Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast. In this podcast, we explore tools, technologies and talented people. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering. I am AJ Murray at NoBlinkyBlinky, and tonight I am flanked by the one, the only the Tim Bertino. Tim, how are you doing, tim?

Speaker 2: 0:37

I am fantastic, AJ. I have been looking forward to this specific episode for a while now. I am ready to get going. Good to see you.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Good to see you as well. Also joining us this evening is Kevin. Kevin, how are you?

Speaker 3: 0:51

I'm doing fabulous. It's almost Friday.

Speaker 2: 0:55

That's all I'm looking forward to right now. It's been a long week. I was going to say do you need it?

Speaker 1: 1:01

I think a lot of people out there need it. We'll cut right to the chase. Our guest this evening is Wendell Odom. You may have heard that name. He has written many books over the years. A lot of us have used to study for our certifications. Wendell, thank you so much for joining us and giving us your time this evening.

Speaker 4: 1:20

It's kind of you to ask. I've been looking forward to this. It's like hanging out chatting with friends.

Speaker 1: 1:30

So I always could use more of that. It was so great to meet you earlier this year at Cisco Live. I feel like I ran into you in 2019 during a Cisco Champions thing, but it was really great to talk to you again and I'm super excited to dig deeper into how you got into being an author and what your background in networking is. I don't want to jump right to it, but let's jump right to it. So how did you get into networking Never mind the author thing, is your background in networking or were you an author before and decided to tackle networking as a topic? How did this all start?

Speaker 4: 2:07

Yeah, so wow, we're going way back. So in college I realized I needed money to pay for college.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Funny, how that works.

Speaker 4: 2:18

I know it's crazy, right, but you know, being a bit older than you, fellas, I lived in a world for which you could pay for chunks of it working, whereas it's just unreasonable to try that today, right? So I started the co-op program at school, where you'd work a quarter school, a quarter, and I landed at IBM and a data center and got to see all the different job roles and fell in love with networking. I wasn't even a computer science major right, I just needed money.

Speaker 3: 2:47

Was that a happy accident or were you like seeking IBM out?

Speaker 4: 2:50

No, I was seeking a place that paid. You got it. It was like you know, I can make it through halfway through sophomore year before I'm going to be working at Subway, you know that kind of thing. So once I got there it's like hey, I really like CS, I like networking, and by the time I graduated college it was I want to work in some networking job. So by the time I fast forward up to signing up with Cisco Press for the first book, that was 13 years after college. So I'd been working in networking for a good 13 years at that point.

Speaker 1: 3:23

So what was the intent in college? What was the degree or, like, what were you studying while you were in college?

Speaker 4: 3:29

I was meandering, but I was in industrial engineering.

Speaker 4: 3:34

But I wasn't like oh, I've got to do it. It just it was like hey, you're good at math, you go to an engineering school and now what you discover, what you want to do, and nothing really blossomed until I got to IBM and the school is a public school, so the computers were not all that impressive and CS was not a sought after major that much because you know it's old equipment. You get to IBM and of course they had spanky new everything equipment. You get to IBM and of course they had spanky new everything. So it's like, oh, this is what real live people do with computer jobs. I like this, you know, as opposed to hey, you know you can only use those three terminals to write APL because you don't have all the working characters on the keyboard, you know on the rest of it, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 4: 4:22

So, yeah, that worked out pretty good. But, yeah, industrial engineering, I think I would have enjoyed that had I landed there. But yeah, I think networking was the place for me, so that definitely would say a happy happy chance.

Speaker 3: 4:34

What drew you to networking? What was the spark that really like oh, this is it for me.

Speaker 4: 4:39

Ah, yeah, well, I'm a rule follower. I like order, and networking seems to be about a bunch of rules fitting together to make things work right, so I don't like chaos.

Speaker 4: 4:54

Of course sorry, Kevin, sounds like that was your week this week, right, and all the cool people at work were networkers. And all the cool people at work were networkers. I mean just saying so. The personal aspect of it was that and the school they had just started emphasizing networking. They were trying out a new senior level was great, 8 am class, senior year, all these seniors in there, and the first day the professor comes in and says this is a new class, slams a stack of papers down and says it's not going to fit 7.30 every time so he upped it to a 7.30 start for all these seniors, for the entire year.

Speaker 2: 5:41

Wow, surprising.

Speaker 4: 5:51

He was. I soaked in every word, man. It was a great class.

Speaker 4: 5:52

Now I'm a morning guy, so I'll be nodding off in about 30 minutes but uh, but yeah, it's uh that was a great class, but you know, imagine back to our college days, right, that was not a time to want to have to wake up extra early for something, but it was well worth it. I, you know it was. I don't know what about you guys. What clicked on it for you? Was there one particular thing about networking that was most attractive? Maybe that'll spark a memory for me.

Speaker 2: 6:18

I think it's common, the concept you brought up about rule following, because when I went to school I I was a computer science major, because I didn't know any better and I shouldn't say it that way, but that's, that's how I say it. And you know the, the immediate calculus, the immediate C plus plus. I just had a hard time grasping those things. But when I sat in, that first happened to be Cisco net, a CAD was the, uh, the program that we had at school. Immediately we started talking about things like the OSI model and it breaks things down where you can start bottom up or top down, and helps you compartmentalize different parts of the networking stack. And I think that's what really helped me, because I'm the same way, wendell, I thrive on structure.

Speaker 2: 7:04

I guess I'm not the rule breaker. We talked about chaos. Maybe that's structure. I guess I'm not the rule breaker. We talked about chaos. Maybe that's Kevin's issue. He's not a rule follower, I don't know. But that's really. Networking gave me that structure and kind of that path. I keep going back to the OSI model where you can start at layer one and work your way up, and that's what really clicked for me and brought me back. I don't know.

Speaker 3: 7:27

To me it was just like the internet is something that I didn't think about much. It's this cool thing that connects everybody, but I didn't think the details going into it. And it wasn't until I discovered all the tiny, minuscule things that are happening and as fast as they are, and that was like, oh wow, this is really cool Right there, fast as they are. And that was like, oh wow, this is really this is really cool, right, there's a lot to it. Yeah, it took that, that Eureka moment, I guess, for me.

Speaker 1: 7:53

Yeah, for me it was around the time I was going into college was the same time we were starting to get, you know, decent internet in the area that I lived and I was bringing a home network or I was setting up a home network. You know, our home internet connection was coming in and we're setting up wireless and pulling some cables around the house and what's a subnet mask, what's that mean? And trying to figure out all this stuff. It was just very interesting. And then I get into college and find that there's a networking track and one of the last classes I took in my associate's degree was a general networking and it's just like oh man, this is fun. I took a programming class and it was really annoying because I wrote like 200 lines of code just to get color to show up on the screen.

