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This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

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this podcast to look for keys, technologies and talented people. We aim to bring you information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

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Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. I am AJ Murray at No Blinky Blinky. And, uh, had so much fun watching Aaron drive this boat. I thought I'd, uh, jump in and see if I can steer this ship. Hopefully I don't run it right into a beach and, and, uh, dry docus. So we'll see how it goes. Uh, with me tonight, we've got Andy. Hello everybody.

00:55
Andy is at Andy Lapteff. And if you've been listening to the show, you know his brand as Permit IP Andy Andy. I love that, Andy. I really do. Yeah, that's genius. I really love it. And we've also got Joe. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us, Joe. Before we dive in and talk all about Joe, the Joe Show, I just want to take a minute and shout out to all of the people that have.

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you know, said something, retweeted, shared an episode, their thoughts. Uh, it's, it's really been kind of overwhelming, you know, like, you know, Andy, I think you'll agree when we, we first started talking about recording episodes and letting this thing fly, uh, we had hoped for the best and the response that I've gotten so far has been so much better than, uh, what I ever anticipated, right? Yeah. It's, it's been real humbling. Um,

01:52
We haven't been doing this long and yeah, we've been getting so much positive feedback and people reaching out and it's it's been really nice But it really feel good kind of ride so far Yeah, absolutely. So if you have any more thoughts on the show, please don't hesitate to reach out to one of us I know Aaron has gotten some some folks reaching out to him as as Dan So please keep them coming. Let us know your thoughts. Tell us what you love. Tell us what you don't love and you know, well We're doing this for you. So

02:22
Please keep the feedback coming. So anyway, our guest this show is Joe. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself. So yeah, I am Joe. I am currently an infrastructure architect for a software company that caters to the beverage distribution industry across the United States. It's kind of my current role. And

02:52
Yeah, I mean, I do a lot of different things. I wear a lot of different hats and just do, I don't know, a lot of different things. We'll break it down exactly what everything is. So infrastructure, first of all, if you're an infrastructure architect, you're not just networking, you kind of cover the whole ball of wax, right? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, my stuff is anywhere from plugging in a network cable,

03:21
all the way up to troubleshooting application performance or trying to design infrastructure layouts for servers, for networking, all the OSI layers, all the things, and just trying to keep it all together and making sure it all kind of works properly. Design sessions, making sure that things are, that all pieces are accounted for, that this group is thinking.

03:49
I talk about this application and I might be the guy that comes in and says, but you have to remember this and that. Then these, so then we take all that information and put together and start to form solution. So a big part of your job is definitely like a higher level. You're not just thinking about any one single application, you've got to look at the big picture and how all of this stuff connects together. Correct. Yeah. How everything integrates, anything from again, plugging in the network cable to DNS, to TTL times, to all the things.

04:19
you know, redundancy across servers, redundancy across data centers, you know, and also I, also when we have major issues and stuff like that, of course I get involved in those. So I'm kind of all over the board, you know, some days I'm dealing in digging with the details and some days I'm designing a, you know, a 50,000 foot view. Some days I'm working with the executive team to figure out, you know, what should be going on and lending a technical expertise to that team.

04:49
So yeah, I'm just kind of all over the place. I kind of do a lot of different things. Hey Joe, are you involved with most of the systems in the data center? Like are you touching firewalls, load balancers, pretty much soup to nuts? Yeah, pretty much everything. The only thing that I don't really get involved with a whole lot is my company, because my company is a 50 year old company or so, and a lot of our original technologies were I series, believe it or not, AS400s, those kinds of things, green screens.

05:16
And we still have a fair amount of our infrastructure that actually runs on that. I think we have about 30 I-Series or so. And so I don't really touch a whole lot of those. I know some of the high level details, or high level, not details, high level knowledge about them just so that I can make decisions and help people and guide people and whatnot. But I'm definitely not an I-Series guy by any means. But other than that, yeah, I mean, I deal with, you know, external DNS, internal DNS, I deal with firewalls, switches, routers, you know.

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All kinds of things, just all of it.

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Yeah, load balancers, all the things. Web servers, we're a cloud company for our customers. We host our cloud, and so we have a lot of cloud infrastructure, so it's all around dealing with that. And we host it on prem. Most of it is hosted in our data centers. We don't use AWS or GCP or Azure or anything like that. So we host all of that ourselves. So keeping all that running, keeping all the things smooth, designing, troubleshooting.

06:22
Again, it's kind of all over the place. It's hard to generalize my job because it's very much all over the place. I think I'm learning a thing or two about your job. I mean, in the interest of letting everybody else know, you and I are friends. We go back seven, eight years. I've been to your data centers. I've seen your data centers, which are super cool by the way. So I'm definitely learning a thing or two about everything that you do. And it's...

06:49
It's bigger than I thought, so I think this is going to be a great conversation. So when we talk about architecture or architects, one of the things that I use to kind of explain the difference between network architects and network engineers is this analogy of building architects. Like a building architect will come up with this beautiful drawing of what the end result should look like.

07:13
and then they pass it off to a construction company and they figure out, you know, what are all the bits and pieces that gotta go into building this? Is that a fair comparison to infrastructure architect and say an infrastructure engineer? Yeah, I would say that a lot of times in my experience, at least, and I think everyone's experience would probably differ, but in my experience, what I find is that a lot of people know a lot of individual pieces.

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but not everyone can kind of put all those pieces together and get a good overview of the entire system and a good look at it. So having the ability to kind of do both is kind of what an architect does. You have to have that technical knowledge to be able to make those decisions. You have to understand it. Maybe not to the nth degree, but you need to have a good understanding of what all of those things are and how they work to be able to.

08:03
then design the solution and then taking those pieces and kind of putting them all together and coming up with an entire solution that works for the specific thing you're dealing with or across the entire network data center, depending on what you're trying to do. Being able to bring all that together, I think is really what architects have the ability to do. I meet lots of really good engineers that do a lot of great work, but a lot of them are like, well, I do this thing.

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or I do that thing and I know everything about that, but I can't necessarily tie it all together, right? And I've seen that from business standpoints too. I've been in and I've worked with engineers that are great network engineers, but just again, can't just see that big picture, you know? So that I think is really the big thing is just being able to take that knowledge and kind of bringing it all together to form like a cohesive picture that kind of works and have all those pieces accounted for. You know, I think that's kind of what the architects does.

