiting to see what you guys would do no man i'm you know i don't do anything um right on whatever works for you yeah i mean it's a it's a real thing right i mean i drink more coffee than i used to um it but so you know uh you know trustree i mean it bothers me that i'm on this podcast advertising that i'm in my 40s and slowing down because you know i may need another job someday and i hope these people interviewing me aren't like oh yeah you're the old guy who sucks at this job and isn't as you know as fast as the young guys like you know i may need a job someday so it's it's a trick it's a slippery slope but i'll give an honest answer um i find and we talked about it in the mental health episode the more self-care stuff i do for myself the sharper i am so exercise meditation sleep i used to give up a lot of sleep so i could study all night yeah um so like this week on vacation i'm getting eight hours of sleep a night i've been riding 15 miles every morning 5 30 in the morning on my bike you know getting like an hour and every morning and i feel pretty darn good but you know i'll get home i'll be tired i might not exercise as much blah blah blah blah and i kind of start to get like a little foggy so to me it just comes down to the more i take care of my my my body and mind the sharper i am and when i go down the other path of like eh you know i'm gonna eat ice cream tonight i'm gonna sleep late tomorrow i'm not gonna work out i'm not gonna when i stop doing my self-care stuff i start to kind of feel foggy so it requires effort you know what i mean honestly for me cardio has always been the biggest thing that keeps me sharp if i'm getting some cardio every day i feel pretty darn good when i stop i get foggy and i start drinking more caffeine so so what i'm hearing from you is it's actually not like studying and that kind of stuff it's more about actually like your mental state and in physical working out that kind of thing is what helps you better with that taking care of my health yeah you know i mean your brain's connected to your body right if if you're sitting around eating caramel creams doing nothing all day you know i mean your body and brain isn't getting the fuel it needs but yeah for me it comes down to exercise and if i'm working out i feel pretty darn good so okay you know it's it's self-care but it's a real thing you slow down every 10 years when i was 20 i was a hell of a lot i had more piece of vinegar than a 30 than at 40. so you know um but you got to fight that you know and i mean there's yeah i i see some old heads that look great they're out there run a marathon so you know you just you got to put in the work i think thanks for including that question aj hey i i feel like i have to answer that just as much as anybody else it affects us all you know like i'm going to be 40 in a couple of years yeah i definitely so like for me um i've noticed myself slacking in the sense of that go-getter uh drive that i used to have when i was like 22 so when i got in 90 i was 22 um because when i first got into it man it was just hit the ground running on everything like any issue it did not matter what the issue was i was willing to try to figure it out right even if it wasn't my problem if it was an issue that i technically didn't even have to answer or look to or anything like that i would still try to figure it out and now that i've i've gotten my my years under the belt um i'm definitely not as driven on that stuff as as i used to be so i feel like i need to i probably need to do some some more of what andy's talking about doing more mental like meditation and uh probably do some physical you know cardio workout and stuff because maybe that would i just feel like i'm getting old and grumpy like like i'm not i'm not like old old yet you know like andy old yet but i definitely am getting more like andy grumpy i think uh hey dad but you want to stand up and compare bellies no i don't want you to either you might be young bro but you look old yeah it's all it's all good uh but yeah so i think for me is like i think i need to figure something out so uh to kind of get back to that drive that i used to have i think the older you get the less you feel like you have something to prove and you get some wisdom you're not fighting every battle like like you said if it wasn't your issue to solve you were jumping on it and then you get along in years you're like i have to jump on every grenade you know what i mean especially the ones that aren't mine there's some wisdom there you know you pick your battles are you are you saying i'm getting wise then i am even though you keep calling me old i'm still being nice to you yeah come on man i've got that video where you called me fat dude i apologize i'm sorry it's just one of those things that slipped out what do we got aj we got a seventh question from this cat we got a lot of questions no no we'll have a fourth we'll get another one later so this this next one comes from isaiah in the discord and he asks what do you think of the neural link implants and how it would affect the world of networking would you get one um nope nope this this right here is enough of a neuro link for me i forget what it is it's a chip in your head is that i remember looking at it back way back yeah i'm not familiar i think it's just kind of like a like an implant i'm not really sure it's it's basically connecting yourself to the network and i i don't think that it's it's the way i think i'm trying to disconnect as it is yeah so i think the the way or the the idea of it is like the matrix right like yeah during what she got in the or she needed to learn how to fly helicopter and like she just literally you know downloaded the how to fly a helicopter can you do that again dan no but i i think that's kind of like what it goes uh i can't talk tonight i think that's along the lines of what what the question is um but i i personally don't think i would get one i for sure would not get one for like the first five or ten years of them just let them work out all the kinks and everything like that yeah so obviously we haven't done any research right but this thing sounds pretty cool so like the first google thing is like it helps paraplegics with simple tasks such as using a phone making mouse clicks so cats who can't move anything can interact with the world around them with this thing in their head so uh you know it sounds like it has some pretty cool applications um i mean it's another network device right like i i i wouldn't want one but you know i'm but if you flip the tables and you're in a position where you needed one like well that's right that's that's what i was trying to get at is if it solves a problem that i have you know like my father-in-law for example has diabetes type two and he's pricking himself and you know all that stuff and i know that there's like new stuff where you're like you can get a sub thermal thing and it checks it already and it tells your phone when you need something like so something like nora link like hey if you're you know paralyzed and it can help you you know answer a door or answer a phone or something that sounds pretty cool but um you know it's amazing we live in the future right all this cool stuff happening and maybe this is you know i don't know but i i think of like if i'm sleeping at night and then all of a sudden i get a picture yeah right right i mean my smartphone's in true you know more intrusive than i'd like it to be in my life i can't imagine having something in my brain without knowing enough about it and bringing on a lawsuit from nora link against the podcast i think well here's the thing i i'm about to go on iran here but oh god you have you had like these