Speaker 1: 8:31

And so networking, you know the teacher's, like you know, telling us all this stuff, telling us about writing protocols. We got to make our own cables, which is like any networking nerds like rite of passage, and it just really stuck. And it was one of those things like, if I'm going to pick a career, why not networking? Right, because we're always like, from here on out, man, we're a connected world. So it just felt like networking was one of those things that isn't going to go away. So I still love it. It's great.

Speaker 4: 8:59

Yeah, I've been doing it over 40 years and I've loved all of it, so it was a good choice for me for sure.

Speaker 1: 9:08

So what happened after IBM? You get to IBM, you get bitten by the network bug. You love networking About. How long were you there? What'd you do?

Speaker 4: 9:20

Yeah, it was a little over eight years after college that I was there. So I had one job that was internal IT, so network engineer in a data center, and then one job that was kind of like the consulting SE role that Cisco has go out and see IBM customers talk to them about things. And fortunately that was around the time that IBM started embracing TCP IP. So part of my job was to go help IBM SNA customers. That was a protocol that existed before TCP IP.

Speaker 1: 9:44

for those of you that are a little bit younger out there listening, dan still deals with SNA. Amazingly, really, yeah.

Speaker 3: 9:52

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Their central application is on a mainframe and it still uses SNA. And it's like the bane of his existence.

Speaker 4: 10:09

SNA and it's like the bane of his existence. So people started considering also using TCP IP and then not using SNA, and so I got to help with that. But IBM pretty much failed in their networking business to the point where they sold off the remaining pieces by what? 1997 or 98. So I split from IBM by 93 to get away from the sinking ship and started teaching Cisco classes. So we've all heard of Cisco Learning Partners.

Speaker 4: 10:30

Well, I was around when it started. I was one of the very first Cisco certified instructors and went on the road teaching 30 weeks a year doing that kind of thing. So by the time CCNA came out in 98, so I was so internal IT job then seeing IBM customers and then about four or five years of teaching Cisco as a contractor, running around mostly the US, sometimes out of the, you know, outside the country. And that was fun. I was still single. You know, you run around, you don't have to worry about, you know wife and kids at home and family responsibilities. But the when the CCNA got announced then it's like, okay, you know, maybe I'll get a chance to stay home a little bit.

Speaker 3: 11:08

So what made you make that jump from engineer to a teacher?

Speaker 4: 11:11

Well, that's an interesting question. So my first job was no teaching. So the first job after college it was just, you know, the old days version of what you folks may do today. Right, keep networks working, build new ones, design new ones right. But in that next job about a third to half of the job was building materials for workshops that were hands-on and then bringing in SEs from the Southeast. I was in Atlanta and we covered about five states and it was always about teaching them new IBM networking products as they would come out. So new version of TCP IP on the mainframe would come out and we teach a workshop on that. So I spent a fair amount of time learning about course development and workshop development.

Speaker 4: 11:53

Lab development Everybody thinks their way to do labs is best in every place. I've ever been Right. So if you meet people that develop courseware in particular, just ask them about labs if you want to start a conversation. So I got experience there. And then, of course, when I was on the road teaching for Cisco Learning Partners, I liked the learning part of that second IBM job and I knew I could bridge from that to being self-employed by teaching.

Speaker 4: 12:21

There were plenty of companies that would hire contractors to teach, employed by teaching. There were plenty of companies that would hire contractors to teach and in the 90s, with the internet growing like it was, you couldn't help but turn around and get work in networking if you knew something about networking. So to be an independent contractor, you just had to say hey, here I am, here's a contract, go do work. Now, things eventually slowed down, but, yeah, it was just as fast as you could go. Stuff needed to be done in those days, so it was easy to go out and teach and then, when I wasn't teaching, I'd do consulting gigs. I'll stop there for now.

Speaker 3: 12:58

Easy transition and it was just like shooting fish in a barrel for jobs. Right there you go. Definitely definitely shooting fish.

Speaker 4: 13:07

So I got married in 1998 and I got engaged in January. The very first week that I wanted to be working for pay and couldn't was like two weeks after we got engaged. But all the way through leaving IBM in 93 till 1998, I was busy working, getting paid every week that I didn't want to be on vacation.

Speaker 4: 13:31

So it was a five-year run and then, of course, we get engaged and my wife's like her future wife at the time well, what are you doing this week? You know it was really unnerving to her to think that I could have a week off and not get paid. And how are we going to pay the bills? And is she marrying some bum? That kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 13:49

You proved her wrong, though. Look at you now.

Speaker 2: 13:51

Details we got through it, we got through it.

Speaker 4: 13:56

Yeah, I'll just keep going. It's kind of a fun story. So I'm on the bench for a week or two she's like wondering about that. And then I got a contract that paid about twice what she made in a year in a month. So then it kind of reversed that.

Speaker 1: 14:14

She's like all right this is good.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Take weeks off all the time please, if this is what comes in between you, do you?

Speaker 4: 14:22

That's right. So that worked out. She had just grown up in a house where dad worked the same company for 50 years and got a paycheck every week. Yeah, stability took a little.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Yeah, you got it so, window, we've got a pretty good question from the chat here. Um, from zatharian, was there ever a point where you were teaching where you felt like you didn't know enough about a particular topic? Do you ever get that, you that imposter syndrome kind of feeling while you were teaching?

Speaker 4: 14:48

Yeah, I'm trying to think of the rate. Twice a week, twice a day.

Speaker 4: 14:55

Yeah, no, I don't mean to poke fun at the question. It's very easy to feel that and yeah, it comes up. I remember thinking this at some point many years into, like, hey, I've taught this topic for about 12 years and I'm lecturing something and in the middle of a sentence I'm realizing I just had a new insight into how this really works. You just you're going to keep learning or you're going to back up, but yeah, there's, you can't know it all, you just have to.

Speaker 4: 15:28

Would get over prepared before I would teach, and when I taught it I knew as much as I could know from study. And you know, there's other things you can't know without using things, right, you know. So you just have you have to have the pressure of getting student questions and being faced with things you've never thought of and going off and experimenting. But there were plenty of instructors who would teach two or three times as many different courses that I would because they were a little more comfortable with the I'll learn maybe a little less and I'll teach it. And you just answer and say, hey, I don't know the answer to that, I'll figure it out. But I always had got very nervous about the whole being embarrassed in front of the room to say you know, I have no clue.

Speaker 3: 16:22

That kind of brings me to a question I had. It's a personal question, I don't want to do podcasts, I don't care about that stuff, but so I learned CCNA from you. I read your book when I was first studying all this stuff and you are a resource for a ton of people who are learning things, learning CCNA or networking in general. But as the CCNA changes and it evolves over time, how do you, where do you learn your stuff from? Like, how do you keep up with technology?

