Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering, where technology meets the human side of IT. Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems or shaping your career, we've got the insights, stories and tips to keep you ahead in the ever-evolving world of networking. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. My name is Andy Laptev and, folks, it's been a year. There's been a lot of change in my life. There's been changes in the show, in my personal life, in my career, and what a good time to have a discussion about change in general in our lives.

Speaker 1: 0:33

How do we approach change in our lives? How do we see it? How do we frame it in our minds? How do we deal with it when it comes up? I could tell you that when I was a younger lad, I did not like change all that much and I wanted things to stay the same. And when things in my life changed, I did not handle it so well and I would fight like hell to get back to the way things were. And, as it turns out, that might not be the best strategy to deal with an ever-changing world. So tonight I am joined by two wonderful chaps. First, william Wilhelm Collins of the Cloud Gambit podcast. How are you, william?

Speaker 2: 1:12

Never better Happy to be here. I can already tell this is going to be a giggly conversation, because I can't stop laughing for some reason I feel like a five-year-old.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Your middle name is not Wilhelm, correct? I just made that up on the fly.

Speaker 2: 1:24

No, actually my first name is William. My middle name is awesome. No, Levi Levi, everybody knows my middle name, wow.

Speaker 3: 1:32

I totally bought into the Wilhelm thing. What a regal name he has.

Speaker 1: 1:36

If you say anything with confidence, people are like oh, that must be true. William, william, wilhelm, confidence is a straight face. Yeah, that other voice you hear in the ether, or the face that you may see on this YouTube video later, is Jeffrey Jebediah Clark. I was trying to think of something with alliteration. Jeff Clark, how you doing, buddy?

Speaker 3: 1:56

Doing all right, doing really good. Glad to be here, thank you for being here.

Speaker 1: 2:00

It's lovely to see your hatless face. It's been a very long time. Jeff is like a baseball cap wearing kind of dude, and you look great without the cap on. I mean, I might buy something from you if you look like this. I don't know, I don't know if this is your normal look with customers, but I'm digging it it's not In person.

Speaker 3: 2:16

In person I would say it is, but you get cap wearing Jeff, but cap wearing Jeff hits all of his numbers.

Speaker 1: 2:23

So no complaints on the War of Joy department from Jeff. And this might be a good segue, because here we are on the Art of Network Engineering podcast and the usual cast of characters cast. What accent did I just adopt? The usual cast of characters is not on this show and hasn't been around for a couple of shows. Aj Murray on this show and hasn't been around for a couple of shows, um, aj murray.

Speaker 1: 2:48

So there was founding members aj myself, dan richards, um and the gentleman aaron weiler started the show. Aaron went on to do different things. Uh, we brought in tim bertino, um, and over the course of the years, for a number of different reasons, people came, people went and I guess that's not too uncommon, right, like you start a business or a company or a team, I I mean there's dynamics and things change and priorities change in people's lives. So I guess that's to be expected. But we're coming up, I guess, on five years it'll be this July for the Art Network Engineering Podcast. We've done like 770,000 downloads in like the four and a half years and it's been an amazing ride. And what a community 770,000 downloads in like the four and a half years, and it's been amazing ride and what a community. But I am the last standing founder of the show. You may have seen.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Not too long ago on socials, aj announced that you know he was moving on to other things. His priority changed and you know, and I mean you can't blame anybody for like there's only so much time in the day. We have careers, we have families, we have hobbies and like you really have to be deliberate about your time if you want to live a fulfilling life. And you know, aj just his priorities changed and he, you know he's doing other cool stuff now. So I guess so.

Speaker 1: 4:02

So Jeff had asked me a while ago like different people have been jumping in to help me with the show. Like everybody's gone Right. So I'm like what the hell am I going to do? The show almost ended in full transparency with the audience, so everything was going to shut down and through a lot of conversations I decided I want to keep the show going. The former team before like this podcast is probably the most fun part of my technical career. That like I've had all the people I've got to meet, all the conversations I've got to have the things I've learned. I mean, like two months in, I'm interviewing, like Keith Barker, like come on, dude, like the people that, like you know, taught me how to do all this stuff. And now Keith knows my name.

Speaker 2: 4:39

Well, yeah, like you gotta be kidding me.

Speaker 1: 4:41

Keith. You know, keith and our are accountability buddies. Like, are you kidding me? Like what? So it's been a wild ride and you know, I guess four to six months ago it all almost stopped. I mean, it did stop and then we had to decide. So there's been a lot of change, right? I decided to keep the show going and that requires, you know, I got to start an LLC and figure that out. And how do you do taxes and I need a lawyer and, like you know, a bank account.