phones right i mean you we all know they're listening they're absolutely listening because you can be talking about a product and then the next second you're on you're on uh amazon and it's like hey would you like to buy this product and it's like how did they know to put that in front of me and so whenever we talk about like uh neurolink and that kind of stuff i don't know i just get freaked out about it because it's like now now you know i can control what i search in google that kind of thing but if i'm thinking something and it picks up on that like nah i that's too far for me i i'm i'm kind of like uh i think it was aj i think you like you said i i'm i'm trying to disconnect yeah more and more yeah i'm looking at the high level description it's a computer inside everyone's brain i mean high level now i'm good on that i'm i don't know the computer but in my brain it's busy enough up there i guess to answer more of his question he said how would this affect the world of networking i think it's gonna be just like um you know i i listen to some other podcasts and some of the ones that i've listened to here recently they're talking about the ever-growing demand of like uh mobile devices like cell phones and all that tablets everything that's becoming more mobile and with 5g and that kind of stuff i can only imagine this being another device like that where they're probably going to use some kind of form form of like ipv6 or something like that or whatever's next in our future but yeah we're just we need uh we need some more of uh of elon space internet yeah it's a it's an iot device right essentially right right their ip address like what do you do when somebody hacks your chip in your brain right like yeah i it's it's yeah i'm good i don't want one yeah no thanks i'll i'll wear my tinfoil hat so could you imagine this stuff you could get away with though like if if i had a neurolink and you finally run into that help desk ticket that really upsets you and you're just walking through the office you know showing spirit fingers to everybody it's like oh somebody hacked my neural link i can't control it what's going on i can't stop eating these donuts all right uh next question comes from gibson on twitter uh he's asking about salary so how much can one earn with the comptia n plus and ccna sir annually in the us and how much can one earn oh that's the same question so let's let's start that over again and uh i'm let's let's keep this one short because these questions are you know whatever uh so this one comes from gibson on twitter how much can one earn with comptia n plus and the ccna certification annually in the u.s um i i would say that that answer is going to vary based on geographic location what a network engineer makes here in vermont is not going to be what a network engineer makes in philadelphia or omaha or nashville for sure uh there's lots of things that go into a salary you know the size of the company how much they can afford to pay you how much they want to pay you or how much they think you're worth and then it's you know cost of living and numerous other things and the other thing that you have to consider is like the the total the total package right like there's you know how good is the health care package it could be that the health care package at one company they might be paying you more but you're paying so much more in health care that you might actually bring home more money somewhere else kind of thing there's lots of things to consider i don't think that we can just slap like a raw number on this i'll give numbers uh i just did a quick search on glassdoor and it says average for ccna is 71 000. okay all right i'll give you real numbers based on my experience as a cable guy in philadelphia area i made 52 000 a year that's the most money i was able to make i was making like 22 dollars an hour and then every overtime holiday anything i could grab i think 52 i hit then i got my ccna and got a job at the knock and they paid me 62. same area new jersey so i got like a 10k pump and then i worked the night shift for a year for another eight grand a night like you know i got shift diff or whatever it was yeah so i see that goes into what aj was talking about right the circumstance you know yeah so i went from 50 to 70 getting my ccna but i had to work nights and it was awful and blah blah blah so but yeah it's it's an impossible question to answer but that's that's what i mean hey good example philadelphia area okay thoughts from anybody else oh you guys nailed it i got nothing to add on that and there's i guess the only thing i do is there's plenty of resources out there uh to to look up and different opinions you can get so the one you can get your cc a day but finding a place to give you a job is a whole different podcast yeah the resource dan brought up glassdoor is a good one yeah yeah if you're researching companies that you potentially want to work for or wondering what other others experience have been that's a great one to start and that's an average over america by the way true so all right uh our next question comes from dusty via email if money were not an issue what would your dream job be and he would also like to send a special roll tide up to dan in tennessee you might not be able to see this dusty but dan is not impressed i'm gonna assume that he's from alabama so i i believe i believe so yeah yeah all right money's not an issue with what's your dream job i'm gonna start by saying that this is my dream job yeah i love doing the the content creator thing i'm having an awful lot of fun doing the podcasting thing i love writing articles on my blog but it's it's a catch-22 right like i wouldn't be able to do what i do on the podcast and the blog without having my job as a senior deployment engineer for a cisco partner right like yeah i get really great experience that i can come back here and share and be relatable and all that fun stuff so it's a it's a really tough catch 22. yeah content creation has been my favorite part of my career for the past year or so however long we've been doing this prior to this wonderfulness i always wanted to be a fighter pilot and parlay that into being an astronaut my whole life wanted to be a fighter pilot turned astronaut so that's very interesting about you tim um i i will give the same answer of of hanging out with you guys on a full-time basis would be cool um but i will add another thing i i always have this uh this kind of fantasy is probably a dumb word but being like a uh a fiction writer and sitting in you know a cabin in like vermont or something and just this this beautiful space you're looking out on and you're just getting inspiration and writing drinking coffee and hanging out i just think that would be so cool now i don't have the creativity for that but whatever have you heard your interests here lately did you just dog on me for saying drinking coffee andy well so i'm okay the whiskey would be in it okay most most writers are hot messes and alcoholics so i i i i just wait i i don't think you'd be drinking coffee in this cabin is all i'm saying no you probably would not we know beer would be involved yeah that's pretty cool though that that's a that's a different one i'll buy your book tim so i appreciate that yeah wait what what would it be called i i i can't say it on the show oh okay that kind of fantasy fifty shades of tim i wanted to change it i gotta go get my bongo did we get an answer from everybody no i haven't answered it we gotta hear dan if money wasn't an issue i don't know like the i think if i could merge this with like my uh wedding video like that that to me would probably be a lot of fun i i watch a lot of like uh youtubers that