Speaker 4: 16:47

Who's your resources. Well, yeah, yeah. So there's probably two phases of that for me. There was the when I was still attempting to be broadly read and know many things about networking, and in this latter stage, the bridge to retirement stage. If you will, I'm just focusing in on things that are in the CCNA space, so say, when I was writing about QOS and CCIE and things like that. You know those things would prepare me for topics that aren't even in CCNA, right so, but it would you know. If you're writing a CCIE book and there's some overlap, that's going to have a natural effect of keeping you fresh on CCA and you're labbing a lot to write those kinds of books as well. But this day and age it is get in the lab and try it and try it again and, oh my goodness, cisco documentation it's written down somewhere but I'm sure that's a very difficult thing to do well with the size of the company and the.

Speaker 4: 17:44

It's written down somewhere. I'm sure that's a very difficult thing to do. Well with the size of the company and the breadth of products, I'm sure. So I am not trying to cast the first stone. There are many times when I wish there were more details in there.

Speaker 3: 18:01

You can be honest, wendell. You're close to retirement. You can throw him under the bus, it's fine.

Speaker 1: 18:06

It's horrible. What are they going to do now? Fire you.

Speaker 4: 18:12

So I'll just go off on one here. So you got an Ethernet switch, you got ports, you configure speed and duplex. Does it turn off auto negotiation? So if you go into the Cisco docs over the years, there are places where it says it turns off auto negotiation. But you can't tell that from a trace right, because you need an oscilloscope to figure that out. And then I've learned that that's not always true on some switches and it's not written down anywhere. I've invested probably 25 to 50 hours of searching for this next edition to find that answer. I just couldn't find it in the documentation and what it turns out from experimentation that ports with PoE consistently leave auto negotiation on when you configure both and ports without PoE consistently turn it off when you configure both consistently inconsistent yep yes, but the documentation I could not find anywhere.

Speaker 4: 19:14

Now they they did a very practical thing instead, which was auto negotiation works. Use it, and they preached that through all the last five or ten years worth of versions of docs. Yeah, I believe that. So they said why do we need to document trivia? I'm thinking to myself, rather than you know. Let's tell people not to be stupid rather than document stupid things. So all right, I get that.

Speaker 2: 19:40

But if we don't document trivia, then we can't create test questions around that.

Speaker 4: 19:46

You got that straight. So yeah, getting in the lab trying stuff and you know you can read docs, but part of it is you read other people's things. If somebody puts something out that's wrong, and then it gets propagated, and propagated, and propagated. It might even be Cisco, it might be me right A TikTok creator and there you go. Could be a TikTok creator, those videos are hard to edit, aren't they, kevin?

Speaker 3: 20:12

They are.

Speaker 4: 20:13

They're a lot of a lot of pain in the butts, yeah, so um, so yeah, that's uh, that's a little bit of the how do you, how do you keep up. But yeah, I read specifically, I take notes. I've got an app called Scrivener that I use this time around, where everything that I change in the books that I researched I've got all my notes on everything I came across with the links and what happened in lab and why I believe it to be true, so that if I then later look back and say I think I got this wrong, I can look and see why I thought it. There've been many times over the years where somebody will say, but that's not right, Wendell, and it actually changed. You know, iOS changed, for instance.

Speaker 4: 20:52

And then a few times it's like, oh, I just blew it, you know, I got it wrong, and you know we're all human right, so, um so, yeah it's. I'm much more methodical about it now than maybe I was in the beginning.

Speaker 3: 21:06

Which you were mentioning, things changing. How do you, do you go back when you have a revision or a new version of CCNA? Do you go back to your old material and verify and redo all that, or do you kind of just are able to use that as a base and move on from there?

Speaker 4: 21:20

Yeah, I have process. So imagine, so the books are in parts. You may recall sets of chapters in a part. I won't have to scrub it, I won't recreate anything in the lab for those, unless I have some external reason to think about it. But of course, eventually, if you just leave things there, you know something's going to change about iOS output. Like, I scrubbed the IP version six chapters this time around. All that output is either regathered or I've confirmed that the format of the command output is the same and the commands are the same and they act the same, to the point where I know that we're solid. So yeah, you do have to be. I mean, it's weird, but it's way different than writing a brand new book. You know it's, it's a maintenance task. Even you know, say, 80% of the content is completely unchanged. There's still the maintenance part of that work.

Speaker 3: 22:29

So do you prefer the maintenance part, or do you rather start completely scratch? Ooh yeah.

Speaker 4: 22:36

Yeah, I like it when I get a chance to improve something that I wrote earlier. So there's more than just the maintenance, more than just recreate the examples and fix the output and tweak a command parameter, that kind of thing. If it's simply making sure there are no lies, you know that's a little bit more laborious. But, like the access control list chapters, here's a bit of trivia. One ACL per direction, per protocol, is no longer true, so I had to update that. Now you can have two ACLs, two IP ACLs, on an interface in the same direction, something called a common ACL, so that you could have I did not know that.

Speaker 2: 23:17

Yeah, aces in one set. I need to redo the CCNA. God damn it. There you go.

Speaker 4: 23:24

Well, I have no clue if they'll even ask about it, but I'm looking at it. It's now in iOS, so do I not put it in the book? Or do I put it in the book in case they ask about it when some clever person comes along and says oh I heard this bit of trivia, let's put an exam question in about this bit of trivia and that kind of thing? So, and I did a whole new chapter on ACLs for overhead protocols, Like how do you match and avoid matching incorrectly OSPF and DHCP and with the presence of NAT or the presence of DHCP relay agent, those kind of overhead protocols. So that was kind of fun to update. But yeah, recreating the same old ACL example to update output not very exciting.

Speaker 3: 24:08

So you mentioned like having to figure out what you need to put in the book, and do you. How do you do that? How do you determine what's important for the CCNA book or what's not? Like? Do you get the the insider information about what's going to be on the test and you basically designed the book around that? Or do you just get the insider information about what's going to be on the test and you basically design the book around that? Or do you just get the blueprint that everyone else gets and you've got to do as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Yeah, I was going to say because the exam topics are just that, they're topics. It's not in depth of all the specifics that you need to learn. That's a good question.

Speaker 4: 24:39

Kevin. Yeah, it's really hard, just flat out. So it's an educated guess. It's an educated guess after doing this, since the exam came out. A lot of education, you got it?

Speaker 2: 24:51

Yeah, a lot of it.

Speaker 4: 24:54

Precisely. That nails it right. But, yeah, I get the blueprint early, I have a conduit to ask them questions about what they really mean by the words. Ask them questions about what they really mean by the words. But what I don't get is the exam database does have these kinds of topics, exactly with these specific command parameters, and not these. Yes, these concepts and not these. What I get is well, here's what we intended to mean by this exam topic, but then there's reality, right?