08:58
So is it safe to say that you didn't start your career as an architect? Yeah, no. I mean, I had to learn to walk first. No, just kidding. No, definitely. Yeah, no. I was a normal help desk guy for years and years. And I just kind of worked my way up, learned a bunch of stuff. And frankly, my role at my current company just kind of evolved into the architecture role. It just turned out that I was the one that could do this. And so that's just kind of the role that I adopted.

09:28
Help desk is where you started. Yeah. I mean, um, my first real job, I guess I would say, um, you know, after high school, after college, my first real job was at a school, uh, an elementary school supporting K through eight. And, um, you know, I was basically just a help desk guy going to the classrooms, help out the teachers do things, you know, um, I knew technology, so it helped them try to incorporate technology into their plans.

09:53
You know, they say, hey, I have to do this thing. And I'd be like, well, you know, Word can do this. And, you know, here's how you use the internet, you know, that kind of stuff. And so I just help them out and do that kind of stuff. I maintain the labs. And then, you know, we had a small infrastructure, a couple of Novell servers and, you know, some dumb switches and whatnot and a firewall. And I would, you know, poke around and tinker around in those, you know, just cause I was curious. So yeah, that's totally where I started. It was a lot of...

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PC deployments, basic help desk, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, it's totally where I started. Um, was that before college, after college? What, did you have any education before you started the help desk? Yeah. So education is kind of interesting in high school. I didn't really have a whole lot, you know, I'm a, I'm a 90s kid and, um, the internet wasn't really a thing back in the 90s. It was, but only for like, you know, the super geeks like us. So, um, it was, uh,

10:48
My first real introduction to computers, I've always had fascinations with them, but my first real introduction was in high school. I took what was called a computer applications course. And you did everything from Word and Excel and some things like that, but you also did a lot of basic programming, like literally in basic and Pascal and Turbo Pascal. They even did some video editing in there and whatnot. And I just thrived in that class. I loved it so much. I was like...

11:16
I love computers. This is so great. And that was actually my first forte into legit programming. And so when I went to college, I was like, yeah, I want to be a programmer. This is what I want to do. I love doing it. And then, so I went to college and I remember just sitting up in my dorm, probably about halfway through my college career, like two o'clock in the morning, debugging a couple hundred lines of code that I had written. And I was just like,

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What the hell am I doing? I can't do this. I'm having trouble just doing my own code. I can't imagine doing someone else's, like thousands of lines, hundreds of thousands of lines of code that someone else written. What have I done? Yeah, exactly. So I ended up graduating. With that said, I did end up graduating from a small tech college here in Vermont with a computer science degree. So just technically a programming degree, basically. Just an associate's degree. Wasn't anything crazy.

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But yeah, other than that, that's basically, you know, high school diploma and associate's degree in computer engineering is really all the formal schooling that I had.

12:23
So then yes, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, no problem. So I am aware that you and I both worked at the same place, but not at the same time. Correct. And we were both systems engineers, where we would go out and deploy various solutions of many different types, sizes, and styles, and fits, and so forth. And so what was that position like for you?

12:49
Yeah, it was cool. That company, I actually had two different jobs inside of that company. I started out as a field support tech in that company. And I would actually go out and just do, you know, network health checks, server health checks, you know, whatever needed to be done, small projects, you know, a couple hour projects, that kind of thing, nothing that was anything crazy. And that's really where I started to learn all the basics of basically what's my foundation today. I learned, you know,

13:18
Active Directory and I learned Citrix, I learned firewalls, I learned more higher concepts. I'd never actually dealt with routing, like actual legit routing and V landing and that kind of stuff. So I started to learn all these concepts. And then about halfway through that career there, I was promoted to a project engineer, which is the same role that AJ and I shared again at different times.

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and then I got to implement different things. And what I loved about that was, even with the small ones, you'd be able to implement something, but you go in and everyone's needs are always different. So you'd always implement, you could implement the same technology different ways at every single customer. And it would just be like, I always found that engaging to me, right? I've always learned something new. Oh, I'm used to doing this thing this way.

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But this customer, I can't do it that way, because it doesn't make sense. So I'm gonna do it this way instead, right? One of the big things that I did there was I was the main Citrix guy. So I used to do Citrix presentation server deployments back when it was presentation server. And so I did a lot of those, hundreds of those, probably in my career while I was there. And I used to tell people, I would walk into a hundred different customers and I will implement Citrix 97 different ways, because everyone had a different.

14:44
a different need, a different use case, right? And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things you do the same, but you have to, there's all these little things you have to kind of take into account to make sure that that technology fits, because it's not necessarily a one size fits all kind of thing. So yeah, I gained so much experience there. I spent probably five years total at that company and the amount of knowledge that I gained there, I think was pretty awesome. Again, because I enjoyed my job there, I enjoyed implementing things different, even the simple stuff I thought was great.

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because you know you implement again implemented all different ways and just different challenges and so yeah. You got exposed to a lot of different technologies there is that was that was that part of your job or were you like kind of just curious and going after it and asking like you know were you hitting up the firewall guys okay how does this work or they just handed it to you. Totally no it was it was a little bit of both.

15:38
It was as a project engineer, you have your specialties, but at the end of the day, if you're the only one available, you kind of have to go do it, right? Or if you have a little bit of knowledge, then go figure it out kind of thing, right? Even in the support role that I held there, I was constantly calling people. In fact, a funny story, I actually got hired at that company, not because of my technical skills at all. The guy who hired me, I went through 12 hours of the interview with him.

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And the guy that hired me, he's like, the only reason why I'm hiring you is because I like your personality. He's like, you're a good fit because my first role was a field support tech and I was going to be customer facing. And he's like, that's the important part. He's like, the technical stuff you can learn, but I can't teach you how to be a person, like how to be a good person in front of people. And he's like, I can tell through these hours of interviews that I enjoy being around you.

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And it was funny because I was his first and only hire there, it was a long story. But I was his first and only hire there and him and I still talk to this day, he came to my wedding and all kinds of stuff. So he's a great guy. But he was right because he knew that I had technical prowess. He knew that I could get in there and I could figure it out even though my resume didn't totally show that I could not do it, right? But I was a go getter.