are you know in the in the photography and videography realm and i don't know i just love nerding out on those videos going over the over the gear and everything like that but i think if i could be a part of like i don't know if i'd want to be in front of the camera let me let me say that i think it would be cool to be part of a like a media group and but at least know what they're talking about that kind of thing right to where i don't know it'd help me with editing and that kind of thing you're great on camera dan you belong on on camera buddy thank you all right i don't i don't know if my southern twang is uh accepted very well maybe for dusty because he's in alabama so right right awesome all right uh next uh jordan has a fourth question for us this is the the last video question from jordan jordan thank you so much for sending these in and being a part of the show hey guys i'm wondering if you can tell me about a time when you took down prod unexpectedly and how you recovered from that how your boss is how the business has handled that and how you learned from that i can i can start with this one so i was working on a project a few years ago i was installing some new switches at a hospital and apparently it wasn't communicated to the hospital that we were doing a maintenance window that night um and we everything was going very well until we got to the storage and uh i tried to move the storage links over to the new switch and they didn't come back up and the vms got all sorts of locked up and it was it was bad it was real real real bad but uh we were able to get it figured out we we migrated the links back to the old switches we had to play around because they were configuring a port channel uh and and so yeah it took a long time but you know we just kept working slowly at it until things started to to come back up and settle back down but yeah i took down prod at a hospital luckily it wasn't like a big hospital it was kind of a really small hospital in a very rural area of the state so uh it wasn't like a level one trauma center thankfully yeah that'd be pretty bad yeah yeah how about you tim i can't remember if i've said it on here before or not um but it was a uh a completely self-inflicted wound and basically everything i did from start to finish was just wrong um i think i was building a new switch looking at a production switch for um just for an example and rather than you know copying a file off looking at a file i was you know on the ssh looking through it got a little backwards on which switch i was on thought i was on my console switch did the right erase did the reload oh no yeah yeah bad news um but i think part of the jordan's question was is how did you react and how did the company react and um the first thing is this has been brought up multiple times dan has had a really good story about it and it's owning up to it being honest giving detail i i think what i did is i i picked up the phone called and said uh this happened i did it i'm going to go fix it and you know that was it there wasn't any more detail that needed because i had to get it taken care of um but yeah it's just being open and honest and you just gotta take what what comes because you can't try to hide it because it's gonna going to be worse but i i mean it fared well i think time of day was was in my favor i hit a certain point in that area where it was less of a big deal so i took that as a win but yeah it was i i fared well people understood it was a mistake but owning up to it was i think the big thing and and now ever since then it's i make sure that i'm you know you change your processes after that when you get bit like that you don't want it to happen again and that's that's how you turn a mistake into a good thing and yeah it's just being cautious and making sure i know what i'm on and double checking things and yeah it was it was a learning experience so for me um i think i've kind of beaten my my big one to death about the the trunk um so i but i i do have another one and this one's pretty funny now this isn't network related this is uh server related but back when i was doing uh half system half network um but it was like literally literally like a month into my job uh so i had like never real world experience or anything like that and we had this they gave me the system now why they gave me this system i don't know because it was a pre-major system but uh it was like we basically have kind of like a portal that all of our users out in all the branch offices all their apps are in this portal right well i was going through all the because we we had like a you know a dev a uat a sit that kind of the different environments for this server well i was going through all those and upgrading them uh doing windows updates that kind of stuff and i got to the prod one and i just sent it like in the middle of the day i was like after i did it i got thinking i was like that was the broad server and uh then my boss you know he came over there and he and that was that was one where i i kind of deserved the cussing on that one um because he was just like what the hell what did you just do and i was like man i am terribly sorry i know because it was for probably around i don't know a thousand two thousand people that weren't able to get to this portal now um yeah it that was a that was a pretty bad one um now how did i react i mean i i waited until the updates finished so i didn't know what i was doing man i didn't know what maintenance windows and stuff like that were you know i yeah i i got a task to update a server and that's what i did so um looking back on it now that was really dumb but hey we you know listen learned didn't do it again so there's that andy uh i've never broken anything okay now um we've done a lot of damaging things in maintenance windows but i don't really think that's that exciting because you're supposed to you know you're allowed to break stuff in maintenance windows like we melted our entire wan zone in our biggest data center one night but whatever you know oh yeah exactly you know what i mean yeah um the biggest one that comes to mind kind of like you were saying dana was brand new i didn't know what i was doing they had me converting hundreds of clients from old school frame relay to mpls and i was on a roll i probably did like 75 of them i knew what i was doing and i just did to this one but i did all the other ones and i forget the exact reason why it happened but i overwrote i was just using the script on everything and i didn't look at sequence numbers or something but i overwrote the tunnels policy on a very large very global manhattan stock exchange company that you've all heard of whose ceo golfed with our ceo at the time which i didn't know any of this but well you know i did i did the you know 5 a.m was our window i guess during a weekday and i did it and 24 hours later when the 24-hour default tunnel timer expired and the policy it needed was overwritten by my new policy which had nothing to do with the old connected so i took down this office for hours um and i sat across from the knock and they said hey man i think this might have been you and i'm like nah bro that was like 24 hours ago like i you know i can't be me that was yesterday i didn't even know the tunnels had a timer and that you could overrate a policy and something could break a day later like this this was all news to me so but it was scary because it was during the day and it was a big deal and i was a contractor i just started the job i had a three month old at home this was like my first big network engineering job and my boss when it first broke he's like dude don't worry about it then that night i'm sitting down i have dinner with