Speaker 1: 5:07

And I guess Jeff had asked me a while back, like, are you going to like talk about this? Like, are you going to have a conversation with your audience about the changes in the show? Because there's going to be new faces, there's going to be new, like, we have a bunch of different ideas for topics and series and I, going to, I'm like, nah, I'm just going to keep creating great content, we're just going to put it out there. People will figure it out. But the more I thought about it for four and a half years we've been so honest and transparent with the audience about our lives and our challenges and what's happened it feels really inauthentic to after all this time of being completely honest and vulnerable with our audience to be like oh no, we're not going to talk about anything, we're just going to pretend that doesn't happen. That'd be pretty dysfunctional. So anyway, here we are. A lot of people have been helping me out, which I really appreciate. Mike Bouchon came on. We interviewed Dr Jay Metz from the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which was great. My pal Colin Doyle came on. We talked about some automation with. Jeff. William has been kind enough to jump in here.

Speaker 1: 6:00

So I guess what I want to say first off is the show will always stay true to its core mission, really, which is just to keep this conversation going of. Like here's what it's like to be a network engineering. Here's how you get in, here's how you stay in, here's how you upskill. It's you know it's. It's always changing. We have thousands of people in our Discord community. People reach out to me every week telling me you know the show changed their life, or the advice helped them get this job. Or like thank you so much for looking at my resume. Like it's just a wonderful. At the end of the day, this is a community I didn't have when I was coming up, when I was sitting in my Comcast cable truck reading the CCNA book and everybody was telling me I was wasting my time, money and effort, except for my girlfriend, who's not my wife, so I kept her around.

Speaker 1: 6:41

So you know, I don't know if we want to talk about any of that, guys, or if we just kind of want to pivot to, I guess, just change in our lives in general. I mean, I've also changed jobs this year. Right, there's a lot to talk about, I think, around change. And I just wanted to start with like, there's a lot of changes happening in the podcast. It almost ended, it's still going and I have a lot of cool ideas coming up for this next year on stuff we're going to do. Any thoughts or feedback on any of that rambling?

Speaker 3: 7:07

Well, one thing I was going to say was I am really glad that you decided to kind of have this episode specifically talking about change and the changes around the show, because you called me kind of in the middle of the kind of transitional stuff and what was happening, kind of the transitional stuff and what was happening, and the one thing I really heard in your voice was how much passion you really had for the Art of Network Engineering and the A1 community and really the Discord channel, and one of the things you said to me was just how much this has. I mean, it's such an important part of your week, such an important part of your life. And we've got Connor in the chat who just, I think, says something that's really true with this show and really with any podcast that any of us are going to want to listen to, which is that the human component of the show is really the major piece that makes it. And I think that over the years people have seen your passion and it's interesting as I've been on the last few shows, um with you, kind of kind of seeing you navigate, um, what's what's new for you, it seems.

Speaker 3: 8:11

It does seem like you really are looking to, like you said, maintain the same spirit. But it also seems like you've got some ideas and maybe wanted you know to change some of them. Is it the format you want to change? What do you? What do you think is a component that you really what would you want to see in the podcast in the long run? So I don't know, maybe I'm interviewing you now. I mean, I will interview you.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Well, no, it's wonderful, and that's why I ask smart people to come in here and help me, because I can't talk to myself for an hour about this stuff, right? So, yes, please, please, interview me, both of you. I think the hardest part about and again, just for the audience, we're not going to spend an hour talking about the change of the art of network engineering. I really want to widen the aperture to navigating change in life in general and have some good advice you can take away from this from some older weather gents who may have gone through a few changes and weathered them better than 18-year-old Andy. So I can't speak for William, but I'd like to hear his feedback because he's a podcaster as well. But the longer you create content for a particular audience, I kind of feel like the harder it is to. It's hard to stay true to your original mission. So, like our show, the first I don't know 30 to 40 episodes was us interviewing network engineers about their career, and it was really the same format of like who are you, what do you do? Where do you work? When did you get interested in tech? Oh, that's really cool. You were eight years old and your parents bought you Commodore. And then what happened? And then what happened? And we spent a couple of years kind of trying to tell stories because what came out of all that was there isn't one way, there isn't one path. Like, I failed out of computer science in college and thought that's it for tech, for me. But then I got in a different way and if we interviewed 60 different people, they all came in a different path, a different way. So I think this career is for anyone. You don't have to be a coder or a math whiz or computer science major or a CCIE to get in. And that was really nice. But after we did that for a couple of years all of us got tired of the format. Like if I have to talk to one more network engineer and ask them every career fart along the way, I'm going to throw up right. So then what do you do? So I guess the shorter answer to your question is to try to continue to create engaging content and change when change is necessary Again like the topic of change. So okay, we can't do straight interviews anymore.

