this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keynes 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 to the art of network engineering podcasts uh this is the voice and this is your host aaron weiler uh also known as erin engineered everywhere books are sold aj dan and andy three of the coolest guys you've never met in real life but you will today andy how's your day sir pretty good got up at 5am for maintenance window did the thing all day and here we are and here we are it's not five am folks just an update so you know it's not five another day i actually got that i actually got up pretty early today too which is not typical for me but anyway uh mr richards how are you sir how do you pack it i'm doing great it's good to see your face you got the uh the art of network engineering t-shirt on over there yeah yeah look at you where'd you get that bad boy huh share your secrets off uh off the internet it came from the internet how do i get one of them well andy you just put your card in and it sends it to you you put your credit card in the cd drive and it just comes to your door oh that's the most ridiculous thing i've ever heard okay uh last and certainly not least aj how you doing man good how are you i'm swell thank you for asking um peachy as as usual normally i'm the one this is this is a unique episode because not only are we traveling countries but we're traveling continents as well as time zones and the international date line so if you didn't know that was a thing have fun googling that but in case you didn't know if you go backwards enough and backwards i mean like to the west the the opposite direction um of the way the time zones are laid out you actually end up in the next day which yeah look i'm just a network engineer i don't get it either so it's time travel it's time it literally is time travel but all the way from a 24-hour plane ride away is daniel and your your at is uh what's your app uh like daniel daniel technique daniel we were we had to ask him how he says his last name too because uh he's got a lot of y's in there and we didn't want to hack it to death but i went ahead and hacked it to death anyway because i anyway so thank you for joining us um we know we're on a bit of a time delay here too because this is how we work in real life we are we're dealing with some latency so we'll ask you a question and then uh give you like half a second to answer because i know there's a little grace period there i've talked to people across the world before and sometimes it's not very easy but thank you for joining us we know it's also about to be summer down there right yeah that's right thank you everyone for having me yeah great to be here yeah man um so like we got started you know we were we've been talking about stuff like just kind of how the state of things are and you know the podcast right all we do is talk about what's relevant to us and basically like how you get ahead and things like that so you've been listening right you've heard every episode i'm assuming up to this point because we were just talking about knox's episode yeah that's right i've been listening to all of them so far okay okay so thank you thank you yeah first first and foremost thank you so much uh secondly though as an australian like you're in a completely different like mindset right so when you hear us and you hear our guests and stuff are there things that like resonate for you or is it just like a completely different like outlook that you have just because of like where you're from yeah i as a result of listening to the podcasts um that there are a lot of themes that correlate between between australia and and here and the people that you've had on the podcast um all have very similar traits and similar approaches to things so i think that in a lot of ways it's similar um a network is a network like um it routes packets just the same way in australia as it does in in ghana in london in the in the us i mean there's only so so many certain ways that you can do networking so i think that that's similar um some of the there's definitely some cultural differences in regards to how companies are structured and how people progress through their careers that's probably a little bit different uh also being in a for a lack of a better term you know a satellite country where a lot of the innovation doesn't come out of uh sometimes uh it's it's easier for us to look from the outside in on on what's happening in in places like the us so that's a little bit different as well and then in terms of of how networks get delivered or products get delivered to cut to end customers uh the structures maybe we use slightly different terms here so i believe in in the us there's the term value-added reseller we we use a slightly different term called professional services or managed services which roughly does the same thing but it's a little bit different yeah so yeah just to summarize there's a there's a lot of similarities and there are some differences so mainly just like how you guys name things and you know just some little bits and pieces here which i mean is true for just the language period right i mean just over time there's just things we call different things which makes sense that actually reminds me of the time do you ever watch the office yes okay both both versions yes thank you for saying that by the way because the british version is awesome and it's very under-appreciated um but there's a part where they go on a sales call it's andy and michael and they go on a sales call together and he's like he's like man i really shrewded that one back there and he's like what he's like well that's what people say around the office when they screw something up but they really pulled a schrute or they shrewded it and he's really just trying to get michael to hate dwight right and he's like he's like yeah it's weird he's like i wonder why they call it that is it this is andy like trying to fish for it he's like i wonder why they called that and michael just goes i mean i don't know like where do words come from just like seriously it's so true though it's like you know like who knows i mean over time right that's just the way it is so you got a pretty cool job though so you work for um and i i want i want to get to a little bit of specifics you know not to name names but just kind of like in your industry a little bit so but you're you work for a toll road right yeah so i've been in my current role for a few months now and i work for a toll road provider uh called trans urban and they uh own and manage and operate toll roads in australia in the washington area in amer in the us and also one toll road or one toll bridge in montreal so um that's interesting this is the first time i've worked in in this particular industry but i've worked in a whole bunch of verticals over my career so so how do okay so then how does the company do that got my wheels turned in here so they just like go and bid on toll contracts i'm guessing yeah so it's it's different for each country yeah but but it's just just to talk more a little more about australia as a country on the eastern seaboard is where the vast majority of the population live and and in those areas uh you know australia in terms of modern civilization is is a relatively new country so um over you know since since world war ii uh when there was a large intake of of immigrants um we've had quite a large population expansion so in order to build uh you know road assets so that people can get from a to b the government um contracts out you know the building of those roads or the managing of those roads etc so it's different in in each country so some of the roads are already existing and need to be maintained others need to be built from scratch yeah because i remember like a long time ago i think it was like in high school or something and i was watching the discovery channel and they were showing these roads that go from eastern australia to western australia and it's like it is here right most of the united states is kind of empty like that as well but it's not as desolate as yours can get out in the quote-unquote bush uh but you guys have laws where you can have a tractor trailer with like six trailers on it right out there yeah we yes they have wrote they call them road trains that's insane if you got you guys if you're listening to this google it's freaking insane to see like and the reason though is because such a long road right and it's like from i mean it's thousands of miles so it's like they don't need to turn right so you just kind of do that that's cool that's a i was i was expecting half expecting you for to be like yeah yeah we own one of those roads and i was like well that's impressive um so like the the toll road stuff as far as i.t goes and you got hired to do what job are you just a network engine just are you a network engineer or are you a junior network engineer are you the director of procurement what's your job my role is i've been hired as a network automation engineer yeah so wait no you didn't you didn't what's funny is how you