my family and he's like yeah man um apparently their ceo goffs with our ceo and he called him so you're going to be on a lot of phone calls the next two weeks but but they protected me they could have thrown me under the bus like hey he's you know they said all the right things and they protected me and and it was you know it was really cool and i never did that again dan like you said it's yeah yeah when you're new you don't know what you're doing i mean yeah i had my ccna i spent two years at a knock but you know there's a we're not plugging in toasters here these are complex environments and a lot of moving parts you know right but i think like one thing i would like to make sure that the messages comes across right is you know we can't live in fear of messing stuff up because honestly me messing stuff up like i remember that and so i'm not going to do that again you're going to break stuff yeah and i think what you need is a management team that will protect you like hey he was new he broke something that won't happen again we're sorry and that's exactly what they did which really meant a lot because i took a huge gamble leaving where i was to go to this place and yeah two two months in i took down this enormous client and i was terrified so fortunately you know and you can't know that in an interview right you're gonna ask them like hey by the way i have no idea what i'm doing and when i break your stuff are you gonna like protect me i don't know you might be able to do that but that's that's what i'll say is as somebody who's who's managed and led people i i would prefer that you you break stuff because you're you're trying and you're working you know rather than you know not doing anything because you're scared or you would rather just leave it to other people to do it because they're you know more experienced kind of thing like you don't get the experience if you don't try to do this stuff like this and as long as you do your due diligence you know do the research lab it do do your best effort but if you screw it up you screw it up and just own that you know like we've talked about on the show before like just own it just as soon as something happens if you know it's because of something you did or even if you think it's because of something you did like that would help the troubleshooting efforts you know like bring that kind of information up like hey i made this change earlier i thought i did it this way maybe it's impacting what's going on right now like contribute to that stuff be a team player don't try to hold it in don't don't you know don't try to hide from it just just own it and the biggest lesson i learned besides how tunnels work and that they actually have timers i didn't know about was you know you can get complacent like i had done 75 of them over the past two months without any impact at all like i had it down i knew what i was doing it was rinse repeat yeah and i you know i got complacent and didn't sweat the details you know like i should have the the sequence that i was writing in this new you know in this new connection to the mpls cloud happened to be the same sequence number of you know whatever the policy was i forget but i just it worked in 75 other routers but i wouldn't work in this one yeah and i'm like whoops i use sequence 10 so did they in the old towel whoops so you know it's a good lesson i'm you know you got to pay attention what you're doing to add to that a little bit though um i andy i'm the same exact way i i will never not sweat the details kind of thing ever again because every time i've done that something has bit me and uh so i and it's kind of funny so i did a you know that aci project here not too long ago um well the architect on that project he i think he was getting frustrated because he was i was doing a screen share and we were kind of going through the config and stuff but i was just super like i did so many show commands first before i put my command in and and he's just like come on let's let's you know get this going kind of thing and i'm like look man you just got to let me do my thing because i'm not i don't i did not rush whenever i'm sitting there configuring things i i i'm one of those where i love copy paste but when it comes to like depending on the device that i'm i'm copying and pasting into like if it's our nexus cores or if it's like our firewalls or something like that i actually don't copy and paste a lot into those i start typing them out make sure i hit the tab so that i'm it's kind of like you were talking about the syntax errors and stuff you know i'm checking to make sure that the command i'm about to paste in there is actually going to work you know because like if something's jacked up or i'm in the wrong uh what do they call that when you're in the wrong branch i guess uh you know i i gotta make sure that i'm where i need to be and i'm not just gonna send that code into it um so yeah i i'm with you andy i never again yeah and because of that experience i now look for those land mines like i'm expecting something to be weird somewhere in me to over you know which is what tim was talking about earlier just really getting in there and you know laughing the hell out of it and preparing and looking under all those you know secret places like what can i break here you know find it during the day when you're preparing right yeah you got to make the most of the mistake otherwise it's just going to happen again and then you look bad when it happens again and again and again and it's harder and harder to defend that guy why did you do it again right you're not as they you know you don't look as reliable at that point right like if if you're if you a lot of a lot of misses here like so i don't know yeah all right that's a good question though i like that one yeah that was a really good question uh so this one comes from karithi on twitter they say hey there i would like to know about how a fresher in the industry so someone just starting out uh and he gives the specific example that in his case he's a uni student with a fresh ccna got a very impressive score uh and they have a year or more to graduate he's wondering how's somebody like him going to start off right like what's the starting point for a complete noob and you know they've just never worked anywhere they've got their ccna they're going to be out of college soon what's what's the beginning look like for them he has a year left is that what he said yeah he should do a damn internship now while he's in there yeah that actually would be nice get i was actually going to answer that question with a question when on with your guys's opinions if you're in that position internship or right out of school and and you're just trying to get into it is any experience bad experience i don't think so just to get going i think you know because we you know we've talked to people who work in the help desk and uh depending it it's that word depends you know we it's a it's our favorite it's a it's a major i.t term um because it depends right if you if you can find a job in a help desk you know it but you're in the mindset that you want to go into network engineering well guess what if you're in that position you you have access to all these tickets right and a lot i don't know about everyone else's scenarios but a lot of times with tickets when someone solves it they put in the ticket what was the problem and how they fixed it kind of thing so right there you kind of have like an information system that you know has a bunch of problems and answers you know so i think that's a good position to be in plus you're you're dealing you know if a user calls you you and they're like hey i can't get on the wi-fi you know