Speaker 1: 10:28

So then we kind of went topical because we were sick of it and I didn't want to listen to another career journey. We had done that and killed it and they're all still there. So there's 45 episodes in the beginning that you can get that if you want. I mean, jeff, you said something to me which I thought was really insightful. I don't know if it was six months ago before a lot of this stuff started to change. But you listened to the show more when we started but we kind of stayed beginning of career focused.

Speaker 1: 10:56

As your career grew our content became less relevant to you because you're like, well, that's fine, but I'm 18 years into my career. I've gone from engineering into like an SE now and like me talking to the help desk guy, you know, or the. What I'm trying to do, I think the changes in the show is I'd like to stay relevant to network engineering and tech at large and like there's a lot of things changing right there's, I think automation is finally becoming like you're going to have to do this. I mean so I've talked about this before, but the job I had in FinTech for six years that I was very good at, I couldn't get that job today because I don't have enough foundational Python knowledge. You cannot get the job I had unless you can pass a very technical Python interview.

Speaker 1: 11:37

So the industry at least has changed, I think, to where automation has kind of become. And look in the certification tracks I mean I was studying for the CCMP, as an example. There is a ton of automation there. People who take and fail that exam are like, oh my God, there was so much automation. I don't think we're breaking NDA, but you really got to know a good amount of broad automation information to pass professional level networking certification. So what I'd like to see we talked about maybe doing like an automation series to try to help people, because me I don't want to automate, right, I don't like Python, I don't, you know, I don't understand all this stuff, but that, but, but. But. So that was the old me, right, like, I've been saying that for years. But then I found a course that I liked and I used NetMeco to log into a Cisco router to like change the host name. I'm like, oh my God. So I just needed like something, just log into a router, figure that out.

Speaker 1: 12:30

You know, I thought we could do a series with William on like, like GitHub, right, like, what is it? I mean, I have a GitHub account. There's a couple of things in there. I star people, I know, like they're my Facebook friends but, like you know, if I were interviewing for a job and you looked at my GitHub repository, you'd be like, well, this dude doesn't really have any code in there. So I like the automation stuff, I like to do some GitHub stuff, ai, llms I mean I know that we're all sick of hearing it and everything's AI whitewashed. But, jeff, you had some really good examples of how you've used large language model stuff like OpenAI to help you in you know networking kind of tasks, and I mean I use it frequently in my content creation. You know role. So the short answer is.

Speaker 2: 13:11

Let me interject here real quick, andy. Yeah, please, I'm going to say something. I've been like that's the longest silence I've ever had in my life Shut up. I was just soaking all that in no-transcript variety of cool shows with different perspectives out there. And another thing you said I thought was pretty interesting is like in the beginning focus it was just okay getting started in the career and the beginnings of that career trajectory.

Speaker 2: 14:08

And I know that one thing that helped me out a ton in my early days was just hearing seasoned professionals talk about stuff I didn't understand. Like what are they saying? That sounds so cool and it becomes like a very salty scenario. And hey, when there's salt, there's thirst. You become thirsty and you're like, ok, I want to learn about that. You know these folks seem to know a thing or two and they've made it so like having the variety of beginner level all the way up to advanced. You know where you can keep folks like Jeff interested. You know later on in the career, you know super important and I think it's awesome the direction that the show is going to take now.

Speaker 1: 14:46

And that's tricky. How do you keep everybody engaged, right? Like you want to let people know that this career is for everyone, and you can too but at the same time, you have folks like yourself and Jeff who are further along in their career and, like you know, what can I, what could I possibly teach you two guys or help, you know, have the conversations. I mean I really just see myself as a moderator, Like I've met a lot of smart, cool people and if I could just bring them together and have these conversations I know some people have said like their favorite part of the show.

Speaker 1: 15:10

It just sounds like you're sitting around the pub with a couple of you know friends talking shop, right, and it's very casual and that's what I love about the show. Like we don't legal page. I've probably heavily prepared for three shows and I was probably the worst on those three shows because I'm looking at notes and I'm trying to think of what I'm going to say next and I want to sound really smart, being vulnerable and open. I can tune in right now and listen to you guys and be very aware of what's happening and in the moment, If I'm reading notes or reading chats or looking at myself on a screen.