phrase that like well what i was hired for was no no i'm definitely doing network automation do it do it all day every day which is which is great for me because that's that's what i'm interested in that's what i'm passionate about that's what i'm starting to get good at uh so it's really the sweet spot of everything that i'm looking for in a role is that a comment so is that a common thing down there to see that job open no it's not okay um and the other the other thing too is even though australia is large in size it's not really that large in population so to you know as as you as you for aware you know you need to be a certain size company to even warrant hiring a single network engineer yeah then you need to be you know x amount of scale to have a team of network engineers and then you need to be in x amount of scale larger to maybe prioritize network automation over network engineering not that i think that they're different but you know from a hiring perspective uh that that is why there's so many limited roles because companies and the size of companies and the size of networks in australia um there are some big networks you know like national banks and that sort of thing or you know national supermarket chains but you know there isn't there isn't a thousand plus sites you know there's very small companies with that sort of footprint uh the company that i work for uh you know they they as part of their strategic plans are planning to you know use automation more and more to to deliver business outcomes um more broadly not just network automation so they're probably one of the more innovative companies in that space in terms of looking at the market and and trying to find a smarter way of doing things is that a common thing though for you like you were looking like you wanted to specifically do that so like is that something you you do a lot or is this something that you just started doing like did you have a network engineer role before where you were in automation or like talk talk to us about that a little bit yeah so i guess um do you want me to go back to the start yeah you know what you know what's interesting and and we do normally do this but um i think that our audience would be super interested to hear how even like how high school goes for you right because you know we learn way different things than you do of course just based off of priorities like you know who who tells us what to do how to ride kangaroos to work wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute because i was going to ask it they're actually the biggest competitor for toll roads so the kangaroos yeah wait a minute because i thought you were just born like that you just don't naturally know how to do that they teach you how to do it were you not born in a kangaroo oh stop us dude hey you feel free to throw out all the mcdonald's and bald eagle jokes you want we can take it man so so but before we wander too far away i i just want to ask this question so you're a network automation engineer uh do you also have just network engineers or just people that focus on the network engineering then you do the automation piece yeah so the the vast majority of the team would be network engineers uh we yeah i'm the sort of the only full-time network automation engineer although um we will unicorn expanding in that in that area uh so yeah it's it's something that um we're trying to build some capability we're trying to build platforms um and ultimately my role is to to deliver business outcomes but also to enable those network engineers to move away from from menial tasks or compliance tasks and you know a lot of the tooling that that i hope to build and plan to build will be to alleviate you know some of the more menial jobs that people have to do like what give us an example yeah so um a lot of companies not just just the company i work for i've i've done consulting roles in the past have compliance obligations so you know pci personal card information yep compliance so automating those those evidence gather gathering activities so that you can supply them to auditors but more importantly um you usually have to prove your compliance yearly in australia but you really don't really want to wait 11 and a half months to find out that your network has gone out of compliance that's something that you want to automate and and detect the drift as soon as possible uh you got you got andy sweating over there he knows probably more than anybody here like so in you mentioned he said he's right he was like yeah he got triggered you you mentioned like that right like the the auditing and stuff like you you work for a toll road so for those of that are listening and don't know what pci is you're right it's pay card information right so it's your credit card information like the the code on the back the expiration date all that stuff has to be protected so that we as consumers don't get hurt by a data breach right so and what you're saying is since since the toll roads collect money you know just like every other business in the world they are responsible for maintaining their data integrity so that somebody doesn't uh attack you and then get all of our we know what happens like and i'm not saying your company but happens all the time right stuff gets breached uh basically what you're trying to do is since that's just really a lot of like getting all that data for the for the auditors is just a very like i don't know blocking and tackling sort of situation we call it right where it's like you know it's like grunt work where it's easy but it's just very time consuming and there's a lot of data and spreadsheets and crap right cool yeah i'm saying that's probably relative to like how many you know network nodes you have in your in your in your entire network there i've been pulled into those pci audits and it's a nightmare because we weren't all demanding at the time well then let me ask you this because that brings up actually just another thing that they could get you for because so for instance in america like the banks are very heavily regulated when it comes to i think this has to do a lot with the auditor personally they're audited based off of like you know what they're using so the guy that's the auditor the girl that's the auditor goes in checks what they have make sure that everything's buttoned down like you said but if i i can almost guarantee you that if this like let's say it was a bank and the guy was doing an audit or a girl was doing an audit and you were like oh yeah i'm the automation engineer they'd be like wait what and out of fear they would probably say you can't do that right like that would be that would be out of compliance and i don't know for sure right like if you could do that at a bank here but i just know how like i know how stingy they are and maybe can annie can back me up on this but they tend to they tend to fear and just blanket statement know everything they don't understand so great example sd-wan i mean you're an automation guy sd-wan is like the consumer version of that right where it's like it's very it's very easy it's you know zero touch but you know touch only if you need to and then set it and forget it right uh but i know that auditors out there like governments all that stuff they're very stringent when it comes to that they just shy away like nope that's actually at a complaint you can't use the cloud or something right that's that was a big fear for a while too nope can't use a cloud that's not compliant or uh pci compliant whatever uh so yeah it as far as your auditing like your day-to-day auditing goes like they're auditing you for pci compliance but they haven't said a word about you being like an automation dude they don't they don't get scared by that yeah so uh i've only recently joined so i haven't been around during during this particular order but um okay it essentially you need to provide evidence that you're that you're meeting compliance and usually what they do is they pick a random subset of of devices that you have so if you have i don't know 100 cisco routers and 35 aruba switches they will just pick three at random and they'll ask you to provide you know is the right level of ssh encryption enabled on this switch etc etc so um obviously you don't know which ones are going to pick prior to to the audit so your best bet and and not only just trying to pass compliance but the whole point of pci compliance is it's a set of recommendations or practices that you really should be doing anyway even if you're totally totally totally so um really you want to automate the validation of that on every device at all times but just for your own benefit so yeah that's that's what that's what we will hopefully try and achieve so you so when you say automation for you because we've been talking about a lot about like compliance and basically like you proving that you guys are buttoned up where you should be uh do you find that your automation is more of like information gathering as opposed to configuration changes so if i talk about uh my current role where we're going