Speaker 4: 25:24

I'm sure you've never been to a Cisco exam where you thought how in the world did they ask about this topic in this exam, right?

Speaker 2: 25:32

Never happens, never happens, not at all.

Speaker 1: 25:35

I always felt fully prepared to take a Cisco exam.

Speaker 3: 25:37

Yeah, no curve balls, no weird questions at all.

Speaker 4: 25:41

Yeah yeah. So just anecdotally there was I felt so bad for Dave. Dave Huckabee wrote the switch book a couple of editions. He's a friend of mine and I wrote the route book one edition and Cisco put some weird not technical topics about, like PDIO or something like that you know, the planning and deployment et cetera model, and they put those exam topics in the route blueprint. So I tried to write something useful to it.

Speaker 4: 26:16

It's the first time they had it in the exam, so I'm, you know, just guessing at this point educated guessing and so I had all this great content and they asked all the questions in the switch exam so poor dave is getting all these hate mails.

Speaker 4: 26:34

why didn't you come? And he's like so anyway. So, yeah, you can't really do anything about those. But things like how far do you go on the topics that are obviously in the exam? That's just hard to do, and so I even write to that in the intro a lot stronger these days and tell people think of it like an SAT or ACT exam in the US, where it's college prep exam or college entrance exam. You're not going to know everything. So study what you know is on it, except that this is not about getting a 100. It's about getting a pass score. Get the pass score, don't sweat it. But you know, if you look at the exam topics, we know where you should spend most of your time. Or if you just listen up to people that live here and get their input, you can figure out where to spend your time Right. No, ospf, everybody. You know, for instance, just all of it.

Speaker 2: 27:25

Everything. I do want to pivot kind of into actual authoring of books. Wendell, Were you a writer of any sort before you started writing technical content?

Speaker 4: 27:38

No, I had written a few 50, 100-page consulting papers summarized the work that we did on a consulting gig, but it was not creative. I mean it had to follow the rules of English language.

Speaker 2: 27:55

So what has been your approach to writing a book? Because I just see that as just this massive undertaking. I have sat down and written blogs before and these are like one, two page things and it will take me a week because I'll write 10 words and go hmm, you know, I think I need to take a walk and come back and then that was really hard, that paragraph. So I'm going to take a week off.

Speaker 1: 28:19

And then writer's block is a real thing, yeah, so it's like how do you approach an undertaking like that?

Speaker 2: 28:25

Do you see it as one big thing or do you, like you mentioned, those books are broken down into parts. Do you take it a part at a time? What does that look like?

Speaker 4: 28:35

So, yeah, you get started on your blog post. It's hard to write two pages. How do you write 1400 that I'm looking over there, yeah, yeah, it's definitely an eat the elephant kind of thing. You know you just do the whole one bite at a time thing.

Speaker 4: 28:47

But my mom paid me a backhanded compliment when I was young. She said to a friend and she told me about this. I said, yeah, I told her. It's like you know he's not the brightest guy, but you know he was really persistent. And she did it with a smile on her face. He was about the nicest lady ever. But you know, and I thought, no, I'm not just, you know, an average guy who's persistent. And it's like you know, I might just be an average guy who's persistent, you know, and that's part of it, tim, it's like you just got to keep plugging at it and you say, hey, I'm going to write something down this hour and the next day. So I think the persistence part of it is a big thing.

Speaker 4: 29:31

But you got to get your head around the project. If you spend and this is something I had already coached Jason on, because he asked me the same question, oddly enough, talking about the CCNA books is, how do you attack something that's big If you are spending your energy thinking about the enormity of the task, be it a blog post that feels large to you, or you know, a two volume set, it's going to win. So what can you think about? So we can imagine it down into parts and chapters and sections and topics and say, all right, well, right now I'm going to experiment with that weird new ACL thing that lets you put two ACLs on the interface, right, and you go play and we all love playing in lab, right. So go figure it out, play with it, see what works, take a few notes on what might go in it and, hey, today I made progress. You just keep chipping away at it. Um, so I would.

Speaker 3: 30:20

I would be in, I hone in on something and I would spend weeks on one thing, like, yeah, well, I would just be on that for like a month and a half. So how long does it actually take you to write a book?

Speaker 4: 30:31

Well, I'm slower now, but the totally blank sheet for a new book where I don't need to research. It's about an hour a page, lock, stock and barrel. So 500 page book, 500 hours. So that's write it, get the edit comments back, review those, get the copy, edit comments, et cetera. But so little of my writing today. Is that right? We talked about that a little bit earlier, right? So it's oddly enough if you say here's a chapter with 20 pages in the foundation topics where all the real content is and I update significantly two pages and minor updates to two pages, but I still had to read the whole thing. That's not as time efficient. That actually takes more time. Removing even a paragraph or two with something meaningful in it is dangerous because you don't know what else further down the road is relying on it. So I mean there are times when it's like, hey, I'm changing 20% of this chapter. I may just throw it out and reuse the figures and examples, but throw out the words and just write the whole thing again. Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 3: 31:38

And what's easier to do that than have to nitpick, and what you're going to keep and what you're not, and how that affects everything. Yeah, yeah, so who?

Speaker 4: 31:46

knows, maybe half a page an hour at that point. But yeah, yeah, page an hour at that point. But um, yeah, yeah, it's um, it's a bit of a slog. I think the last one. Oh, my goodness, that's been a while.

Speaker 2: 31:57

Uh, I was gonna say you're not helping my case for writing, wanting to write more blog posts well, blog posts are I.

Speaker 4: 32:04

I don't think take as you you'd be surprised how much planning do you? So for the context, you have a lot less of that right? Oh yeah, what's your next topic in your blog?

Speaker 2: 32:18

I've been working so hard that I don't even have one, all right. No, yeah, I have not. I've shifted a little bit more to video lately, but yeah. So let's say I had a topic I wanted to write on OSPF, area types or bringing up neighbors. Let's say that's the next topic that I want to write about. What would your advice be to attack that?

Speaker 4: 32:42

I like an iterative approach. I know some people don't. I would literally write something and not worry about the wording of the sentence, or. But I just want to capture ideas. And I learned this in a technical writing class in college, actually a technique where you start with ideas and you try to write only the first sentence of the paragraph. So you write the first sentence, and what do we want to do as nerds? Right? Well, detail, detail, detail, detail, detail, right, because that's the fun, cool stuff. But there's a style of technical writing that says the first sentence ought to be the theme of the paragraph and the subject ought to be the subject of the paragraph and the subject should be the first phrase in the sentence.