Speaker 2: 15:44

I'm just not present and I'm not there and it doesn't really make for conversational style wins, like in the episodes I think we're at like episode 45 now and the ones that, like avon and I, went into that were like completely unscripted, like we're just having a conversation and we're we're not going to overly plan this thing those are the episodes that coincidentally did did the best as far as views.

Speaker 1: 16:06

So and I wish it. I wish I hadn't blabbed that long jeff about where do I see the show going. I have a whole asana full of like, like you know, topics that I'd like to do, but I I'd almost put that back on you guys and even the community at large. Like I, I haven't wanted to be like, I haven't wanted to go on linkedin or twitter and be, hey, everybody quit, I'm by myself. Tell me what you want to hear, but that would be super helpful, but that's not what people are looking for. I don't know if everybody wants to be free producers on the show, and so that's my challenge and I'm being perfectly honest and transparent is I want to keep doing the show because I love it. I really enjoy this. I mean, I do it for a living. Now I'm in product marketing and it's the best job I've ever had.

Speaker 1: 16:44

But five years in, how do you keep network engineering interesting? Fortunately for us, along the lines of change, there is so much changing in tech and in the industry that I mean it's dizzying and it's scary and it's like holy crap, now what do I have to know? But these are the topics, these are the conversations that I want to have. Right. What do you need to know when somebody asks you guys, how do I get a job in network engineering? For the longest time I think it was at least for me, it was get your CCNA, create some kind of content to share your communication skills and build a home lab. And if you can't afford a home lab, do packet trace or whatever. That was my advice forever. Do you think that's good advice today? Is it enough?

Speaker 2: 17:24

I always said learn Linux as a first. That was always my because. I can only say that, though, because that is the road that I took and it was very, it worked very well for me. Knowing Linux has paid dividends, even to this day, because I use it in cloud pipelines like Linux, like bash scripts or the glue in these pipelines that like basically glue these disparate tasks together and set things up like you know, get into, make files and get into those different things and uh yeah, why is linux so important?

Speaker 1: 17:51

because the whole world is built on linux, right?

Speaker 2: 17:52

well, if you think about it, every, every network appliance that you probably log into now is linux under the hood. And I mean even like in the earlier days, like when in some I'm not to throw vendors around, but like you'd have a, an overlay sort of shell. You know the, the, the shell that you interact with. But under the hood you could always go down a layer deeper and when you really needed to troubleshoot, you really needed to debug, you'd have to debug at that layer a little bit lower and pull these logs or do these things to send to you know vendor x, y or z. And just being able to log in, being able to navigate the file system, being able to SCP some files for goodness sake, at least learn how to SCP Different things like that it's just very and it's not hard.

Speaker 1: 18:35

It's not hard at all, it's just time a little bit of time and every smart networking person I talk to tells me that exact same thing. Pete Lombos, just to throw some names around, like he's one of the smartest guys I know, and he's been telling me for years learn Linux, bro. Right, and I think I know a little bit of Linux, but probably I mean I can do most of the things that you said. So maybe I know a little bit of Linux, but I wouldn't. I don't know if I could teach somebody Linux Like I. I do the three things I mentioned. William says Linux. Is there anything you'd add to that?

Speaker 3: 19:06

I think, learn Linux. I don't know that I would have said it necessarily that way, but I think it's a good point and really Linux is it's an important part of my day-to-day. I mean we talked about automation before. I automate because I know Linux. I mean I have a ton of scripts that I've turned into little applets in Linux. I'm running a Mac which is Linux under the hood, and I have a bunch of scripts written in Bash which we were talking about before the show started that do things like go and find the next available IP address in my lab and SSH into something and you add this to my list of host names in my DNS server. So I didn't really think about it until you said that, william, but I do spend a ton of time in Linux daily just doing basic tasks. So I would absolutely say that's true.

Speaker 3: 19:55

But the other thing that I will say the best engineers I know and it's something that I have become better at is diagramming. And I don't mean creating amazing diagrams, I mean being able to walk up to a whiteboard and draw out the network you're trying to design and explain to somebody what you're looking to do, or when you're having a conversation with somebody else say hold on, let me diagram this out, and then diagram it out while you're having a conversation with them. And I'm not saying go and learn Visio diagrams. That can get really complex and there are people who are amazing at that stuff. But I mean, I use diagramsnet. There's a dozen different choices out there.

Speaker 3: 20:40

But I would say learn to diagram, learn to whiteboard something. It makes it easier when you're building your own lab to have a diagram of your lab. It's something that is needed in every network. They need someone who can diagram that stuff and who can trace out how that network looks and provide some kind of documentation on it. So I would say learning to document a network is as important as learning to build a network, and it's a skill that most network engineers don't have and it's a task that a lot of guys just you know they don't want to be involved in. So if you can learn to do it, I think that it puts you in a position where you're really unique and it gives a visual thing that you can show someone in an interview or put into your GitHub or on your webpage or whatever. So I guess that'll be my thing. An additional to learn Linux is learn a diagram, learn to whiteboard.