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And that's what it was. And yeah, so in these projects, that's totally what I would do is we had, there was a bunch of other engineers that were back at the office or they were around at other projects, whatever the case may be. And I just hit them up on IM or you give them a call or whatever. And you, hey, I'm having this issue. Can we take a look at this? Or let me talk to you for like two minutes and tell me what you think, you know, that kind of stuff. So I definitely 100% learned through a lot of the people at my company for sure, just picking brains of people and whatnot. It's funny, I, when I think back to my,

17:27
career there and everything that I learned at that company. I always think back to my father. My father was a big sports guy. And my father always said, you should always play sports against someone who's better than you. It teaches you two things. First off, it teaches you how to lose, which as a good sportsman you have to know. And secondly, you're going to learn how to get better by playing against these people.

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I, in the, my, my job there really showed that that's also true in work. I think it's probably true in any industry, but if you surround yourself with smart people, even if you don't learn the job, as long as they're willing to help you out and you're willing to accept that knowledge, not just fix the issue, but actually learn from it, then totally you'll, you know, you can make some serious strides in the industry. So, wow. So you hit a couple of good points and I want to go back and touch on both of those.

18:25
You said in your interview there, the person that you interviewed with, the hiring manager, directly said, you don't have the right experience, but you have a great personality. That kind of echoes what we said back in the personal branding episode. It doesn't really matter if you've got the technical chops if you don't have the soft skills. You heard it right here. Joe got hired not because he had the technical chops, even though the hiring manager could tell.

18:51
that underlying, you know, he had the right idea about how to troubleshoot, how to learn, how to install. Uh, but what he really had was the ability to, to have a good conversation, to be very personable. Uh, and, and it sounds like in the end, that's what got you that job. Totally. 100%. Yep. Hey, and I, sorry, this is Dan. I'm a snuck in real quick. Hi Dan. Hey Andy. Uh, but so we were doing a round of interviewing not too long ago and

19:20
We found this one guy and dude knew his route switch really well. Like, guy was super solid. But man, he just seemed so grumpy. He was not happy with, I guess, who he was working with and it showed. And we ultimately didn't go with him because I just, I couldn't get past his personality. And so, yeah, that's a major point right there. Your personality just alone. Totally. Yeah. I think that's one of the worst things that you can do.

19:48
Um, either walking into an interview at another place, or if you're, you're just out in a social event, you know, talking to other people, the worst thing that you can do is talk crap about the place that you work with now and the stuff that gives you headaches. If you want to do that in private with a trusted advisor, a really good friend, you know, that's one thing. But if you start doing that out in public, uh, especially if you're at like some sort of a networking event, like, Hey, I'd really like to get a new job. But the place that I saw, uh, work at right now, like really sucked, you know, that that's.

20:18
not going to be good for your personal brand. And that same thing happened to me, Joe, at the job I have now. I fell on my face, the technical interview, I was there forever. And at the end they offered it to me. And that's what he told me. He's like, you know, we can teach you this stuff. We can help you fill in the gaps you don't know, but you have, you know, customer service background and you're good with people. I'm enjoying talking to you because they had also hired, like Dan was saying, that guy who, you know, knows it all, but oof, you know, he just, he just can't seem to get along with people. So, yeah, right.

20:47
The nerd with people skills is a huge asset, I think. For sure, definitely. So the other point that you made was your sports analogy and always playing teams that are better than you, right? That's how you learn, that's how you grow. You learn to lose, you learn to play better. So one of the things that we've talked about on here is, if you feel like you're the smartest person in the room, that's not necessarily a good thing, right? So putting yourself in challenging situations.

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where maybe you feel that imposter syndrome going on and you don't feel like you can cut it here, but you want the challenge, you wanna rise to the challenge. So making sure that you're always feeling challenged is gonna help you grow as a person. Yeah, definitely. And I would say, don't be afraid of those challenges. I mean, I deal with stuff all the time that I don't have 100% of the answers for, right? So don't be afraid of the challenge, but I like to, I've developed this kind of be honest kind of thing is kind of how I work. So...

21:42
Like when I think about something, if something comes to my mind, I try to categorize whether that's fact or whether it's just my opinion. And so a lot of times what I'll do is I'll say like, hey, you know, it should be this, or this is how this thing works, right? Like I know how this works, this is how it should work, right? As opposed to, well, I don't really know how this works, but my opinion would be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So I try to like categorize those two to make sure that I'm not...

22:12
giving false information, but also to kind of, you have to have confidence too, right? You can't not say anything, especially when you're put in that position. If someone's asking you for technical advice, then clearly they want your, you want your advice, right? So don't be afraid to give it. At the same respect, don't be afraid to say, well, I don't really know that answer, right? Or don't be afraid to say, well, I don't know the answer, but here's my opinion on what it could be based off of what we're seeing here, right? You can make some kind of educated guess or whatnot.

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But again, I like to just kind of make sure that you're always saying kind of the truth of what that is, whether it's your opinion or it's a no, this is how this thing works because I know that. Right. Yeah. I always, in every one of my sentences, I'm always like, it should or should. Right. Exactly. That's the key word there. So how much did that job, when you're going around to all these different places, you're installing these things and like you said, you could go to 100 customers and you install it differently 97 times.

23:11
How much did that prepare you for your current role as an architect? Yeah, so it really did because when you go into these kind of places and you have to, sometimes you have to think on your feet, sometimes something's kind of laid out to you. Sometimes you have to do a little discovery and whatnot. But understanding that, or not being stuck into this is the way to do it, really helped me kind of create like...

23:39
I like to think of things in concepts. A lot of the things that I do, I think of in concepts. So I say, in concept, it should be this, or in concept, it should be that. And that's kind of like the idea around how this should work or how this should look or this kind of layout should be kind of thing. And then you can kind of drill down into the specifics from there. But I kind of like to start high level. And I think that that job really gave me the ability to kind of think about how these things could go. And I do this a lot too, where I'll just think about things.

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and I'll kind of work through it in my head as I'm talking about it. So sometimes I'll be talking about it with some executives and I'll be like, hey, well, it should be this thing, it should be that thing, although we could incorporate that so we could do it this way and that kind of stuff. So we'll kind of go through it. And then the other thing about that job too is that a lot of times we were dealing with, because here in Vermont, we deal with a lot of small to medium sized businesses. So a lot of times you're not even dealing with the quote unquote IT staff.