through phases yeah of of the automation journey but i might just talk more generally about automation so automation has all forms of activities that you need to do so really the first thing you need to do is workflow what it is that you're trying to automate if you can't workflow what you're trying to automate you should we really shouldn't be automating it so whether that's gathering information deploying configurations um you know uh building chat bots whatever the case may be you you really should take the time to document or what i call workflow you know how how a network engineer does it today or how someone does it today so that's that's really the the most important skill that you need and that's if you take that mindset to it like you can automate you can automate you know making a copy machine you can automate i like that i don't know whatever the case may be but if you don't know how it automates and and more importantly you don't know when you need the inputs and at what time for example if i take the coffee machine if you don't know that you know you need to monitor the water levels you know because if there's no water you can't produce the coffee if you don't understand those dependencies those inputs and outputs um you'll spend a lot of time attempting to automate something but you you won't get that far that's a that's a mistake that i see a few people make um and it's really an important skill being able to take a non-automation requirement so something like i want to check all the vlans and taking that statement and breaking it down into exactly what that means and sub steps um and that that that workflow is sometimes referred to as pseudo code so you know writing out you know if else human readable logic and then are developing your automation solutions against that logic this is extremely smart and maybe i'm just stupid that's probably the more likely scenario but that seems like i mean it's like how you write a movie right you like take the book and you and you make a story board right and you like you know this is where people will stand this is how you get there and all this other stuff so you just follow along i mean it makes sense but um okay so let's back up for a second because i had to stop myself from asking you how long you've been in automation so let me just start way back at the beginning spare us the part where your parents were hooking up but get us to like i don't know sophomore year in high school which would be 10th grade in uh primary school is that what you guys call it okay we call it secondary school just kidding secondary school so at that so we have uh we have six years in secondary school in the last two years you do uh precursor subjects and then at that point you decide whether you want to go to university or i believe what you call like a community college or you decide to do a trade you know at the end of year 12. so year 11 i enrolled in the cisco networking academy that was back in 2002 and that was my first experience in networking i'm not saying this right now you don't look 36 are you 36 i'm 34 so that's fine well that's why he doesn't want well in case you're wondering if if somebody just randomly comes up to you on the street and says hey uh yeah so since you're 36 you tell them hey look aaron said i don't look a day over 35. so but either way you don't look like you're in the mid 30s okay that's basically what i meant by that okay why did you sign up for cisco networking academy did you have an interest in uh in tech yeah i mean i was lucky enough to be one of those people who my dad worked in uh in the carpet uh you know cut in in car manufacturing business so he had a comp a personal computer at home was like a rare thing in australia at that time yeah you know i'd always um interact with computers at that time in my life i was i was adamant i was going to become a physio and then i decided to take this this it course purely out of i thought it would be easy for me to understand because i already know how to use computers i soon learned that i knew nothing about networking oh yeah and that it was a pretty steep learning curve but it was probably you know it definitely was life-changing uh because prior to that i probably would have done something completely different not in it and also i did i i used to live in a regional city so it would it you know this city only had 70 000 people so it would have been a pretty rare thing to have a cisco networking academy in a city of 70 000 people so i mean dude you're right because annie and i were talking andy was trying to figure out if it existed when he was in high school i think we found out it was not right um so i graduated high school in 2000 i was like 100 positive it didn't exist then but i guess it turns out it was because you know you're not that far behind me so and and especially in that because that's how big the city i lived in was was roughly about the same size as yours and i could tell you that yeah you would have had to went to a major city to to get something like that or you would have been in like like we have some of these like high schools that like well we have private schools right where you can pay to go to and you know it's supposed to be better but i can imagine a place like that having that or like a college preparatory school having something like that because they do it's so weird they do actually focus on your future what a concept like they care what happens to you after year 12 which is wow that's freaking crazy uh so so you guys hold on i just want to ask a question too because you brought this up like your dad had a computer do you remember what kind of computer it was was it a dell oh he he had a few but i remember playing games on like those massive is it called the five inch hard disks oh yeah the flappy yeah yeah yeah um i remember when we first got a computer with a cd rom in it i remember when we first got the internet tight waiting um yeah so nice i've been there from from the start of guess and now and now you're automating humor internet yeah yeah well look at you go wait hey just wait till you turn 36 the world is your oyster uh so so yeah so you go to you go to college or you go to you go to the cisco netacad did you get a cc high school at a in high school or out of high school yeah in in hospital in high school that's rad did you did you certify then or did you wait till afterwards or no so then i i finished that course and then i enrolled in a diploma of it network engineering and that was at a private community college and that was a one-year course and during that course i got my my a plus my comptia a plus my comp tia network plus my microsoft certified systems administrator 2000 wow my and then i got my ccna during during doing that you did all that in one year yeah because it was basically like eight to five every day like monday to friday take that aj and funnily enough i got to six weeks before the end and i did a work placement which was part of the course and i i got a i got a job swapping out uh f pos registers for a supermarket and then i just didn't go back and finish the course so i've got you know i i didn't go back and do this one module which well you know 34 year old daniel looks back and thinks uh you shouldn't have done an idiot for not finishing it i don't know anyway that's dude ladies i think you're all right man you're all right yeah yeah were all the search you got was that your first year of university you said yeah yeah i know bro i gotta tell you i'm moving generally generally speaking the first year of university in america is absolutely wash yeah you're it's it's like a high school teacher brush your teeth it's stupid it's yeah it's a drunken volleyball on the beach or something like that yeah you're waking up not knowing where you're at here's another guy like i wish i was in australia and got all those starts my freshman year in college that's just that's amazing that's great well in fact you're in cisco network academy in high school too i mean just man that's awesome he's kind of doing saying the same thing you are though right he even got all those search but he's like man i wish i would have just finished so it's like it just kind of goes to show you right like you could always look back and be like i wish i would have done that but look at all of us now we're just leveraging what we did do because that's all you can do right um yeah some versus a little bit further than the others that's all so starting at 18 and starting at 33 100 well just look at it this way now you don't have to retire to your 80. so you get to have all that fun so so you you don't you don't finish school you get job placed so you so i didn't realize and please take this as a column i didn't realize you were this old so and the reason why that's interesting to me is because you've obviously been working for close to 15 years at this point right yeah uh yeah seven uh seventeen years i think yeah seventeen okay so right when you were eighteen and then and yeah and then yeah i took a bit of a detour for a while so then i obviously got a