Speaker 4: 33:28

You don't need a novel, you don't need stylistic words. Make it clarity over everything. So if somebody can read the first four words and know the topic of the paragraph. So now I've made my mind think I'm writing a blog post with eight paragraphs and my topics of the paragraphs are these eight short phrases. And then, nerdy people right, if I said, hey, compare and contrast a normal area to a stubby area, you can go off on that, right, but now I've got the structure of what those are, so I have found that effective. But also just the get something down. I can edit something I've written a lot better than I can write something new. Does that resonate with any of you guys? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 34:16

Right, so write something crappy and then make it better and then make it better.

Speaker 2: 34:20

That makes a lot of sense, not use chat GPT.

Speaker 3: 34:23

Got it.

Speaker 4: 34:27

Can you use AIs to write?

Speaker 2: 34:37

Taking that a step further and talking about learning and knowledge retention. You mentioned that you had a book next year that was 1,400 pages. I think it's human nature we get a book, we want to read it cover to cover and just go what's kind of some of your advice there on okay, you've written a book, it's out there in the public for people to learn and practice and study for a certification. What's your guidance on how people should use your books?

Speaker 4: 35:03

Yeah. So it's a two-volume set for CCNA, and Volume 1, before Chapter 1, is a plan for how to use the books on purpose, and it answers that very question, tim. So the idea is that you know you certainly can't. If your strategy is to read them both cover to cover and then start studying, you're going to have forgotten almost everything, if not everything, right? So it's got to be a process and I would even I would even improve and change it now, even though the books just came out. I debated whether to put even more advice in that section or not. But in terms of books, you read a small chunk, you do the review and study. You read a small chunk, do the review and study, but it's not necessarily even sequential the review and study, but it's not necessarily even sequential, as modern learning science tells us that you will retain more if you delay between, say, your reading and your review. So the thing I would add even, is read chapter one, read chapter two, do a bit of review on chapter one, read chapter three, do a little bit more review on chapter one. So space learning is one of the big things in modern learning science. Science that they say improves your retention over time. It's a little less comfortable but it's more effective. But yeah, so I imagine from your days using the books, tim, that you remember the end of chapter review. There's activities in the book that it suggests to you. There's end of part review activities In my YouTube channel.

Speaker 4: 36:34

When I sat down to say, all right, what do I want to accomplish there? It's not meant for entertainment, it's just more CCNA learning, right? But I decided, hey, if I make a video about a topic, I'm always going to have one more review something. Whether it's another video, that's a review exercise or points you to a blog post, that's a review exercise. And I've really enjoyed coming up with video-based review exercises to go along with, you know, content videos. But yeah, you've got to. If you don't commit to the study part of the equation, I don't think you're going to be as successful at any big body of learning, whether it's IT or not.

Speaker 3: 37:16

Wendell, you mentioned your YouTube channel. That's relatively new. What was your idea there of why you want a YouTube channel? Is that to supplement your CCNA stuff on your books, or is it to meant to replace it, or what?

Speaker 4: 37:29

Yeah, in fact I may. I may exercise that I can ask you guys questions. I want to. I want to answer your question, but you tell me, when you're learning for something big, like you're studying for a certification exam or you know some big thing, you're learning, not just finding out information about the CrowdStrike failure, right, but uh, you know you're learning something big. Why do you pick video? Where do you find it effective and why do you pick reading something big like a book? Can you think of one or two things that's appealing about video learning for big learning tasks? And what do you find appealing for books for big learning tasks, if anything?

Speaker 3: 38:09

For me. I'm an auditory learner. I'm used to like lectures and audio books and podcasts and that kind of stuff where I'm ingesting a lot of the knowledge through my ears, and so I prefer videos. Just because of that, I can kind of focus in and I don't know it's when I read something, I'll read it like three to four times and lose where I am and just not keep track what I'm doing. So I prefer videos. I've used CBT Nuggets and then I also supplement with your book to go kind of reinforce everything that I'm learning. But my primary source is always video personally, either of your other guys.

Speaker 2: 38:44

I agree with Kevin. I think that video to me seems almost more conversational, so that it's, like Kevin mentioned, kind of that auditory, that classroom style. I think there's value in that. Where I really like text is, within the last couple of years, how I have approached studying for certifications is using that space repetition approach that you brought up. We talk about the Anki flashcards a lot on here. In fact we had an episode way, way back on space repetition and how people learn and that kind of thing. And what I like about text, especially digital, is I can take, you know, I can copy those that text and put it right into these flashcards that I can leverage and review on a daily basis and the text just is just makes that a lot easier than hearing it in a video and then having to type it down and that kind of thing. So I think that combination approach is what really helps for me.

Speaker 2: 39:43

What I like to do is to take different mediums. So like I would take your book, wendell, I'd read the chapter and then if I had a video resource of the entire CCNA portfolio, then I would basically take that chapter and watch the videos for that. And so take one topic, use the different mediums I have at my disposal and then build those flash cards as I go. So I'm constantly reviewing as I'm learning something new. Because I'll tell you, in the last couple of years I got the CCMP and pretty much the entire first year that I was studying for that, I was just going read the chapter, watch the videos about it, read the next chapter, watch the videos. I was not doing that review that you were talking about. So, other than getting value from doing labs as I went, I basically wasted a year of studying because I finally hit the end of that and I'm like this isn't working. And that's when I developed that space repetition approach and that's what really, I think, kind of got me over that line.

Speaker 1: 40:47

Yeah, wendell, for me I like to introduce myself to a topic by video first, because usually they do a great job at like breaking it down. You know, high level. When I want to go deeper, I'll look for, you know, the textbooks, the technical papers and stuff like that and just kind of immerse myself in it from there, and then if I've got to go back and review it, then it's flashcards. Maybe watch the video again, you know, and all the stuff at the end of the chapters that they want you to do to try to memorize key topics and terms and stuff.

Speaker 4: 41:20

So all three of you gave different slants on it, and I've heard those things before. See how thick that is.

Speaker 2: 41:27

That's one of them. Yeah, that's one.

Speaker 4: 41:31

Did any of you or any of the other people listening probably say you know I love reading thick technical books cover to cover and I absorb doing that right.

Speaker 4: 41:43

And it's definitely happened more as a cultural thing too. I've got a 23-year-old daughter recently out of undergrad and she just laughs when it's like, so do you think anybody would read this book who's anywhere close to your age. She's like, nah, you know. So what I'm trying to do with the YouTube channel is say, how do you take a book that's, in all fairness, I think, pretty good at being a book, a book for CCNA, I think we've got that down here. But how do you make it effective, in the lens of what you three just said, for somebody that you know, honestly, would learn everything with video and they need some review tools, but they probably wouldn't read, or I want to. You know, learn first with a video and then. Or learn first with a video and use as reference a book, and that's that's the exploration I'm doing with the YouTube channel. So I think, a YouTube channel with videos that are organized in the same outline as the book. So here's, here's the premise.