well now you're actually troubleshooting a network issue whether you know you're really thinking about it or not but that you're you're trying to figure that out uh so i think the help desk is a perfect place to start you you're not you're not the one who has to sit there and fix everything but you're at least kind of watching what's going on so you and then if you like uh i'm trying to remember who it was was it eugene that he's in the help desk but he uh also has a network team that he like they show him stuff every once in a while was that yeah yeah um so and that's perfect right because you you already you're fully employed there you know and you get to see the environment but then also you've got people you've got connections in the team that are willing to show you like hey this is how you know that problem that you called in you put you open a ticket for us this is how we solved it and like you know show the interface and that kind of thing and i i mean i think that's excellent starting out experiments right there i agree but yeah i'm gonna echo that dan i i think starting out you you need to be cognizant of the opportunities that are available um i i will admit i had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder i got out of school i had this you know networking knowledge pounded into my brain for multiple years and i'm like okay i'm going to go out and do this thing right away and and i was a little miffed that i i couldn't find a job getting straight into networking because i had zero experience which was legit i did not so i got into a place where i had experience on the end user computing side and as you all know i'm still with that company and and one of the biggest things about that was is i was the boots on the ground at all the different facilities i learned the facilities i learned the business and then when i got the opportunity to get onto the network team already knew where data closets were i already knew the lay of the land it just it just helped so i think it's important to you know really grasp the opportunities especially early on that are out there and just soak it in ask the like andy says ask the thousand questions be curious because back to your eugene statement dan is he's getting noticed every day because he cares and he's and he's trying to learn he's people are never gonna forget him yeah so it's just make the most of those opportunities whatever they are and here's another thing too is like if you if you get in a place and you're able to like in my scenario right now i feel like i was a little bit lucky in that i got a position straight into the you know infrastructure team basically um but with that being said you know i was still i didn't come in and they expected me to just know everything right i was kind of like a junior i guess you would say and so one of the first things i started doing is walking the network right you know i i just i went from the core switch show cdp neighbor and then i started drawing everything and i just started digging into that right and i that's awesome i don't know if that answers part of his question or not but if you start doing that you start learning how to navigate a network in like cdp or you know whatever depending on you know which vendor they have but yeah steph fellas uh wait a minute next question oh the knock knock my answer for them on you know where am i going to go where should i go and i know it's i know it's i'm saying that because it's where i came from but i almost think that everybody should spend at least six months in a knock but as a new guy coming out of school you get exposed to so many different issues so many different problems so many different vendors stuff's broken stuff's impaired uh it's it's just a really good environment you get that network engineer title or network something in your title i think for somebody coming out of school i mean if you can go right into infrastructure build like dan rock on you know um i i needed a little leapfrog step before that um and the knock was just a great great learning experience so look at the knock whoever that yeah i i would say a knock is a lot like a help desk but like on steroids right like you're still yeah you're still getting tickets in you're triaging but it's it's usually more infrastructure network focused stuff that you're you're dealing with not i can't print or i can't see my chat videos you know it's yeah it's actual like uh real real uh or more specific network infrastructure i got you yeah sorry i mean step one you just wanted to get that i'm sorry i think that was perfect all right uh next question we're we're coming down to the end here fellas there's only three left so uh this one comes from andre he uh commented on a post on linkedin he said do you feel pressure to be good or perform well now that the podcast is listened to by a bigger audience than you expected and he goes on to say does it feel more like a job than fun at this point i'll jump right out the gate and say that this is so much fun uh and the fact that more people are listening to it than me anticipated doesn't uh hurt me or or phase me in the in the least i that gets me more excited that we have more people listening to this thing than we thought every time i i checked the download numbers and it just seems to keep jumping and jumping and jumping and jumping and it's it's really motivating that like we're we're doing something that people are enjoying they're learning something from it i don't feel any more pressure to to be better or or you know i'm just going to continue to be me and you know hopefully that's enough kind of thing right like i'm not going to try to be somebody i'm not because i think part of the biggest success that we've seen from this show is because of how authentic we are so you know if i make failures i'm going to talk about it if i have successes i'll talk about that too and share my strategy on how i was successful with whatever but you know more importantly i just want to be transparent and authentic with with the audience about what my experience is you know doing what i do i guess i'll go next um yeah so i definitely have felt the pressure of okay maybe i need to start getting more certs and and whatnot since this is kind of like what our podcast is about um not necessarily certs but it's like that's a major part of our of our field right and and i think you know the reason why i haven't really pursued certs and whatnot is because my current job you know they they don't really care about them uh so i haven't had that motivation i guess that in that sense but now that i've been doing this with you guys so i guess this kind of goes back to our that other question about you know who who's had a big impact on your learning journey and i will say this community because i don't know it it i feel like i need to you know you guys are talking about rest out last last week right and some days i feel like that i i've hit that right where it's i don't feel mentally stimulated as much anymore because i i kind of you know i've known this network for nine years so i know it like the back of my hand um it's like a roller coaster so some days you know i feel like i'm in a low where it's like i'm not learning anything new i'm not working on some new fun project or something but then all of a sudden you know we start upgrading a lot of things we get new devices and you know new vendors and it's like now i'm trying to learn all this stuff at once kind of thing so i i i definitely get hit by that and i think now i'm like ready to start going into more like certifications and whatnot and i and i feel like being on this podcast i need to have the creds to back up being in front of people