job because i was just keen to to get money and and to be independent and i started i did the the fpos job for a little bit swapping out uh sorry uh cash registers yeah machines yeah and point of sale pos right yeah yeah and then i moved into role swapping end of lease computers so in australia companies leased computers for three years and then they swapped them out so i was doing uh basically end of end of lease replacement computers so imaging machines and swapping them out and then uh towards the end of working for that company i started actually managing um relocations so we this is back you know when the internet was was no good so you know if you were your company uh 2004 okay so here it was already good i don't want to ruin it for you but uh we had broadband in 2004. yeah well maybe you did wherever you were well okay vermont and australia are basically the same thing to me because i don't know where either one of them are i'm kidding i'm kidding yeah so yeah so so but how long were you doing that role for the the swapping leases or lease machines and then also how long were you doing the pos install so i did the pos installs for only like two two months and then i okay moved into this desk this um desktop end of lease replacement role for about i don't know seven or eight months and then and then i moved into the another component of that team called the relocations team so the company that we worked for they had numerous buildings in the central business district in melbourne and what they would do would be they'd refurbish a floor like you know put in new desks you know new paint job etc and they'd need to move the computers from one floor to the other and then sometimes they'd need to move from you know like 100 high street down to 400 high street which was their other building yeah so i was um in charge of like organizing all the relocations of the computers you know what packing up like organizing to get staff members to pack up the computers and then getting the delivering people to you know pick up those computers and put them at the new desk at the new location and then setting up those computers and then doing things like robo copying their user user profiles from from the 100 high street server to the 400 high street server dude i love that yeah i love that terp that's the best term i have a robocop too i just want everybody to know that yeah and so i did that is it though is it a tramp stamp uh yeah when in theory yeah i just have one giant tramp stamp oh god sorry daniel sorry daniel um so okay so so how long was that project for for you we said like eight or nine months right i did that role so moving computers around from various locations for another i think it would have been about three or four months and at this point i was i was living um in this regional city that i lived in called geelong and i was commuting up to melbourne every day so you know it it'd take an hour and a half every day and so i got one way or two ways one way hmm oh man yeah so i got i got sick of that pretty quickly and then uh and then i um took a a role on the service desk at the university in the in the city that i lived in in geelong and then and then from there i stayed there for about six years but i worked in the service desk and and sort of progressed my way up you know level one level two level three and uh i i at this point i'd i still you know during all this time which is probably three or four no it's probably about five years you know i still liked networking i still enjoyed it but there just wasn't any opportunities without having experience um as we all know so i went down the heavy certification route but without you know the exposure or the experience and it was that chicken and egg scenario yeah but i was i was lucky enough that um during working at the university they had a team of network engineers and uh you know the management there were supportive in um allowing me to speak to the to the network team leader and expressing my interest and he he and my manager agreed for me to work one day a week for his team oh wow so that was that was my uh foot in the door okay so you did this on your own and and you listen to the show so you you know probably why i'm stopping right here okay it's either me or d or or andy that's gonna stop you and say okay what what did you do because there's two things that i heard right there number one you had a job for about four years and you were like helped us one two three four like you basically got a new job every year you got like a promotion um but then you also convinced somebody on a completely different department to get you you got the managers to talk to each other and agreed to let you go do that job for a day a week like this is the most insane thing i've ever heard in my life but yeah i've never heard this i've never heard this before you hear stuff like that right you enter through the bottom and then work your way up to this and you hear stuff like this all the time you hear you hear like like oh i expressed it i told the networking dude like hey like let me have some projects or whatever and he was like sure and maybe like he let you watch for an hour or something but the fact that you got the managers to talk and he gave you the opportunity to go in there a day a week like they talked it out like that was your full-time job for that eight hours like that is such a cool thing because like you said you're stuck in the the chicken or the egg situation and yeah and there's ways to dig yourself out of that which you're clearly telling us right now like how do you get experience without experience doesn't make any sense and the answer is always figure it out just figure it out yeah i think yeah and i also think that you need to be you need to be realistic with yourself and you need to um like just just talking from like a personal uh personal values point of view you need to um like understand that if you want to if you want to get somewhere it's it's it's up to you ultimately to to drive the change that you want to be or you want to become rather than relying on other people and so you know like it wasn't smooth sailing i know i had glossed over it no no it wasn't smooth assistant we know that yeah give us the dirty yeah i mean i remember i remember we we on the help desk were allowed to do call manager like cisco call manager changes so you know update people's extensions or update people's people's uh displays on their phones or whatever you set voicemail pins every five minutes yeah so you know you would always uh we we'd always be sending tickets to the networking team and you know they might send tickets back so you know as part of just being a curious person i'd always try and think of ways of like do we really need to send this to the networking team could we do it for them so i'd always try and um you know take the opportunity whilst i was talking to anyone related to networking to try and build a relationship or or try and grease their wheels a bit so try and take something off their plate they might not be interested in or whatever the case may be so i think like the point of that is if you want to get somewhere you've got to see it from the other person's point of view and you've got to almost answered the question to yourself of why would they bother to help me i know that sounds quite abrasive but um no it's true like you've got it you gotta we all work in sales like that's another thing i believe in so you've got to be able to sell something to someone even if it's not a product if you want to sell yourself you've got to be able to sell the benefits to them holy crap if someone come up to you on the street and said buy this car for a thousand dollars and walked off i mean why would you you wouldn't that's that's that's that's the way that i daniel i approached it question did we just become best friends like you listen to the show you're like i know what's gonna get this aaron dude jest and you're over here pressing my butt like what do you want a christmas present like just send me your address dude i got you it's all good um he just wants a t-shirt yeah man you know what we're gonna send you a t-shirt dude and i don't say that just painting the shipping on that uh yeah i will i will because like he just said he greased the right wheels and apparently on the right wheel so so how did it go you you always wanted to be a networking but you didn't get experience you were in help desk you asked your manager hey i'd like to get some experience in networking what can you do for me yeah he talked to the networking manager and then they worked out that you were going to work on the network partially yes so as wow yeah so as an organisation they're they're they're they were one of the leading organizations and they're quite mature um you know a lot of a lot of companies complain about how they can't get they can't get talent but i don't see many of those companies developing talent so um the university's name is deacon deakin university you know they they decided that you know we can use the service desk as a way to get