24:35
you're dealing with the office manager, right? Who just happens to be the IT person because they helped someone replace a mouse one day, you know, that kind of thing. And so you're dealing with all kinds of different people and sometimes you're dealing with executives, sometimes dealing with the office manager, sometimes dealing with the PC intern guy, sometimes you're dealing with super knowledgeable, huge networking teams, right? It just depends. So kind of having that gamut allows me to kind of...

25:03
take the technical knowledge that I have and kind of transfer that to any kind of sort of people, which allows me to kind of talk to lots of different types of people, I guess is what I would say. So. So in addition to preparing you technically for an architect role, would you say that it also helped you prepare or prepare you to be able to learn the needs of a business and translate those to technology?

25:30
Yeah, and that's it's funny you say that because it's something I've come to the realization the last couple of years and I never thought about it while I was doing it, but I've really taken more cons. More of a look at it that to be an architect is not necessarily always making the correct technical decision. But it's also making sure the decision you're making is right for the business and in that case, a lot of times you have to know the business needs, not just the technical needs, because a lot of times those but heads right.

26:00
So being able to understand what the business needs and marrying that with the appropriate technology definitely is something that I do a lot, for sure. So I think that's like, regardless, like if whether you're an architect, an engineer, whether you do the job that Joe and I did and the job that I kind of do today where we bounce around to all these different customer sites and get in dirty with the customers and install stuff, I think that understanding the business need, the business driver,

26:30
for a given technology or solution is really key. And so what do you think are some of the ways that we can help people that listen to this show cultivate those skills? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a lot of probably just understanding your business, right? Understanding the needs of your business. We're looking at doing this upgrade. Why are we looking at doing this upgrade? Is it just to get the latest and greatest because it's fun tech?

26:59
play with, right? Or is it solving a problem? What problem is it solving? What is my business really using this for? If my business is using this thing, then I have to really understand and I really have to make sure I compensate for this thing over here, right? And kind of making sure that's all part of the solution. So yeah, I definitely think that, again, I think that understanding business needs, it's different than just knowing the technology.

27:27
I think you just, again, you just have to understand what your every environment's different, right? So you just have to understand what your environment does or what the environment is that you're designing something for or that you're working in or whatever. You have to understand those needs and be able to at least recommend appropriate solutions. That was one thing that I always told people when we worked back at the other company was that, I would say Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer, this is your network.

27:57
Right, so I'm gonna make some recommendations to you. And then we can talk about those recommendations if you want, you know, lots of, especially around here with small to medium sized businesses, a lot of times you're running into budget constraints, right, hey, Mr. and Mrs. customer, you need a $50,000 network overhaul. And they're like, yeah, well, we got 20 grand, right? So it's like, what can we do to help us along in that journey, right? So you kind of have to think outside the box, maybe you implement some stuff. I don't want to necessarily say that you wouldn't normally,

28:26
it probably wouldn't be your first choice, right? Maybe it's a little bit a budget on a shoestring kind of, kind of set up. You're putting it to the rescue. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we've definitely come up with some creative stuff too. And you know, it's unfortunately a lot of times too, it's with a lot of compromises, you know, and I've had to have those conversations with customers where it's like, look, I can do this for 20 grand, but let me tell you what, you're missing out on an X, Y, Z, you know, A, B, C, D and E, and you're getting, you know, eight letters of the alphabet where

28:55
is when we first started talking, you were supposed to get 20. So we've really had to scale this down, but that's because of budgetary concerns or because of timeframes or whatever the issue is, right? So. So I think that's a really good segue into talking about a little bit more about the company that you work for, because I think that'll help people even kind of further understand your role there as the infrastructure architect. And up to you as to how much detail you wanna go into.

29:23
So I'll let you take it from there. Yeah, sure. So my company, it's a cool company. I really like it. We are a software company for the beverage distribution industry in the United States. And quick history lesson on what that really means. Back in 1920, the US government or Congress actually invoked prohibition, right? Which is what prevented the sale and consumption of alcohol.

29:53
for non-medicinal purposes. And then in 1933, I think it was, or something like that, prohibition was repealed. But prohibition was repealed because the government had come up with what's called the three-tier system. And largely the three-tier system has been unchanged since then. The idea being that you would create three tiers, a supplier who is the one responsible for making a product.

30:22
distributor, which is the regional, I guess, based person that would be responsible for distributing that product, and the retailer, who is the end store that consumers like us would actually go and buy stuff from. So that's the three-tier system, supplier, distributor, and retailer. We started out in the 70s actually making software for the distributor market, so the middle of that. Basically, throughout

30:50
lots of years, we ended up creating solutions that basically ran the entire distributor, everything but payroll. It's the only thing we didn't do. So anything from truck loading to truck tracking to warehouse management to all kinds of stuff. I can't even tell you all the things that we do. So then in the early 2000s, we took a look at it and by we, I mean the proverbial we, I wasn't even at the company yet. We took a look at it and said,

31:21
we have all this information from these distributor customers that we're dealing with. The suppliers would love to know this information because they're constantly running promos. Like they don't know how their promos are doing. They don't know how their product is being handled and all that kind of stuff. So we went to suppliers and said, hey, you know, we could do this, what do you think? And they're like, yeah, we would love that. So we started feeding data from the distributors back to the suppliers. Basically we...

31:49
created a reporting service for the suppliers. And suppliers loved it so much, they actually said, this is all in the beer industry, by the way, they actually said, hey, all of our distributors, regardless of whether they use your system or not, are now gonna have to send all of their data to you because suppliers wanted us to report on it. So we ended up getting all of this supplier, all this distributor data,

32:18
and basically turning around and giving it to suppliers. And then we ended up breaking out into other markets. So we do everything from soft drink to iced tea, to water, to wine, spirits, I mean, all kinds of stuff. I like to say it's really hard, not impossible, but very difficult to have a drink in the United States of anything without it going through our system somewhere. Because we have small customers,

32:48
your local distributors, your local retailer, well retailers technically aren't our customers, but your local distributor, all the way up to large people, Anheuser-Busch Miller Core, those kinds of people. So it's kind of cool, it's a cool industry to work in because not only are you dealing with beer and that's always fun, especially to a Vermonter, but they're just a lot of cool people out there too. You know, you get to deal with all kinds of people, the small local mom and pop shops, all the way up to having

33:18
having conversations with the SEC team for global conglomerates like Miller cores and it has a Bush and whatnot. So it's a lot, but it's a lot of fun. And basically, so what we did was in the probably over the last 10 years or so, we've kind of migrated all of our most of our applications, working towards all of our applications onto a cloud-based service. So basically, we're a cloud company for our customers, all of our customers, consumer, our stuff over the web. So as you can imagine, we have a lot of like, you know, reverse proxies.