uh i don't know that's just me but and then also the let's hear does it feel more like a job it can feel like a job when our audio gets screwed up and i have to spend hours cutting and chopping it up in in post but just fix it in post damn yeah just fix it in post um but no it's definitely fun this is fun it it doesn't feel like a job it doesn't i i was just playing because we've the last two weeks we've had we've had some audio issues and so it's just been like a nightmare editing you read my you read my mind dan so dan's been editing the show as of late which i really appreciate dan because it had been feeling like a job to me and it wasn't it was just wearing all me you know we spend whatever it is like an hour and a half two hours here sometimes and then it would take me another you know two hours to get it i'll edit it and out the door and it was just kind of wearing on me um so the editing felt like a job so i really appreciate dan you know picking it up and kicking butt with it um you know i don't think there's like pressure to perform for me that there's a bigger audience but i feel like it's kind of changed i don't say change the dynamic but like for instance there was a time period for us where we were coming up with topics five minutes before we recorded right and i'm just being fully transparent with the audience i did not like how that felt the bigger the audience got because yeah i felt like the audience is invested they're telling us how much this means to them and they love it and i don't feel like we're putting the proper care into coming up with content for them like you know one point it just can't be a couple of people sitting around talking shop like i think we should provide you know some value so i would say yes that the bigger the audience has got for me it just changed the feeling because i want this to be good i want people to keep that feeling of like they're getting something from it and just for me it felt like we were phoning it in at one point now i must say that around the time tim came on board there was like this fresh fire litmus and we scheduled topics you know out months now and i for what it can do for me is now i have some time to like research stuff and like okay like we have a topic coming up i'm not familiar with so like i'm gonna spend some time and do some research and dig around because i want to be able to bring something useful to the table and not just be like how'd you do that or you got kids or you know the old jokes that i used to throw around because i said the same thing every episode like it's gotten bigger people are you know so there ha there is a momentum that's built that makes it feel a little different to me but i think we're the same authentic guys doing the same show you know i the only difference is i just want this to improve and get better and better i mean now like sponsors are interested in this we've we had a sponsored episode which is going to help us help the community we have more sponsors approaching us like for me this isn't the time to let it just fall apart or not be good or phone it in i and we all have been doing this we're all putting in more and more effort and more and more work to keep this thing growing so that we can reach more and more people you know the 90 000 downloads or whatever i mean i'm just amazed at the growth and oh yeah i want to i i want to i want people to keep enjoying this and we're doing a lot of behind the scenes work now to you know to keep that moving i'm really excited for what's coming up the next few months like the fact that we're planned out a few months and and i look at that calendar and i'm like this is going to be really cool like now i'm excited you know where before i'm like damn we still don't have a topic we're starting in 15 minutes like you know i don't even know who's going to be on this thing is anybody like who's coming on who isn't so i don't know i just i i like where we're at and where we're going so it's a really good question you know by andre yeah the pressure for me has been trying to find my place so oh you found you guys brought in the front on those interests so in all seriousness seriousness you guys had an established brand um when i started coming around and i felt like i i was auditioning and and i need to be completely transparent i i've never gotten pressure from these guys they've been nothing but supportive but i felt that i felt the need to perform and to get this right because i don't know what i'm doing i don't i've never done anything like this before neither do we so all right you're in good company so so yeah it was it was really just just trying to to find my place and and make the decision that these guys had to offer me a spot on here make it the right one so that's been the pressure i think some of that is kind of going away um i do still get the uh the the kind of heart palpitations when we start the beginning of the episodes and and i almost kind of hope that doesn't go away because that that i think makes it exciting and fresh and and all that but yeah there was pressure for me and it'll be interesting i think we should uh ask that question again a year from now yeah yeah yeah i love it i love it yeah yeah andy i like what you said like it doesn't feel like a job but i think that we kind of mistook like what our our secret sauce was like our secret sauce is the off the cuff that sounds like you're having a conversation with a beer at a bar and those conversations typically aren't planned and we're not planning the conversations we don't plan stuff down we don't even do bullet points but to have a topic that we're going to discuss and you know know going into it that that surely helps and you know i've had a lot of fun planning this episode to ask us anything uh we're not wrapping up yet we got two more questions but it's it's been a lot of getting the interactions from the fans by email you know getting the video recordings the audio recordings it it's so much fun i i can tell we're definitely going to do this kind of stuff again in the future and at some point we're probably going to do the live i think a live one would be fun yeah absolutely so um but no i i mean it still feels fun no matter how much work you know we're putting into it it just feels fun and seeing the download numbers the reaction from the community the support that we're getting just and even within the community how people like lift each other up like that's that's a huge success that's the kind of stuff that motivates us it keeps us going and i i think as long as we have all that it's never going to feel like a job you know yeah i agree well put awesome all right uh the penultimate question here is going to be a video comes from ethan jackson over in the uk i will play it for you now hi aj i'm the other cohort of the art of network engineering it's even here from across the pond over in the uk i'd just like to first of all congratulate you on the huge milestone of the 50 episodes it'd be an absolute pleasure listening to all of the guests that you've had on listening to their stories in their journeys so again i'd just like to say a huge thank you from my perspective my question to yourself and all of the other cohorts is what is the proudest achievement that you've had since starting the art of network engineering thank you we're all like that's a great question it is i mean i i don't know so one thing is able to do giveaways right giving back to the community that's one of the main reasons we started this thing and the fact that you know people you know bought merch or you know donated or anything like that or we've had sponsors and stuff but we're able to give back to the community and i i that's