people who are talented or interested in the industry and then we can progress them through our ranks into other areas of our organization right so it wasn't just me at the time there were other people that ended up as you know web application programmers or system administrators or whatever the case may be so though they're an example of an organization that takes a holistic approach to to talent and to progressing people so you know i saw those i can't remember if i was the first one but i'm sure that that would have been one of the reasons why i tried to sort of make it happen but but if you didn't ask you probably you would have stayed in help desk right because we've heard this a lot aaron knows because he's got you know background in sales there's so much power in asking that question something that you want and there's a lot of people who don't ask because they're afraid yeah and you might still be sitting in help desk if you were waiting for your managers to read your mind and say oh i think you might want networking right like you have to be your own advocate and ask that question that seems to be the turning point in your career right right there yeah and then and then when i finally got the one day a week i i ended up just working um on a project to swap out all the ups's in the university so where were they addressing wasn't it it wasn't even real networking hold yeah you probably got a lot stronger but were they addressable ups yeah okay then yeah that's not working dude yeah yeah i was i was wanting to ask that question what does a an a network person who of one day a week do on a on that one day of a week like a tier one ticket like this does uh does like network connections go down and they're like wait a second oh yeah that's right daniel's daniel's working network today you know like like how does that part timer again they probably asked you to update documentation right is that what they gave you when you started no i physically went around with with with um a senior person and physically swapped out ups's in all you know when you have a university campus you have everything from a full-scale data center to machine rooms to swapping out ups's in dormitories in a janitor closet or something somewhere yeah yeah so you know we'd have to do everything related to it so we'd have to load test the batteries to make sure that batteries were gonna you know be certified to do what they needed to do network the new devices label them you know unbox it the whole the whole deal so um and and as part of doing that i just any chance that i could that i could um you know maybe persistently nudge my way into do you reckon i could do you reckon i could configure the switch port to asking correct the ups up to whatever the case may be this man is a renaissance man one day he's installing freaking ups's and land down under and the next thing you know he's configuring switch ports putting port fast on things he shouldn't you know wait did you do that for real just put you didn't accidentally put poor fast on something you shouldn't have did you okay no i made plenty of father errors so yeah so so yeah so so i love first of all i love the university experience because like if you look at design and i'll use cisco as an example like they call things campus right like campus design i have to think that a lot of that came from a school campus because if you look at their design like what is a campus design right like you have like a service provider edge you have a way in edge whatever you want to call it you have a data center um and then you have core access distribution to your earlier point like most places don't have all of that right like they have some sort of collapsed version of that or like a flatter version with a little less moving parts maybe a little more cloud whatever but what's cool in your situation is that like it's a it's a true campus like in more than one word and you get to see and touch so many different things and not even on like a medium to mid-size scale like this is serious stuff here like i could speak for the universities here they're some of the first places that they got like real serious network stuff and and you're the same age i am so i know when you were there and like what time that was and i have to imagine that like a lot of that stuff was like like the network like so for instance like wi-fi in the dorm and stuff like that that that stuff all had to be like coming out as you were there right like like whoa you know you there's just so much to do right yeah and and yeah so then yes so during that time i i did that one day a week and then then a networking role came up where someone moved on and then i obviously applied for that role chewing and had to go through the interview process and and do everything that was involved with that so did they ask you any like uh ccna like questions in the interview like or or networking stuff if i don't remember i can't remember but i i remember being so nervous about about going towards the interview i remember being you know i i knew every person in the room except the university have a policy where they have had a policy where they have three interviewers so you know two from the department you're from and one from maybe the science department that's weird yeah just a random person who's probably there to assess your character or whatever the case may be that's an interesting thing that's an interesting concept because for one i've never heard of it so that that makes it interesting right off the bat but what the theory like i get that that you could maybe be a character judge but what's interesting is like i don't know do you ever do you know malcolm gladwell is you heard that name before uh i think i have okay yeah don't don't strain yourself too hard because so he he writes books and like scientific books about like human behavior right and he's got a lot of famous ones out there like make it stick and some others he's really into like how the human brain works and he has a concept he calls being mismatched which i think is interesting so like the fbi and all these all these people uh always say like oh they could tell when someone's lying or like interrogating them and they can they're uncomfortable and all these things well malcolm has like just stacks of evidence and different sort of like research papers and all these publications that say like none of that is true so basically what he says is like you could be mismatched so for instance like i i'm very i'm not mismatched at all like you can tell what's going on like in in my inner self right but some people are like inwardly just like mad but outwardly they look happy or vice versa that's usually the worst one they're happy on the inside but their face like you always we always say the term like resting bitch face right like that well i mean that's the thing is it's like your wife has an aj she doesn't listen to this so i'm not worried about her hearing oh god this is blinky yeah that brings up the the part about like the random person coming in the room to be like a quote-unquote character witness right like like let's just see how good of a person this is like that's a weird concept to me because if they knew anything about the science of human behavior they would know that that was actually probably putting that person in a more uncomfortable situation which is going to make them more likely to act like not themselves especially with those people that you know already you know are you're encompassed by people that you know you've worked with and then there's a stranger that person already feels weird too because they're kind of a stranger in the situation but anyway this was that was just a weird thing to hear so i just wanted to make sure that like i addressed it because i thought it was strange interviews aren't supposed to be comfortable right absolutely and if he's interviewing with people that he already works with it could be a softball layup kind of thing for them like oh let's just give them but i think that's okay like there's no yeah maybe that's why they bring him in like just as an objective third party that doesn't know him hasn't worked with them like what do you guys see in this guy i don't see it you know maybe i'm yeah devil's advocate but to my earlier point if they're going to bring in like a third party from like the outside it might be with the department that they commonly do work with there's you know somebody that you maybe not see all the time but would interact with at some point or maybe they help desk folks right or like the admins or something right like i mean they kind of know what you're talking about so like somebody else in the greater i.t team right they would at least understand what was happening in the room when they wouldn't just sit there like uh what so daniel beyond being nervous for that interview which we'd all be did you feel like you could answer the questions did you have enough base of knowledge in your studies that you know you could address these questions or were you just like i don't know any of this stuff