Speaker 4: 42:47

Each content video matches a major heading in a chapter in terms of scope, but I purposely teach it a little differently than the writing style or the examples in the chapter, so it's like a second resource on the same concept and if you are a lean video person, you can watch the video and at the end of the video I tell you skip the section, look at these two topics in the section, make sure you look at these two topics in the section, make sure you look at these two key topics or whatever the advice is about whether you can skip the section or dig in if your preference is video first.

Speaker 4: 43:21

But we've got a huge amount of study and review tools packaged into the book in the same organization. So if I manage to complete the task, then now somebody could buy the books and if they want to use it solely for the review tools like the monster big set of practice questions which I got a little carried away on, honestly, but it's a large number or the other review tools and just never read the text or just use the the key topics. Now there's PDFs of all the key topics from the chapters pulled to the companion website so you can review those, watch the video, read the chapter or read the section of the chapter, so somewhere between that. So I I think we can reach more learners with that combination than with just handing you a book. It just takes a little work to get it all made.

Speaker 3: 44:17

Do you think people have changed how they're learned over the years since you first started doing this, like these kind of the videos are the new medium of doing this, but you've been writing books forever.

Speaker 1: 44:26

Do you think that is going?

Speaker 3: 44:27

to gradual change, or do you think this is just how it should have been from the beginning? Well, it's definitely changed.

Speaker 4: 44:33

You know, know, multimodal I think somebody had tossed out that term. But certainly if you look at what, you know, how kids are taught in school today and I'm not opposed to to those kinds of changes, we just want it to be effective and certainly the more people learning a thing, the more you can invest in those different tools. That may take a little more time to develop, right, there's just more money in the game to be able to do that. But I grew up in a world for which you read the textbook cover to cover, right. So you know, partly it was like all right, well, I've gotten pretty good at writing books. You know, I used to teach a lot, so I'm comfortable recording videos for the most part. But yeah, if I could do anything in that regard, I would maybe find some way to make written text more useful to those who embrace video. But I don't know if how many people that embrace video are gonna start with this, right?

Speaker 2: 45:33

so kevin, how? Maybe it's a different beast, kevin, how many tiktoks would that be?

Speaker 3: 45:37

tell me that book size I've looked at, you know, doing tiktok series for ccna, and it's just so overwhelming the amount of amount of stuff that has to go over and how much detail do you go in, and all that stuff. I can't imagine writing the book, let alone having to make these little videos that you do that are like. It blows my mind that you can even do this. To be honest, I'm very impressed by what you've been putting out. That's all I'm saying.

Speaker 4: 46:00

Well, thanks, it's not quick but it's funny. On that I mean I'd be curious to get your input. So we've had this conversation around the family. It's like all right, so could I make a video course comprehensive to CCNA? That was one minute portrait oriented videos that are popular today.

Speaker 3: 46:20

I mean how many? It's hard to get that much information in a little minute video, you know, and like you have to do bite size. But then are you going into enough detail, is it? Are you making entertaining? It's a whole balance there of is it entertaining? Is it actually useful information?

Speaker 4: 46:37

And and can video number 10 rely on people having watched one through nine? Yeah, like I rely on that. You'll never get there, yeah.

Speaker 3: 46:45

I think a YouTube platform like that you could do a little better, because I had playlists and stuff. But if you're doing TikTok or anything that's just being forced, like Instagram Reels and all that stuff, then I don't think it works well.

Speaker 2: 46:54

No chance.

Speaker 4: 46:55

yeah, yeah, but with a 2,400 one-minute video playlist on YouTube 10,000 videos in this playlist.

Speaker 2: 47:07

Hey, wendell, you never know, until you try, there you go.

Speaker 4: 47:11

Well, I'll make 10,000 videos and I'll let you know how it works.

Speaker 1: 47:16

Wendell, I don't think we covered this. How did you go from teaching to writing and then, as a follow-up to that, what was the first book?

Speaker 4: 47:27

Yeah, yeah. So teaching to writing. So I'd been doing this gig, teaching on the road 30 weeks a year developing some courses. So in 98, in April Cisco announced CCNA. I was getting married in June I wanted to stay home more. They had a placard the size of a business card that said want to write for us? At the Cisco Press Booth at Cisco Live they had five books out and it had a placard that said want to write for us? Call John John's phone number.

Speaker 4: 47:55

Wow, write John's phone number down. John was in the middle of a job change so I called John every week for like two months. He didn't return my calls. So his replacement sorry, it wasn't John, it was Jim that left. John took his place and then, after a couple of conversations, they said sure, we'd love for you to write a book for us. Which one do you want to write? And I said so. It was basically what grew up to be Route Switch or CCNA, and I said which one will sell more? And they said the one that's the prerequisite to the other two, ccna and I said all right, cool, I'll write that.

Speaker 4: 48:31

So that was the motivation. So it kept me from doing the road warrior teach on the road for the first half a year of marriage, which worked out. And they promised up front about the whole writing and the difficulty thing. It's like all right, so sign up to write a 500-page book when you've written 50-page consulting reports half of which are tables and things like that to tell them things like IP addressing plans and the like. And they said we need the nerd. We've got people that can write English. So I said we will fix every sentence as need be, but we can't write about the technology. So they said just get the tech into the Word doc and we'll take care of it. And I'd like to think that it wasn't all that bad starting out, but I definitely have grown into it. It took some practice to get better and better at it.

Speaker 1: 49:24

It took some practice to get better and better at it. When you wrote that first book, did you get the vibe like I can see myself doing this for a long time, or is this like a happy accident?

Speaker 4: 49:35

Yeah, it was probably two editions in before and those were pretty quick. They revved CCNA, so it came out in 98. They revved it again in 99. They revved it again in 2001. By the 2001 edition, it's like you know, I could probably do that and then add a couple other books in with it and make a business out of that.

Speaker 4: 49:56

A business that paid me, not a business where I had a bunch of employees running around. Books just don't pay well enough to do that kind of thing, but certainly to keep me and my family fed. It seemed reasonable at that point.

Speaker 1: 50:09

So that's when.

Speaker 4: 50:09

I started thinking all right, well, what other books do you add in? So I talked to the publisher. They were happy with me. They're happy to send projects my way. So that's when we added in things like I did a couple of editions of a QoS book and then we decided I'd do the CCIE route switch written Did. And then we decided I'd do the CCIE route switch written did three editions of that. That was a beast. So that was you know. Talk about the whole imposter syndrome Writing a book where all of your customers are going for their CCIE. Yeah, that was pretty scary.

Speaker 1: 50:44

But it worked out. How many total books have you written over the years?

Speaker 4: 50:49

All right. So I have to do this math occasionally. So it's 10 or 11 separate books, 29 editions, three video products and I helped out with a software product. Wow products and I helped out with a software product. So almost all so 29,. I count a new edition of a book as a book. Because of the work, involved?