33:48
and application servers and database servers and all kinds of networking. Everything is fully redundant, not only within a site, but cross site as well. We deploy multiple architectures. Everything's deployed to one data center and to another data center at the same time to make sure that everything's intact. We do DR drills all the time, moving stuff back and forth from one data center to another. We're constantly looking at new solutions. We're constantly doing all kinds of stuff.

34:17
And to top it all off, we are now going for SOC 2, which is amazing. So, yeah, that's another part of the architecture role, by the way, is also trying to keep all the, what I'll call internal regulations in hand and trying to remember all of those and being like, well, we could do this, but don't forget for SOC 2, we have to do that, right? It has to be this, or we have to do it in this way to make sure it conforms to our SOC 2 practices and that kind of stuff. So. Wow. As if your job wasn't complicated enough already.

34:47
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's just called Tuesday. So. I love it. So the big question is, do you get free beer? So yes, for a couple of different reasons. First off, I'm working from home. So I can have beer any time I want. But yes, no, actually we do. It was funny, when I first started, probably like my second year there, I think, or so.

35:15
I came in one morning, because I'm an early guy, I get to work like a half hour, 45, sometimes even an hour early. And I walked into the kitchen for some reason, and there is like three pallets of beer sitting in there. And I was like, where did all this beer come from?

35:33
And then I get to talking to one of the executives, I forget which one, and he was like, yeah, we just signed this deal with Boston Beer Works and they shipped us a boatload of beer because it was right around Christmas. They're like, it was for Christmas. And it just so happened it was on a Friday and we actually do have beer Fridays. So at like four, 430 every Friday, you're allowed to go to the fridge and crack a beer and finish up your day, whether it's doing work or talking with colleagues or whatever the case may be, just kind of hang out and it's a nice little end of the week.

36:04
That's awesome. Okay, so next question. Where do I apply at? Yeah, I'll send you all the info. Now, so I where I live is actually really close to the Jack Daniels distillery and it's been said that every paycheck they get they get a bottle of Jack as well. So I was just curious if if your company is similar.

36:28
Yeah, no, well, again, we don't produce anything. We're a provider for the people who do the producing, right? So we don't actually have any of those things. Every once in a while, we get gifts and swag and that kind of stuff, but it's not the weekly bottle, proverbial weekly bottle, unfortunately. Hey, Joe, you mentioned you get to work an hour early every day. I didn't want to let that pass. Is that on purpose? Is that just because you wake up early or does that help you get ahead of your day? Why do you go in an hour early?

36:57
Yeah, it's kind of a lot of different things. It's a...

37:05
I always have a lot of work to do. So I could be there 24 hours a day and not have enough time in the day, right? So it's part of that just getting in. It's also kind of my process. In the morning, you know, I get up and what I'm thinking about is I gotta get to work. And so the sooner I can get to work, it just kind of, I get to work and then that's my chill time, right? It's work, work, work to get to work, right? Get up, get dressed, feed the dogs, you know, all the things. And then...

37:35
you know, get out the door, drive to work, all right, now I'm at work, all right, let me take a half hour or so before people start really showing up and doing the thing. It also gives me time, you know, I have actually come in in the morning and resolved issues before anyone's even come to the office, which is really nice. So that's really good. So you get those kind of little benefits too, but just kind of more about how my mind works.

37:57
I've noticed that you're working from home. Is that still a practice that you put in today? No. So actually working from home has been really good for me because I didn't realize how much I was missing out in the mornings, like just enjoying relaxing in the mornings, it's a different type of morning, a different type of relaxing. I guess. No, no, now it's completely different. Now, um, my wife actually quote unquote goes to work, um, an hour before I do. So she has to be to work for seven and I have to be to work for eight. And, um, so generally we get up at about the same time.

38:27
But then I'll just kind of cook breakfast for her and you know, we'll talk a little bit while she's beginning her day and we'll sit down and we'll have coffee and you know that kind of stuff and then I'll be all right I'm gonna go to work and I'll walk into the other room right so. So that's actually I actually enjoy that a lot more it actually it's more reminiscent of our of our weekend time so it's kind of like almost weekend mornings every day. That's nice. I've noticed when I have like a morning, you know maintenance window I have to work, and I'm up at four, you know if I'm done at five, I can get so much done.

38:57
in that next hour or two before, you know, the call start and the, you know, the people start I am-ing me and meetings and all that stuff. So I was just curious if it was a, you know, one of those things where you're just trying to be productive before, you know, meeting hell takes over. Yeah. It's, it's a little bit of both, I guess. Isn't it crazy how much of distraction work actually is? Oh, so much. I mean, not only from just being at work, but I mean.

39:24
In my job too, I'm constantly thinking about things. My mind almost never stops, and it's a lot to deal with sometimes. Sometimes I really have to deliberately say, all right, Joe, stop thinking about this. We're gonna do this. That's why I enjoy hanging out with friends and that kind of stuff, because it gives me a break from that. Oh yeah, I'm big on going outdoors and stuff and getting away where there's no cell signal and getting your mind off of it.

39:54
Yeah, definitely. Any distraction. Yeah. So that's a good segue into my next kind of question for you. So you said you go through this like morning routine. It feels a lot like the weekend and you're at home and you're working and you've got this whole work life balance. How do you maintain that? That how do you do that separation? Like you just said, you got to like kind of forcefully turn yourself off from, from thinking about work and doing work. You know, do you find yourself working more because you're working from home or how do you keep that balance?