guys sorry yeah i thought i would but um i guess reflecting back on that i would have been 23 or 24 at the time and probably like in most young people you know you're not really sure who you are or who you aren't at that point yeah um so i just remember like you know being in a very small town and back to what we were talking about at the very start you know there's only certain amount of size companies that that offer those opportunities in those locations so yeah i was i was acutely aware that you know if i don't make it here as a network engineer there isn't there isn't going to be many other opportunities around town and then you know i might have to move move to the big smoke or whatever the case may be so you know i was i was probably feeling the pressure more upon myself rather than this was your shot right this was a big deal for you immediately yeah and um yeah i think i think putting pressure on yourself can be can be to like debilitating sometimes also sometimes i think you know as a as a human you should you know you should live up to your own expectations first so yeah like don't let yourself down of course if you can manage the stress you can use it to your advantage right a little bit of adrenaline doesn't hurt in that kind of situation but yeah if you if you panic and your prefrontal cortex shuts down it's a different kind of or you're just mismatched crap who knows yeah yeah so how did you like there's there's two things that i'm dying to know from you one of them is is one thing that we've been trying to catch up to this whole time because i know aj's chomping at the bit over there how the hell did you get an automation dude and how long have you been doing it cool oh wait did you get that job so you got to check out he got the job he's in automation now i'm only pushing you forward a little bit because i just assumed that you had networking jobs you know throughout that time period right which is i'm sure all interesting we have that but i know the most interesting part the morsel here is is your automation which yeah how did you even find out about that kind of like just walk us through the whole journey there yeah so around 2015 i started working for uh managed managed services professional services company and i was given the first project i was given was to do a large-scale land migration so move 80 sites from one internet service provider to another internet service provider and so that involved writing change plans for them all uh you know coming up with a project schedule uh etc etc so during that i basically got an excel spreadsheet and put in one column the current config and then in the column next to it i put in the proposed config or the implementation plan and then the column next to it i put the implementation sorry the backup plan then on another excel tab i had the verification plan which was all the show cam commands i was cells gonna run and after doing like three of those change plans i thought this is crazy i can't write excel spreadsheets 85 sites right like this is just yeah this is just this is just not um efficient um it's unreliable like because oh hold on andy's laughing were you doing this this morning i've been doing this my whole career he's like notepad plus plus baby i've been migrating weigh-in sites for five years painfully manually and i've had the thought that there's got to be a better way but i haven't gotten there yet yeah so so during that time um this project was quite time sensitive so i remember like i'd never ever even used python before and one of the consulting team members back at back at the head office because i was out at the customer site said you should look into parameco it's an ssh library for python and first thing i thought was what's parameco and what's python i know what is what's the library so that's what i would have said what the hell's a library so so i i started um you know furiously googling things and trying to work it out and you know trying to get python installed on my machine and doing a whole bunch of other things and i basically spent i think i spent a weekend or two trying to work this out whilst writing the change plans the the the classic way shall i say um and then i reached a point where i i just thought there's no way i'm going to be able to work this out given the timeline pressures so i actually have abandoned automation at that point just went back to the excel spread excel spreadsheets which worked fine and the project was finished in in about four or five months and everyone was happy and all the sites were migrated but that triggered something in me to to sort of identify that my current practices probably weren't going to scale for those larger activities and that i needed to probably take some time to learn some new skills to help me be efficient in my current job so then after the end of that project i enrolled in a python for network networking for python course um on gns3 no a gentleman named me high i forget his surname but yeah that went through you know lists dictionaries uh you know all the python fundamentals and i i remember the first time that i that i used netmeco which is which is a product it's a common network library that's used throughout the industry now i remember the first time like connecting to a device and and grabbing a show command i was like oh this is awesome yeah i'm never going back yeah so so i uh so i did that course and i i learned a lot and then the year after i worked on uh an aci implementation so that was 2016. and a colleague of mine who who was a lot more skilled than me he was dual ccie um he also knew python uh he developed uh you know an x an excel spreadsheet that we'd we we'd fill in the values in the spreadsheet and then it would it would use the python aci toolkit and and deploy aci constructs and this was aci version i think one zero h or something like that so it was like the rawest of raw aci implementations and um yeah that was the first time that i actually ran python code doing something at work and i just remember at the time just trying to learn anything and everything i could about it and so he built the structure and then i would tinker away at the code so that's how i got into automation and then from there it's just progressed in terms of use cases in terms of complexity and yeah that's i would say like that's how that came about it's interesting because you know most businesses that are going through any sort of migration have have gotten to that same point every network engineer is doing any sort of migration he's got the exact same point that you've been at where it was like all right i'm not typing any more of this crap most of it is like literally one number different you know the the companies that i interact with they all have well over a thousand sites right and trust me i get lost in the sauce i'm like which one is this again you know because and i can only imagine working there but there's always a tipping point right there so what you did i think that's atypical to most folks and i'm not going to pick on andy is is that you were like there's got to be a better way you googled it you found something called paramico and you're like what in the hell is this and then you probably saw a couple of scripts and you saw somebody doing it maybe on a youtube video or something you're like okay what because i was the same way i'm like it's that easy like you just go fetch everything and then i thought to myself like okay now i feel stupid because i didn't think of that before like why wasn't i the one that thought of automation like why weren't any of us you know what i mean because like it's stuff that pisses us off on a daily basis it's like every little thing has to be perfect and we know how configs are and and here it was the whole time kind of um but like gosh give me let me make a template let me you know i just want to type one number in and it i could say 1 is my starting number increment by 1 and it pumps all that out you know just like even stuff you can do in an excel spreadsheet which is rad but most people in that tipping point scenario don't go down the road of let me just get get some automation in there maybe maybe some more now but in 2015 definitely not that was yeah you know i think there's a couple of things to say to that right like i think early on in in network automation there was just a lot of people going you need to learn python you need to learn python and then you go and you learn python but it doesn't actually tell you like how this applies to network engineering yeah i think some people also start down that path and they struggle so much with learning the code that they're just like well if i just did this the way i normally do it'd be done by now rather than me trying to you know learn how to waste time learning how to do something new yeah no you're right yep yep it can be a lot like back sorry back in 2015 there wasn't there wasn't devnet there wasn't right that's what i'm saying there wasn't ipv0 there wasn't um free youtube resources there wasn't network code slack maybe there was i didn't