Speaker 1: 51:13

Yeah, no doubt.

Speaker 4: 51:15

But you know it's not in terms of what the public sees, so much so. But yeah, it's a lot. I kind of lose track, but since the publisher said, hey, when you're teaching, keep keep your books up there in the backdrop, so that's the most recent CCNA books over there, the less recent over here, everything else and stuff I impacted by passing off material on those. So yeah, it's a lot, but yeah, it's been fun to do. It's funny. I was joking with my publisher today. We had a meeting and it's like so what are you doing now? You know the CCA books are out. You don't have any work left to do for us for this edition. You know what are you spending your time on? And I'm like well, you know I've been thinking about another book. And he's like no, you're trying to get get rid of this one. Why do you want to write some other new books? So we'll see about that, but I probably won't do another, another whole new one. I might, I might get Kevin's advice, maybe, maybe Kevin will team up and do 10,001 minutes.

Speaker 2: 52:20

I love it.

Speaker 1: 52:21

I love it. Will the YouTube channel continue after you enter retirement? Is that going to be like, maybe the little side fun project?

Speaker 4: 52:33

Oh, yeah, yeah. So this is not a plan for Wendell to retire fully. This is a plan for Wendell to hand off the grandkid to Jason, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 52:40

Okay.

Speaker 4: 52:40

All right, so I'll probably keep my fingers in something somewhere. Nice, so I'll probably keep my fingers in something somewhere. So I really want to try out the YouTube channel to see if I can. Can I serve the people I've been helping with CCNA for 20 some odd years better with one last big push in this YouTube channel and figure out how to do that? Well, not just.

Speaker 4: 53:02

Hey, what we need is another video on ARP. Right, we may not need that, but we might need something that's systematic, that works well with the books, etc. Etc. And I'm going to try to figure that out, but yeah, I would. I'm not able to talk publicly about the how and when and wherefore, but the goal is for that to be long-lived. Like, I chose a network upskill name for the channel so it's not tied to any other. Like, search skills is name of my company that you know my paychecks come from and my blog site is search skillscom. But I chose another name for the YouTube channel in part so that it would be easily set aside and funded and used by others once I decide to be done with it.

Speaker 3: 53:47

Now, when did you get your CCIE? Because you were talking about you had to write the CCIE book and you were feeling some imposter syndrome and that kind of stuff. Did you have your CCIE way before that and was kind of like doing this, or did you have to get your CCIE while you were writing the book? That would have been horrible.

Speaker 1: 54:05

No.

Speaker 4: 54:06

I got it in 95 october or something. It's on, it's on the wall, so it might be on one of those little doodads on the shelf october 24th I think.

Speaker 4: 54:13

So my number is 1624, which is you know by today's standard number, um, but so, and it's, I guess, enterprise now right is route switch. They didn't. They didn't have other names for them back then. It was only Route Switch back then. And then I probably wrote the first CCIE Route Switch cert guide. I did what was effectively the second edition, although they didn't call it that Somebody else did the first one. It was probably 2003 or 2004. It was the year after Katrina hit New Orleans, because we signed up the deal sitting at the convention. Cisco Live was in New Orleans the year before the hurricane hit down there. Oh wow, okay, so, anyway, so, yeah. So I was already a CCIE. I had taught CCIE boot camps for a learning partner. I lived it every day and it was still a very scary subject to write about Well yeah, you know CCNA scrutiny is.

Speaker 4: 55:09

Most people are learning it and don't know anything about networking. So more of the questions are they're confused about something and you can help them. And then you get to CCIE and people are you know, they find a problem in the book and they may not bother to spend their time telling you because they're moving on. You know they've got other stuff to do and say well, I know that that's not right, I know it's really this, so I don't get the feedback quite as much if I happen to have something wrong. But then when you do get the feedback, you're talking to, you know, the lead person at whatever company you're thinking of, that's that's the person giving you the feedback, right? So that's those. Those are interesting ones. It was interesting to go to Cisco live in those years. We'll just put it that way, right?

Speaker 3: 55:54

Hey, wendell you got a minute, was the feedback? Personal attacks, cause I get that a lot from on the internet. I can imagine being books a little a I can imagine being books a little a little, a little, a little easier.

Speaker 4: 56:06

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's not quite so personal. It's like no, you mean, the book is wrong. Not that you know I'm ugly and my mom addresses me. Funny, you know, and not you know, it's interesting, though. You talk about putting yourself out there on your videos, right? I mean, you're doing more than teaching, You're being entertaining while doing that to get people engaged, and of course, you know haters gonna hate, right?

Speaker 3: 56:30

so yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm. I kind of tone it out now. Um, I just had a video recently that's over a million views now and you know, once you break a certain point, you start breaking into the the general public, not just the tech nerds, and that's when the people really let loose yeah the general public, not just the tech nerds, and that's when the people really let loose. The general public has no idea what I'm talking about, or?

Speaker 2: 56:53

anything like that and they just really you have it, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm going to tell you why you're wrong. Exactly Just personal. It's like just making fun of me, Like like the way I look just random stuff.

Speaker 4: 57:07

It really is. You're ugly and your mom addresses you.

Speaker 3: 57:09

Funny it honestly really, is it really?

Speaker 4: 57:12

is oh, I hate that for you, Kevin.

Speaker 3: 57:15

I hope that reduces dude that's just, you can't be in the internet without Tune it out.

Speaker 1: 57:21

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 57:22

It's part of the growing process, too, of putting yourself out there. You've got to like have some confidence in yourself and who you are and what you're saying, and just people are going to be people, no matter what.

Speaker 4: 57:32

Well great attitude. I don't know that I'd want to go there. I'm going to. I'm going to limit the number of people that can watch my YouTube videos. I don't want to start turning comments off and yeah, got to sign a waiver first before you can see the video.

Speaker 2: 57:45

Wendell, I've got one more question that I kind of want to put you on the spot, for I've been seeing and we've kind of had discussions internally about this too. I've been seeing more and more things about how there's this thought out there that potentially network engineering could at some point go away or it's not going to be as big of a focus as it has been in the past and I think, is right now. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think at some point we will see a downturn in people that are trying to learn network fundamentals and get the CCNA, or do you think it's got many strong years ahead?

Speaker 4: 58:25

I can give my opinion, but it is not based on researching data from the, say, the US Department of Labor that kind of thing.

Speaker 4: 58:32

So I can only give you the sense that I get of it. I just don't live in that part of the world of the you know like sometimes people ask me to talk about. You know, come on some show and talk about the job market and I'm like, well, I don't live there, I'm not part of that. I'm helping people learn skills for that but not to get there. So the best I can tell the number of people needed versus the number of jobs available, there's still a shortage. That's what I hear from different articles, articles that quote the Department of Labor, from different articles, articles that quote the Department of Labor Anecdotally though. You know, there's compression in the market. There's always going to be ups and downs in the market. I don't think we're anywhere close currently to a world for which you can turn around and get two offers in a month if you want to start job shopping. So there are times when that's been true. But I've just, you know, in thinking about what we're going to do tonight for this recording, I was thinking back to the early days of my career.