awesome but i think that my the the favorite the the cream of the crop here is when we bring people on this show and they talk about their stories i don't care who it is right it can be someone who is at the tip top architect of this and that you bring them in here and we're like all right where did you get started at you know and they're like i worked at this grocery store and then i got in you know i did my ccna whatever and and i you know started in knock or you know whatever help desk they all started from like the same you know roughly the same kind of job title and right that is so awesome because i think that helps the community them hearing someone who's that that far into their career say oh yeah you know i was stocking shelves at a grocery store and then i turned into this and uh it just took off from there and hearing and hearing their secret sauce i guess i i think that's my favorite because you know aj you you share a lot of like fan mail and stuff like that and by far that seems to be the most um the the biggest thing that we hear is hey this this episode their story related i relate to that so much and that's helped me through you know whatever that that person is going through and the fact that we're kind of a platform to allow that to happen that's my i feel very accomplished that we've been able to do that so sorry long story short uh the fact that we've reached out to everybody yeah i think the fact that the uh that it the show is tied to the discord community is is what does it to me i think that i think that was genius from the beginning uh to not just go into it as we're going to do a podcast we're going to do a radio show but to have it tied to a base of of people that's just growing and helping each other and making discussions and there's people in that channel having live or not live but having real discussions about the show so you provided that platform as well uh to just allow the the podcast to expand i think was was genius from the beginning i think that's the biggest thing for me it's awesome andy what's our biggest accomplishment since starting the podcast right is that the question yeah yeah what we feel like our biggest what's your favorite thing that you've accomplished uh that's a different question um well it says we've that we've accomplished so i guess as a group i mean the first thing i thought is just that we've been able to give voices to people who may have not had them otherwise um you know you can you can be on twitter or linkedin or even have a blog that you write on um but to me the just i don't know if it's the chemistry of our of our team or exactly what is going on here but um the conversations we have with people have just been um i mean it they've been something else it's something i haven't seen you know i've been i've been in and around this industry for i don't know close to a decade i guess and i haven't run in anything like this um so i think it's interesting that i still can't put my finger on exactly what it is you know much i'm not sure why this is such a you know positive thing for people but giving voices to people that like beau for instance he just comes to mind for whatever reason like you know here's a guy starting from scratch starting over his whole world got turned upside down and just because of he's on the discord and he came on the podcast and we were able to help him with some gear and like i think the biggest accomplishment is just that we're able to help people whether it's helping them on their commute keep them entertained or whether it's getting them some gear or a book or a voucher or some training material or you know just kind of keeping them going in their journey of like you know what we've gotten so much like you always forward us the fan mail that we get which is just so humbling and then i get a ton of stuff you know dms and linkedin and like i'm just amazed at how many people keep reaching out thanking us and saying it's helping them because this is a lot of fun for us like like dan said this is one of the highlights of my week i mean i'm on a family vacation hiding in another room to do this because i really want to be with you guys and do this and our 50th episode's a big deal i didn't want to miss this um you know but the fact that we're giving people voices that might not have them otherwise and the fact that we're able to help people and we just get all this thanks of like thanks for helping me i mean it's just such a sense of gratification for me it keeps me going you know knowing that this is making a difference like it i think all any of us want to do is like make a difference in the world and you know i'm not trying to give more weight to this than there is but all the feedback we get people are telling us we're helping them so like what could be better than that you know for me i i agree i think that the the biggest accomplishment is the one we didn't plan for you know like i i never i never thought that a podcast would help people in the ways that it is helping people i'm i'm extremely thankful that people are getting these messages from us and and they are like using these takeaways to better themselves and and get excited about what they're doing and you know take their careers to the next level um it's it's it wasn't the intent from the beginning you know we never sat down in a planning meeting and said you know we're going to change people's lives you know that was that was never anything that we said i'm pretty sure you sent me that text message i'm sure i'm sure we're way over but because it's an ask us anything i have to ask you and i may have asked you this before but i don't remember your answer why did you start network engineering podcast like you started all this like why what was your intent what did you set out to accomplish like seeing what it's become in the past year the past 50 episodes what was that initial seed well i mean we were just study buddies in the study group and you came up with the pop like why what what did you um i i saw a gap and i i felt like there there was a lot of people on social media that you know they got their ccies they got the ccd they got tons of search they're super successful and then you know there's everybody else in between and i wanted to share their stories i wanted to share the common the common person stories and it's not to say that the common person can't be the ccie but like everybody starts somewhere and there's a journey that you take you know there was something that somebody said to me and and that's where the name of the discord came from it's all about the journey i had just got done uh publicly posting about another failure of of the route or the t-shirt exam and somebody said to me it's all about the journey and that was just this like it really is about the journey you know like if if you just go in there and you fail or if you just go in there and you pass like you don't appreciate it as much passing on the first time as you do failing and learning from it studying a little bit harder you know you don't appreciate putting a new switch into service or performing a maintenance window without screwing something up you know that's when you learn that's when the learning takes place and sharing the failures sharing your experience makes those failures like okay you know it's it's like normalizing failure and that's that's what i wanted to do from the beginning you know like from my twitter presence from my blog like i just wanted to share my raw experience and you know like having the podcast takes that to the next level there's a number of other podcasts that have influenced you know i think this podcast and um hopefully we'll continue to see those influences come