know about it there wasn't anywhere near the amount of resources that there are now right so you know now now is a great time to start learning now there's there's a mixture of free courses intermediate courses to to expensive courses that that are worth it as well there's a lot of great free blogs out there a lot of bloggers like what right about automation like what uh getting started on your network automation with ansible yeah i know daniel's got some good one too who who like this is that's a that sounds like a great title do you know where we can find such an article absolutely yeah you can just go to my blog blog.no blinkyblinky.com oh isn't that convenient well aj the first time you showed us that ansible demonstration that blew my mind right the first time i saw and ansible's a cool way to get started for sure yeah it just makes so much sense to a network engineer right and i need to thank you i need to thank the panel right now because i had a little epiphany when daniel was talking and aaron that uh i failed out of computer programming in college and they weeded me out of computer science major because i couldn't hack c plus and i think when i got to your point dan you were talking about that this is insane there's got to be a better way when i reached that point and i was told it was programming i got a block i got some like ptsd or something that i'm like well i can't do that that's out of my i'll never be able to do that so i guess i'll get a job at mcdonald's or something after this like i don't know what to do next but you know it's just a personal thing i'm gonna have to overcome because automation is here it's at my company yeah they're even offering very expensive training but i have this block in my head that i can't do it which isn't true but it's based on experience and i got to get over that because yeah this is where we are everything's automated now and i just want to emphasize that it isn't easy and there'll be so much time where you'll literally just be banging your head against you know the figurative wall well he does that anyway so what you're saying is like do you see that you see the dent on his desk right there right there well the old and the old andy would have asked daniel were you a computer science major did you learn coding in college i try to find a way to discount why you you have two kids right do you have kids but yeah that's the epiphany i had which is i just have a block about it and i got to get over that or i'm just going to be left behind yeah after all these years dude you've talked yourself out of it for sure yeah i think it was it was traumatic i wanted to work in computers they said you got to be computer science i went in there like all right buckos let's do this yeah and in three weeks they were like you're not you don't belong here you're out and i headed for hills and got my communications degree but they're like if i was you i'd think about dropping this class um now there's not too many people in here you're just sucky sorry that's good i think more broadly i think we discredit how much um network engineers uh are comfortable being uncomfortable and uh you know i think we discredit how much that people learn being in networking like one of my best friends he's a plumber and um you know i chat to him about work but he just his eyes glaze over but um i i use the analogy to him imagine uh gravity changed every three years in plumbing um wow imagine imagine how many new skills you'd have to learn no kidding no kidding get where you're coming from so i don't i don't think you should beat yourself up about it and you know the the reason i wanted to mention that i had a crack and then just decided to give up is like anything that's hard or difficult isn't going to be easy straight away and might need a little bit extra persistence or sometimes you're not mentally in the right space other other times um you might not have reached the true peg point yet oh maybe it's got to hurt bad enough andy maybe maybe you just haven't heard that like that pain is always a motivator for me you got a low tolerance sounds did you say i have a high tolerance wait i said low tolerance actually um i thought that was a dick so be clear but so david daniel what would you do to hear what he said though did you heard he said he he gave up with that one project and went back to doing his spreadsheets right then he gave a crack at it again because you know it wasn't the timing was off right all right yeah and then have the persistence you know to know to know that it'll it'll eventually work and that you just didn't have like the stress capacity at that time to do that because that's what projects do to you they they just amplify your stress you know and so to know that you that that was actually so beneficial you just couldn't get it fast enough to be efficient with it however you knew that it would be at some point like you just stuck to it that's the lesson for sure so then yeah so then if you're if you're talking to like a guy like andy right who's who did have a crack at it but a very long time ago what is it like how does one then because you said that there's like a pain point sometimes it's like it's all of a sudden it's just so much pain that it forces you to change let's say we're not there um what can you do then as just like a normal network engineer to get yourself into this yeah that's an excellent question so there's there's a few ways you can go about it um and there's a few people that i respect in their industry with their opinions as well such as i want what sorry such as uh jeremy shulman nwa network order maniac he talks about this a lot uh you can even start with things that aren't you know pushing configs or validating configs you can start with things like producing spreadsheets or reading in spreadsheets and i was doing that from reading in spreadsheets of ipam data and printing it out to a screen or yeah reading in spreadsheets and transforming you know a spreadsheet format a into spreadsheet format b so you can start with stuff that's that's not going to cause any risk at all and just learn the fundamentals of python or whatever the programming language you can shoot that that that you feel that you can use and then the other the other thing that i'd recommend is gaining access to a lab or building your own and and just experimenting safely so experimenting with the consequences of my failures are trivial so therefore you know i can i can really try and go and actually break stuff i mean when we all first started out in networking i'm sure at least one of us on this call thought you know what happens it when i do plug the switch back into it into back into a same port like to sp just spanning tree really spanning really do what we think it does i'm sure in fact you know back to back to the university examples some someone did that like they did it by accident though it's how it always so yeah so um you know you should be able to experiment safely there's a couple of free resources online so um you can use the cisco devnet sandbox nice uh you know myself i i invested in in getting an um intel nook i don't know if you know what that is oh yeah that's cool a little computer and i i run uh a network simulator on there called even g and then i have a couple of linux virtual machines on there as well so you know in there i've got a little you know one of each vendor and if ever i want to play around or or have something like that that's that's what i use but you should you can start out with something that doesn't have to do anything with networking and just something that automates something in your life i mean another example is uh you know using python to send emails for example i was doing it when i first started out to read i was looking for something on craigslist now this is kind of unethical to just like web scrape but it was cool because i was printing it to like an excel spreadsheet and it was like the item i was looking for where it was and how much it was and like how long had been online just like stupid stuff but it was easy to just hit a button like run code and then all of that what did i say five minutes of googling you know but it was cool like it was it's like you were saying earlier it's just cool to see it actually do something and then all of a sudden you're like all right what else can i do with this stuff so automate the boring stuff that book is awesome right that's what i was going to mention as well i mean that book is is meant at your your middle office worker not even like a tech savvy person so that that's one that that'll get you some some productivity straight out of the gate and i guess once you get that once you get that uh buzz or all that feeling of i've just saved myself time no it's a virtuous cycle after that that's like a drug save yourself an hour you're like can i save myself a week yeah i saved myself here's the question about if you automate how much have you saved so far if you automate something and you save yourself a week do you tell anybody oh depends depends what it is i think that's actually