40:23
I've, it's a really good question. I've, I think I've done a fairly decent job. You know, when I used to go into work, I would get to work early, you know, seven, seven 15, seven 30, somewhere in that, like seven 30 was like a late day for me. And then I would always get out of work at like, you know, five 15, five 20, five 30, even though my job really ended at five, right? Cause you know, we're all in IT. That's you never work an actual 40 hours with the work. And so I kind of used to that.

40:52
I actually go in, technically I go in later because I actually start my workday at eight as opposed to starting at like seven, seven fifteen, seven thirty. I still, I try to keep an eye on the clock, not like a whole lot. I don't really try to clock watch too much, but I do try to be cognizant of my time. And you know, I'm usually done working between five and five fifteen. Unless something comes up, I really don't work.

41:19
after that. Like once I'm done working for the day, I don't work after that. At most, if something comes up and I have to like, I have to send an email to this thing because it has to go out tonight or something small like that, then I'll go ahead and do that. But I really do try when my day gets done, cut it off. I might still be thinking about things but I'm not actually working if that makes sense. You don't check your phone? Yeah. I try not to. I might keep a tab on email and whatnot just to kind of make sure I'm

41:49
keeping going, what's going on. Um, but I don't act on any of it, right? I'll, I'll read an email and then I'll mark it as on red and I'll just check it again in the morning, that kind of thing, just to kind of make sure there's nothing I got to attend to right now. I have to power my stuff down. I found sometimes, cause if I just read an email and then I'm like, Ooh, well let me just get this thing out. That'll save me some time tomorrow. And then half hour later I'm working at night and I'm like, what am I doing? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I've actually found, um,

42:16
putting things on silent is really nice. Like not necessarily the whole phone, but like my mail, my work mail is on silent. So I'll get notifications on my phone, but it doesn't ding. There's no ringing or anything like that. So just having that kind of disconnect where I don't really know if something's coming in, so I don't have to immediately take care of it. And just every once in a while checking my phone is much more calming to me than being prompted to check my phone because a ding went off somewhere.

42:46
And you can get called in any time for an outage, right? As the architect, so. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I also, we also run, um, on call shifts. So we rotate on call shifts and I'm part of that. Um, part of that rotation too. So, you know, when I'm, when I'm on call, I could get called at any time. Um, and when I'm not on call, if there's a major issue or something, then yeah, I will get called for sure. 100%. Yeah. And I've had it, I've had it all the time and, and sometimes it's totally inconvenient, you're at a friend's house or whatever.

43:15
I've even had it where I've been drinking out of a friend's house and I hop on the phone and I'm like Let's try to do this So yeah, no, it's a it's a thing it's it's a it's a constant thing It's it's almost a way of life. Unfortunately, well fortunately and unfortunately I enjoy my job Don't get me wrong, but sometimes it can be a little much for sure They say don't drink and drive, but I think it's also don't drink and CLI Yeah, exactly

43:41
I actually did that once. I was actually at a party once, and I got a phone call about some network outage or whatever, and I remember setting my laptop up with a MiFi on the back of some guy's tailgate, and I'm literally sitting there, remote it into a firewall, trying to figure out what's going on with it. I don't even remember if I fixed it or not. I just remember that happening.

44:06
So you mentioned a little bit earlier where you kind of silenced the notifications on your work phone I just have to say that for me personally that was the biggest most liberating thing for me and helping me get to this work-life balance because I Used to have every ring ding and ping would come to my phone and I would just you know constantly check it constantly check it and like, you know, somebody would email me for a request and I would instantly reply and after

44:34
years of doing this, people would learn my habits and they would take advantage of it. Totally. If they needed something after hours, they'd say, oh, we'll email AJ. We know we can get that from him. And so I just decided one day, I'm like, you know what? It's an email. If somebody really needs me, they can text me. They can call me if it's that urgent. So I have filtered out all of my notifications, even silly games that I used to play. Nothing breaks through to...

45:01
actually notify me and disrupt me unless I want it to. So taking control of those rings, dings and pings was extremely liberating. And if anyone's listening that's not doing that, I highly recommend doing that. Yeah, even try it. Like even if you don't think it's your thing, like give it a couple of days and like set an alarm or something and be like, you know, in three days, I'm gonna go back and check this and see what I thought, that kind of thing. It really is. It really is liberating. Yeah, it'll totally help you achieve that work-life balance that you deserve.

45:29
I don't think any employer's expecting us to work 24 seven. And if they are, you might be, you know, not at a great, you know, place. Yeah. Not, not a great culture. It's hard. Like my company, my company is very customer focused. And so when something goes down or there's an outage or something and it's affecting our customers, that means a lot to us. Um, so it's kind of a catch 22 because yeah, you're right. The employer is not necessarily expecting me to work 24 seven, but if we have an outage, especially something major like that, and I'm.

45:58
not available, especially when I'm supposed to be available, like if I was on call or something like that, then that's hard for us as a company, because it's not good for our customers. So how do you handle the on-call rotation? Do you guys pass around a pager? No, because this is not 1990. Fair. Hey, now, about three or four years ago, I had a beeper. So.

46:27
Yeah, and we still have actually there's still departments and for whatever reason, I don't know why this is there's still departments in our company that pass around like an old Nokia, you know, candy bar cell phone, which is crazy to me. But yeah, it's totally crazy. But we use Ops Genie. That's what we use. And in Ops Genie, you can actually just set up schedules. And so it's nice because we just go in there, we put in our schedule for the year, and then it just automatically rolls to whoever is the next person on call. And that call comes in via an app.

46:56
on your phone, right? And so it's just, you don't have to really think about it. It's just there. And then it prompts you, it'll send you a notification, say, hey, you're on call starting at, you know, 8.30 on Monday morning this day. And then it'll, when you're done, it'll say, oh, you're off call now. Some of the next person's on call and it'll just kind of automatically switch. So you don't really have to worry about doing that at all, which is nice. And you could do overrides if you end up trading with someone because you had some conflict or whatever. So it's pretty nice. Do you have a knock? Do you have like a first level responder?

47:26
Don't, technically speaking, although we are developing an ops group, which is a group of one, soon to be a group of two, which I'm very excited about because it used to be that up until this year actually, it was, my department was very flat. Lots of people had their specialties, but everyone was kind of part of the IT group period in the story and that's what it was. And so if a ticket came in...