out in the future but i just want to share people's stories and you know the the conversations that we were having in the study group it already felt like a podcast and it's like i had this idea do you guys want to try this kind of thing so uh yeah i mean we're definitely we're doing a lot more than i thought we would be doing and we're definitely accomplishing what i had hoped to and and still tons and tons more i'm super thankful to have you guys uh here helping and supporting and doing this thing with me and and thank you for accepting my crazy idea um because it's it's crazy like i can't believe we're recording episode 50 i can't believe we're about to hit 100 000 downloads um it's nuts that's fun very cool and uh i think with that that's a great segue into the last question i saved this one for for last for a reason uh this one comes from chris randall who recently had some success and ensured he got his first network engineering job on twitter he commented do you all realize just how much of an impact you have had in so many people's lives uh no yeah uh i'm gonna answer uh no no if it says anything to the three uh what you did and what you started is the reason i'm sitting here now and wanted to sit here now and and uh kind of not subconsciously i knew what i was doing but i i took that my first episode when i came on here i took that as an audition because i i knew that i wanted to be part of this and i said if i'm gonna get a chance to come back i'm gonna use this as as the stepping stone and so yeah that what you guys did from the beginning um drew me in drew me to wanna write on the website and it's not doing it just for me it's doing it for you know how however many people we have in the discord and how many downloads we have it's yeah it has i know it sounds corny and i i think i brought it up my episode too but it is it has been a a life-changing thing you guys have done things back to the the lab with bo um it's not it's actual tangible things that have been done so it's it's incredible guys yeah i can say it's not something i think about usually but because we get so much you know mail we we we get hit up on all the socials and linkedin and the discord group and and the download numbers as well like it just there's all this evidence right that it does mean something to people so that's just it's very humbling and i'm very grateful that uh you know the people are getting value out of this because it's just fun as hell for us but the fact that there's this ancillary benefit that it's making an impact just wow like what a wonderful unplanned you know side effect of this but here's another thing too andy about that is like you know when we have these guests on and and they talk about you know what whatever their journey was like i've i mean i relate to some of theirs so this is you know as much as an impact this might be making to other people it's also making an impact to myself i've i'm learning a lot when we have so yeah and having like we had open gear that's another thing you know we were talking about uh accomplishments like getting a sponsor like we went from this idea of you know we were a study group and we're like why don't we just talk about this stuff and and see other people's journeys to now we just had our first sponsored episode you know two weeks ago um that's crazy but you know that was i i learned in that in that uh so so yeah this is this is me learning too like i'm having fun and learning this so uh i learned from you guys all the time but yeah yeah each and every guest we have like this is i mean i guess selfishly right for us we're we're learning along with everybody else listening right which is kind of cool like yeah and i think that's kind of like what i'm trying to say is it i don't i don't i'm not sitting here thinking that i know everything and yada yada like i'm i'm i'm sitting in the audience with them you know yeah i just i just happen to be right here i thought it was so cool on wednesday uh when we had uh some issues with the audio and we didn't get the show out right away we actually had somebody pop up that was like hey y'all got one of those episodes it's just cool that that somebody you know called it out hey yeah supposed to come out at six o'clock in the morning where are you at yeah and i'm driving in the office what's up i got nothing to listen to come on yeah sorry about that guys are you talking about taking ownership i'll take ownership of that it won't happen again we're sorry don't hate me awesome um guys this has been super fun um thank you so much the listeners for sending in your questions uh you can bet we will absolutely do this again yeah maybe maybe before another 50 episodes but 50 episodes felt like the right time to do it um and and i i definitely feel like we're going to do that live streaming episode here maybe in the not too distant future uh because we love we love the interactions from people on social media so why not do it while we're trying to record one of these things huh yeah yeah andy uh has me a believer of that idea now i i want in on that now the call-in show yep oh boy here we go we don't we don't have posts to save us though i can't fix it in the post all right awesome uh you guys thank you so much this has been an incredible journey um i'm so happy that we've hit 50. um i i've been told many times that 50 is like this milestone episode for a podcast like usually by episode 50 if this thing is going to work then you're going to cruise right on 350 and keep on going with the momentum you've got and sometimes some podcasts starting out don't even make it to episode 50. so we've made it and i feel like we have a ton of momentum behind us that's going to keep us cruising forward um i've filled a couple of slots on our calendar we've got some exciting guests coming up here in august and september uh and and so you know we're we're planning that far out now you know and i'm super excited and proud to be saying that we're looking that far ahead uh and and trying to pull together some good content for our listeners we super appreciate you uh your support all the shout outs we get from fans the the merch purchases um all of that goes right back into the community you know you know and it goes right back into this podcast so we can help create better content and and bring you more exciting stuff so thank you so much everybody guys any any final words to put a bow in this thing i do want to reiterate the thanks for the questions we wanted to do this episode this q a episode so bad and if you guys didn't send anything in that would have been pretty sad so the amount of questions we got and the the quality of the questions we got that this was awesome thank you yeah yeah and if you you meant to send in a question you didn't send it in send it in maybe we'll do like a mailbag portion of the episode uh definitely we want to hear from people i appreciate that there was no personally directed embarrassing questions thank you thank you for keeping it professional i don't know that one guy was asking you know when you're old uh andy i love you man i'm gonna start submitting questions dan as anonymous like y'all into trying to get to your keyboard you can't get to it because your belly's in the way that happened to you or is that just me this question is directed to dan howdy packet i don't know why i got a southern accent just having fun folks just having fun just for the record i can reach my keyboard well there's no no other way to end an episode like this on a note like that so thank you and see ya just fix it and post 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 art of network engineering dot 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