Speaker 4: 59:31

I got out of college in 1985. It was a great job market. I almost got a master's degree. I would have gotten out in 87. Horrible job market. So you know, part of it's the ebb and flow, but I don't think the long-term outlook is poor. But we are definitely in the what's the analogy. I can't remember who to give credit to, but it's like one generation's Nobel laureate is the next generation's engineer, is the next generation's technician. We're definitely in the technician stage and eventually the jobs would go away. But you know, it's maybe literally. You know maybe it's a 20-year thing, maybe it's a 40-year thing, but we're all going to get replaced by AIs anyway, right?

Speaker 2: 1:00:14

No, that's variance.

Speaker 4: 1:00:17

So where did all of you land on the? What's the long-term network or output?

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

So I don't think network engineering in and of itself is going to go away. What I see happening is the kind of continued push toward abstraction and trying to take as much of the intricate details of configuration and building networks away. I mean, we're seeing that I think a good parallel to that is the public cloud model. Is we want to be able to provide people an end user interface that they can go in and easily point, click, pick what they want. I think at some point that's where the industry is trying to take networking. But networking is still there and you're still going to need people who understand and are able to troubleshoot and fix things when they're broken. That's kind of my stance on it.

Speaker 1: 1:01:10

Yeah, I think we'll eventually get there, tim, but I think before we get there, it'll probably be network as a service and you're going to need a lot of network engineers to operate that model. We're not going away anytime soon.

Speaker 3: 1:01:24

I don't think. I'm curious to see how network as a service and all these things go in, that, like we just saw with CrowdStrike, how it caused a global outage because of one little thing, and I can see network as a service happening and the provider or whatever goes down and we have no one to fix it. We have no one on premise. We have no idea what's going on. We're at the vendor's mercy. So as we move towards the same thing with the cloud, you know we're moving off premise and going to cloud. I'm curious to see how this progresses and if there's like a boomerang back of you know, getting all this, all this power away from our individuals who are at the company and seeing, if you know, I don't know, I, I, that's my hope.

Speaker 3: 1:02:03

I guess I like control, I like control and I like having people on premise. I don't like the cloud, I'm sorry, cables to cloud guys. I mean I love you guys but like I, I want control of everything. I don't like having someone else's computer, I don't like as a service and like that. So I know we're moving that way. So but my hope is people will see the light eventually and start peeling it back and coming back into control. But who knows is that gonna happen or not. But that's my hope is, people will see the light eventually and start peeling it back and coming back into the world. But who knows if that's going to happen or not, but that's my hope.

Speaker 4: 1:02:34

I love it.

Speaker 3: 1:02:38

Let's just do away with cloud completely by 2026.

Speaker 4: 1:02:43

That's awesome, but I'm hopeful for the future. That's awesome, but I'm hopeful for the future. But you know it's a question that comes up related that sometimes. If you're you know, if you're 20, which technology area and you want to be in computers, computers, you know what technology area do you want to get into. Then you see, you know occasional articles. You know what are the best paying entry level things to go for and clouds in it now, and you seldom see networking mentioned. So are those accurate? Are those just trying to get clicks to sell ads or not? But I think people that wrote the articles are probably genuinely interested in it. But uh, but yeah, it's not like you know, in the, as I mentioned in the 90s, it's like network. You know internet growing at 14 per month. You know you're gonna have some jobs right.

Speaker 1: 1:03:24

So well, wendell, uh, we have been at this for over an hour. I cannot believe how quickly this, uh this, has flown by. Um, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about anything you're working on currently and where people can find you uh, at all your different places oh sure, so you can find me at link treeree slash Wendell O, wendell O.

Speaker 4: 1:03:46

So I love it.

Speaker 4: 1:03:49

Or Wendell O if you prefer, and that'll link to everything in my digital life. And the big thing for me these days is continuing on with the YouTube channel generating content. We've got, I guess for the live listeners you're hearing this in time to know that we've got content coming out in August related to the exam release and for those of you that see it recorded, the goal is to get videos related to one book part out every month until I've got some out for all of the parts of both volumes. So that's the publishing plan there. So yeah, and I do teach online occasionally at the O'Reilly platform. It used to be called Safari, so if you want to learn CCNA level things from Wendell, you can pay them money and come to my class.

Speaker 4: 1:04:36

It doesn't pay me money directly, I get paid another way, but it's a paid service, but love to see you there. They do have short free trials occasionally, but it's definitely a give them your credit card short free trial. So if you go that route, make sure you note in your calendar when to cancel your trial if you really don't want the trial.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

Awesome. We'll have all those links in the show notes so you can easily find them there. Wendell, before we sign off, is there anything that we should have asked you, or is there anything you want to ask us?

Speaker 4: 1:05:10

Well, you guys want to stay up another hour, but yes, I won't. I won't keep us going too long. I know you were. You were leading us to the close with that, didn't you?

Speaker 3: 1:05:22

Before we sign off, I also want to say, just just, wendell, like I met you for the first time, cisco live, and as someone who is younger, um, than these guys, these guys are old as crap, um, but I'm pretty sure we're the same age I know man why I'm way younger you know, you were my head forward.

Speaker 3: 1:05:40

I dare you no, you don't talk about my bald spot, um, but you were. You know I read your book. That's how I first got into my CCNA studying and stuff like that, and you know I always had that fear don't meet your heroes, kind of thing. But I met you for the first time a couple months ago at Cisco Live and you are genuinely one of the nicest guys in the world and I am so glad that we got to meet. You are amazing and I just wanted to, before we sign off and I don't see you for a while. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate you man. You're an awesome guy.

Speaker 4: 1:06:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you. It's very, very sweet of you to say and feel, and, uh, you know Cisco live was pretty overwhelming for me this year. You know that's where we met Kevin and uh, it was.

Speaker 4: 1:06:20

there were a lot of people saying nice things to me and know it's great to hear, but it you know it, I just by wednesday or so, I think, my heart was full and it just, it just hit me. I just um, it was, it was a lot. I was very thankful for it, but it's like, man, all these people, I need to get back to the basement and hide out for a while but thank you for that, kevin awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

Wendell, thank you so much for your time. This has been such a fun conversation again. We'll have all the links in the show notes to everything that wendell mentioned earlier. Thank you so much for joining us, uh, and we'll see you next time on another episode of the art of network engineering podcast. 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 NetEng, that's Art of N-E-T-E-N-G. You can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineeringcom, 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. We'll see you next time.