47:49
then it would be escalated to you if you're the right person to do it or if you weren't available someone else, you know, that kind of thing. And now we're finally starting to get into an actual ops role where we're actually having tier one type support, which is great. It's very liberating for someone like me because when I'm stuck in a project and I got to deal with an IT ticket, it's fine, but it's kind of annoying because it's like, all right, I've been working on this thing, I'm heads down this thing for three hours. Now I got to do go do this, this task.

48:15
to get this person back up and running or do whatever. And then I have to get my head back into that game after leaving it. And it's like, I'm going to waste not only the time that I'm doing that for that person, but it's also I got to get myself back into the game to where I was. So yes, I'm definitely looking forward to having an ops team for sure. So I'm curious, how large is your network team? So you're an architect there in?

48:45
And so how many engineers do you have that work off designs? Yes. So there are 12 people total in my department. We are approximately a 420, 430 person company. And there are 12 people in my department, two of which are managers. Although I will say that my managers are probably more of the technical hands-on nature. They're not necessarily engineers.

49:11
But they're very capable at getting in, digging into things and starting to look into things. Not in everything, but they're more capable managers than I've had in the past, let's put it that way. Then we have basically three sides of our team right now. We have the ops person, like I just told you. Then we have the I-Series side of the team, because again, we're a big I-Series shop and a lot of stuff runs off from that. We have a few guys that are dedicated to that.

49:41
And then we have probably four or five people that are, I guess, for lack of a term, non-I series guys, which they kind of deal with everything else, right? They're a mixture of networking people, PC support people, all kinds of stuff, depending on what we need. So it sounds like you guys have a pretty lean team then. Totally, very lean, yes. And in fact, probably a problem. We're so lean, for sure. Sounds familiar.

50:09
Yes. Yeah, I think that's the plate of most IT people. I've never heard of an IT person that's like, yeah, we could lose three people and be okay. That's never a thing that comes out of anyone's mouth. Yeah, just absorb all that, right? Yeah, exactly. You touched on it, but at this Cloud software and I guess, analytics company, you're the architect. How do you do that?

50:35
How deep into all these technologies that you design and put together, how deep do you get into all these? Is there just like a small cross section that you're really familiar with or do you really get into all of them? Yeah, I mean, I would say I've probably personally built about 80% of our infrastructure. I've had a hand of building into it. So I get involved quite a bit. I'm trying to pull back as much as I can because we have other people that

51:05
could and should be doing it versus me doing it so that I can spend my time doing other things. But at the end of the day, I'm also still an engineer. I love doing this stuff. I love digging into stuff. So I'm also the type of guy, too, that I need to understand products at least to a certain level to be able to design them. So we deal with proxies a lot, right? And we use HA proxy quite a bit. And so I dig into, I guess, what you might call more complex HA proxy configs.

51:34
when you need to do parsings of URLs and bodies and that kind of stuff. And you do regex across all of those, classifying them, putting them into ACLs, classifying them, and then making routing decisions inside of the proxy based off from that. The request that's coming in, that kind of stuff. I like doing that. It kind of tickles the brain a lot, right? And again, I'm a firm believer that you have to know at least at some extent,

52:02
what these things do and how they operate to be able to design it, right? Am I an expert in every single technology that we have? Definitely not, definitely not. But I'm also no slouch. I feel like I can, I feel like there's a lot of things that I know and I feel like I also have enough technical knowledge to be able to get in and figure out things, right? I'm never afraid of an issue. Hey, Joe, this thing's happening. All right, let me go take a look at it, right? I don't mind. I've never heard this thing before. I don't even know where this is.

52:32
I don't know what this does. I wasn't involved in the implementation. I have no training on this thing, but let me go dig into it a little bit. Right. So that was a question I was going to ask you, Joe and AJ nailed it. And I just want to follow up for my own, you know, selfish motives of, you know, Hey, Andy wants to be an architect someday, which may or may not be laughable. Time will tell. But the depth, so you have to know all the systems in the data center. Right. And I almost wanted to ask you for a list, like, you know, routers and switches, servers, load balancers.

53:01
I'm probably missing some, but personally I need to compile a list of like, okay, here's the 10 things I need to learn. But my assumption was that you wouldn't have to go that deep in a lot of them. You just need like a high level understanding. But if you built 80% of your, you know, environment, it sounds like you're, you can get in and configure any one of those systems. So I mean, do you think that's common as an architect? I mean, I was kind of hoping that.

53:28
I could have more of a high level understanding of stuff, but not have to configure it. Would you recommend to me who wants to be an architect someday, like don't just know how firewalls work and be able to log into Panorama, but like be able to configure all this stuff too? Yeah. I mean, I'll say more knowledge is always better, right? I mean, you can never have too much knowledge, I think. And then, but you know,

53:52
Architecture roles, like especially at my company, when I consider an architect at my company, totally works, but might not necessarily work at the next company, right? Or someone else's architect position might be completely different. And then when you get into bigger companies, they have specific architects, right? A firewall architect or at least a network architect, right? And then they have server architects, and then they have all kinds of different things. So an architecture role is really what the company, how the company defines it, I guess is what I'll say. I can see that. Yeah, so it really depends on what your company does.

54:22
I think that's a really good point. Uh, you know, like you, you look at a, at a company, you're saying you guys have like 12 people on your, on your more immediate team, right? And you're the architect of that team, but like you look at a super large company that, you know, maybe they have 50,000 employees and their IT team is, you know, 5,000 of that or whatever. Like how does an architect look on in a company or in a situation like that versus on like a 12 person team? You know, it.

54:51
Yeah, and I think at some point it's ridiculous. I don't think I could walk in and be the single architect for a 20,000 node global company and expect to know all the details. There's just no way. That's just physically impossible. So in that part, I would assume that even if you were the top level global architect, you're still relying on other architects below you to give you opinions and everyone kind of comes together and forms solutions.

55:20
So I can't imagine that, especially as you get into big environments, that you can have like one person just kind of knows everything that's just crazy. It's like you turn into more of a generalist architect or something. Yes. Because how could you have all your hands and everything at that level, right? Yeah, for sure.