a great i think you bring up a like i know you don't mean it like this but oh but i do i know what you're going to say or automating does save time but i think we we get stuck on that as as the conception of automation is it's going to save time and we're going to get rid of people right that's not actually what um the business wants the business doesn't want save time they don't that what they want is increased reliability at all costs reliability is speed if you make anything reliable and and consistently reliable it's it's more important to anyone than speed and i would argue that by making something reliable um and and being able to rely on it being reliable you can make more things more reliable which means you move faster right it's the classic case of the tortoise in the hair right now when you say reliable are you are you talking about like i know some people use like automation to like self-heal a network or are you talking about like if when it make when it does whatever config it's going to do it the exact same way every single time that it runs are you kind of seeing everything all of the above or go go a little deeper in that yes so um one joke i like to make is that automation um automates my mistakes with 100 accuracy so i like that undefeated that's that's the point right it'll do exactly what you wanted to do and so just being able to build things that are that do exactly what you expect them to do i mean i'm a fallible human being like the rest of us tired sad happy uninterested motivated excited but but computers just compute right so yep they will do literally what you tell them whether it's good or bad 3 a.m kansas time or 3 a.m melbourne time they'll do what they do so shout out to canvas yo by the way did you know my sister lives in kansas because that was weird you know we're basically best friends now since earlier you know i'll tell you what else is reliable though um the fact that we usually try to keep this around an hour so i'm trying to i'm trying to pump us up on the race here so what i'm going to ask you to do is give us kind of your final words of wisdom here like like we were making fun of it last week like do this right now but give us your do this right now like what what what should someone like andy be doing if he's just deathly afraid of this like because it's coming right yeah i mean i guess it's it's hard to it's hard to say i don't i'm not saying that everyone should automate i'm not i'm not imposing that on upon everyone it's more it's more um like take a step back from work and and just decide what you want to achieve in your life more broadly i mean like a lot of us have a lot of us enjoy work and it's and it's a a large part of our identity but you really need to understand why it is you you go to work or what motivates you and what provides you energy and what doesn't so for me like i i enjoy doing automation because it enables me to have time with my family and and allows me to live a you know a normal life in terms of you know always giving my son a bath every single night or always feeding him breakfast or whatever the case may be um so it enables me to to have quality outcomes outside of work and not working at 2am in the morning and i love it waking up grumpy or stressed or whatever the case may be so if you start with that goal in mind about what you want to achieve as a person then you may or may find that automation is is or isn't for you for example if you live on the adrenaline rush of of doing cut overs at three o'clock in the morning i mean you do you you know what i mean you do you idiot but for me you know i i i i take my work seriously um and i like to do the best job i possibly can but you know my my priorities lie outside elsewhere you more than that so that you work to live not live to work yeah and then um you know someone's starting out like i've got a book i've got a blog post on on starting your network automation journey the other thing i'd encourage people to do is um reach out on on on twitter or linkedin and feel free to ask for advice i've built a couple of tools that um cater to people like andy i'm not going to pick on you andy just it's okay thank you you're you're the dude um that that are really i actually built them for someone like yourself so asking you to just fill in the minimal amount of info and and then just run it and then just see it in action so that you can you can get the benefits without having to sit there and and write a bunch of code one of those tools is called day one net toolkit so it's literally you know you put in you put in the variables and it will go and discover all all the facts that can about your network and it will even produce an excel spreadsheet with you know your device name your serial number andy's the interface whether it's got ipv6 on it etc so i don't know andy might get in trouble running a tool like that it is working 100 percent so that's good we're heavily automating right now it's it's just begun user uh well i'm saying i would figure that some kind of security application would think that that's malicious well no not if it's all ssh traffic they're working they're working all that out and building all the tools but but dan you you had me at um you know saving time and having more time with the family start with your why it's all it's all about time right we're only alive for a certain amount of time and i want to spend more time with my family and less time working and the chicken or the egg is i have to invest time now so that i can save time later by automating stuff and and that's the commitment i guess i gotta make you're smart dude you know that anybody ever tell you so andy it sounds like you you've been afraid of what could be your freedom all right we're gonna save that for now you know like we're going to have to what am i going to complain about we're going to go ship him a couch and make him lay on it we're just going to consult him dan's going to get his uh this voice out and he's going to start talking to him yeah so daniel thank you thank you for visiting us from the future thanks for visiting us from the future because we know it's wednesday there now um it's still tuesday here in america i know these these all the episodes get released on wednesday so that might be a little confusing if you're listening at home but we're recording this on a tuesday and daniel's actually already on wednesday so maybe he's already listening to the recording we don't know we just these are all still mysteries to us um we really appreciate you showing up dude um we know that like you guys you have obviously a lot of stuff that you could be doing other than you know hanging out with us and we appreciate it we appreciate you listening it sounds like you'll have a lot of cool stuff uh just real quickly what is your website and your twitter handle your twitter head is your full name but your website and my webs my website is blog dot daniel teshny.com probably the the easiest one to remember is if you go to github and my username on github is write meme so w-r-i-t-e-m-e-m-e right meme okay cool and it's a play on right memory yeah but the memes are so much funnier um so dude you rock thanks for joining us thanks for putting up with our our uh american ignorance as we know we got that in droves let me tell you we're representing every corner of the united states here so if we weren't ignorant enough for you we're gonna have to get some more uh people on the show to help help paint a better picture of us but dude yeah thanks for giving us the insight we appreciate all that uh the tools are rad we're gonna put your website and your ad and stuff like in the show notes so that people can get to that kind of stuff uh and we'll also hopefully maybe tweet some of that stuff out too i know aj will tag you in that when we tweet the episode out and stuff but just so everybody this listening knows if you're gonna go find some of those cool tools that he made we'll we'll make that as accessible as possible because it sounds like a really cool like entry into getting yourself started with the automation journey so thank you so much for uh joining us and the rest us being the rest of the team here and for everyone here thank you for listening again if you would do us such a kind a bit of favorism and hit that like and subscribe button so that you can catch more shows and listen to more people like daniel um probably not from australia but uh we can only be so lucky if you got any friends daniel holler at us we'll we'd love to picked our brain too you never know um got many got plenty of mates cover oh okay all right all right all right um mates is friend here for those of you listening means friend um i'm just messing with you uh i did not make a vegemite joke when you said you feed your kid breakfast by the way which i did want to and i guess me saying that right now is me making the joke so and it's good because no one's laughing so on that note we will see you next week see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artoofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you