55:40
For sure. How come in networking the answer is always it depends. Cause just like, I mean, we've been talking a lot on the, on the episodes about, you know, Hey, if you're new and coming up, you know, how, how, how do you become a network engineer? And there's just so many different paths and everybody's story is different. There, there isn't one answer, you know, and it, I can't, you're the second architect, I guess we've talked to so far and the same thing seems to ring true. Like, well, it depends. And.

56:06
And that's a good insight that you're giving me at least is, you know, even the company depends, you know, where I work, there are a lot of architects and there is a network architect, firewall architect, that, that, that, that, and it's probably going to be different there than, than it would be, you know, where you are. So it, it always depends, which it's hard to get a straight answer sometimes because it does depend. Yeah, it really is. It's, it's really, it is really difficult to kind of figure that stuff out for sure. So one question I had, um,

56:34
How much of your time do you actually spend like labbing things or do you lab things? Like how do you play around with some of these technologies to understand them? It's a good question. We don't have like what you might consider a proper labbing scenario. You know I might carve out certain separate sections of the infrastructure to do specific things but a lot of our stuff is really done for POCs. You know if we're looking at getting something we'll do a POC.

57:03
At the bare minimum, a demo, a better demo would be a hands-on demo where I'm allowed to play with something or something like that. Discussions back and forth. Sometimes I can't even touch technology until we get it in. Sometimes it's just not feasible to do that. That doesn't happen so much nowadays, but in the past, totally. So there really isn't a lot of... I don't have a whole lot of time and...

57:29
ability to do a lot of that kind of stuff. But you know, localized stuff, like, hey, if I need to test out this HAProxy config, sure, I can spin up a CentOS VM and throw HAProxy on it and start playing around with the configs and figure out what's going on. I've totally done that, so. Gotcha. So Joe, in just this conversation with you, and I mean, of course I know you outside of this, but it seems like you're pretty fearless. You know, like you get thrown a technology and you're just like, all right, you know, let's kind of do this. Like, do you ever...

57:59
get those moments of imposter syndrome where it's like, yeah, gee, I don't know, am I an architect? Mm-hmm, totally. Like, and that's another thing that I try to keep in check as best as I can. You know, I know you guys, a lot of times you guys say, you don't wanna be the smartest guy in the room, and you're right, you don't wanna be. It's not necessarily a great position. But the fact of the matter is sometimes you are. And when that happens, you have to kind of try to approach it where,

58:29
You don't want to seem too cocky, but you need to be confident too, right? And that's where I go back to telling people what you know as a fact versus giving your opinion on something and making sure that it's known that this is my opinion, this is what I think we should do. I don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to work, but based off from the conversation we're having, this would be a good way to go because X, Y, and Z, right? Being able to back that up and that kind of stuff. So you're right. It's a hard position to be in because you don't always have the answers, right?

58:59
I don't always have the answers. But making educated guesses and kind of moving forward. And I'm not afraid of a challenge. It's kind of frankly, it's how I think I've kind of got here is I've always been interested in stuff. I was looking at stuff. I'm always kind of tinkering around with things. Even if I'm not there to do that thing, if something's kind of coming in contact with another technology because of the thing that I'm doing, I might spend a couple of minutes to poke around there so I can understand how it's working with the system that I'm dealing with.

59:28
and then I can figure out what I need to do with the system that I'm dealing with better. And being able to kind of look at that, getting a bigger picture, just even when that small window sometimes helps, right? So yeah, you don't always have the answers. Like, I'm not always the smartest guy, and I love being around smart people, I really do. But sometimes you gotta play that role in just a matter of making sure that you're just not, you don't wanna be cocky, but you definitely need to be confident.

59:57
in what you're doing if you are confident in the things, right? And if you're not, then you just come across that way and say, hey, you know, this is how I think it should be done, but I don't really know. Right. All right. So it's definitely a fine line. And some people love to tap dance all over that between confident and cocky. Right. Exactly. So, so one thing that I picked up out of there, and I hopefully, you know, a lot of other people did too, is that you don't need to know the answer, but

01:00:23
If you have an understanding on how A works and you have an understanding on how C works, you have no clue about B, but you can start to make some really good educated guesses on maybe this is how this whole system should work and kind of give you at least a starting point. And you can walk down that path if it works great, if it doesn't, let's try something else. So, working with what you know. That's a good troubleshooting step is just starting with the things that you do know.

01:00:51
Right? Verifying those things, start poking around in those things, and then kind of working from there. I do that a lot, for sure. Yeah. Excellent. Well, Joe, this has been a fantastic conversation. I want to thank you so much for coming on here and spending some time with us and carving some time out of your evening for us. Where can people find you? So I'm not much of a social media guy. I got to admit, I have a LinkedIn page, you know, slash jillamare, I think.

01:01:20
And then that's about it. I mean again, I'm not really much of a social media guy. I'm more of a more of a loner, I guess Let me let you know I feel a lot better because these guys give me such a hard time Having a good social media presence, but you know, I think it's a little bit different when you're a co-host of a podcast You might be right you might

01:01:50
No, but you know to Joe's point I think that that speaks to what we said on our our personal branding episode is You don't have to go out and have a Twitter and produce this gigantic social presence you you can definitely build a social brand Or a personal brand without doing the social thing and obviously Joe has done very well for himself without having a Twitter And if he'll let us I will Post his LinkedIn in the show notes so you guys can track him down check him out and connect with him on LinkedIn

01:02:20
Yeah, definitely. And AJ and I are friends, so if you ever need to get in contact with me, just hit up AJ. Absolutely. I will share his address and phone number. He's practically my neighbor. He lives in the same town that I do, so I know exactly where Joe is. That's kind of scary. All right. Well, I am AJ at NoBlinkyBlinky and Andy at AndyLapTef. Permit IP Andy Andy. And Dan, well, maybe.

01:02:50
get a social account going here of some sort. I don't know. I liked your suggestion the other day. All right, guys. Thanks for joining us. And as always, you can find us at artofneteng on Twitter and Instagram. And hit us up on our web page, arto Have a good one.

01:03:14
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 eng. That's art of NETENG. You can also find us on the web at art of network engineering.com where we post all of our show notes. You can read blog articles from the co hosts and guests.

01:03:41
and also a lot more news and info from the networking world. Thanks for listening.