Speaker 2: 21:26

I was hoping you'd say automation Whiteboarding actually validates your comfort level and your ability to spin an idea too, because it's going to test you, Like when you're trying to whiteboard in front of a room of folks and then somebody else comes up. I mean, this has happened so many times in my career. I can't even count being able to communicate that idea and effectively draw it out and in simple enough terms to get everybody on the same page or for other people to give them enough to actually poke some flaws in that idea and you know, sort of everybody leaves the room with the best possible outcome. It is super important, very abstract in the beginning and you just reminded me like.

Speaker 1: 22:03

So whiteboarding can also be used at? So not only just diagramming your ideas, like you said. But I know someone who I won't name and instead of using PowerPoints when he presents to customers, he whiteboards. He already knows what's going to be on the whiteboard before he starts, but because it's a blank slate and it's interactive and he'll ask them leading questions to write things down, it looks like he's taking feedback from the audience, when in fact he knows where he's going the whole time. But the what would you call it?

Speaker 1: 22:35

The magic trick, I think, is they can see, they know where this is going before it gets written down, because it's their idea. And and at the end, here's the real beautiful part of it they think it's their idea and at the end here's the real beautiful part of it they think it's their idea. So he comes in to sell them on a different idea and he somehow magically uses a whiteboard to convince them that this is their idea, even though it was his idea. Now, if he comes in with a PowerPoint deck and shows you 15 slides showing you what his idea is we've all done that before where we're like arguing with our wife or our kids or like if I just say it enough times or loud enough, they'll change their mind. So anyway, it just reminded me. It's a different use of a whiteboard I never thought of until I was talking to this gentleman, inception.

Speaker 3: 23:19

There's a guy named John Kares who wrote a book called Mastering Technical Sales. If we could get him on as a guest, he teaches a whole class on whiteboarding and silly things. Like you know, if I asked you to write you know to. You know to draw a router on the board, you could, you know, you kind of know. You did a little circle thing, but one of the things he talked about was you know if is router one? But the thing that too many people do and this is a silly thing that he taught was like you'll draw the circle then you'll try to squeeze router one into it instead of writing router one then circling it. Like there's so many tricks to whiteboarding. I'm amazed when I see people who are really good at it so selfishly.

Speaker 1: 23:59

I love this conversation because I'm writing these topics down, because because, honestly, I'm trying to like you're asking me where do you want to do with the show? I want to continue to create value, I want to continue helping people, I want to continue to bring cool stuff to light and you know, I know I have my like. So when automation came up, I'm surprised you lean on Linux, jeff, because I figured you were going to say Python. Right, I guess it doesn't matter. Like does it? Do you need Python? Not to me, I.

Speaker 3: 24:23

I don't dislike Python. I write in whatever. The fastest thing for me to write in 90% of what I do is in bash, because I can just write it quickly. I don't again. I told you in a previous one, I'm a selfish, you know, scripter. I'm not writing it for anybody else, I'm writing it to accomplish a task that I need. It's a repetitive task and Python I just don't know well enough to sit and chunk it out because it's not what I do every day. But Bash is simple.

Speaker 1: 24:49

When you say Bash, is that the Linux shell? Is that what you're talking about?

Speaker 3: 24:51

It's the Linux shell Born again.

Speaker 2: 24:53

Yeah, say it again Born again, shell, yeah, born again shell, is that really what it stands for?

Speaker 1: 25:01

I mean, that's what I've heard other people call it Okay.

Speaker 2: 25:04

I mean, I got to Google it. I mean, unless I changed it, yeah, all right.

Speaker 1: 25:11

So we have Linux automation whiteboarding, which I really like, and honestly I can stand in front of a crowd of as many people and not be nervous. But you put me in front of a whiteboard and I seize up and I think it's because all the technical interviews I've had over the years at a whiteboard are just terrifying. Yeah, you know, draw me a network.

Speaker 2: 25:26

What is it? It is Pornigan Shell, pornigan, shell, pornigan Pornigan.

Speaker 3: 25:30

I like it All right, so One of the things I was going to say, andy it's funny is I asked the question you know, what do you want to do with the show? I actually saw you them out or really just the engineering. Because the thing I've always said about a good engineer is a good engineer doesn't necessarily know things. They know how to figure things out, and it's, it's fun, as we've been doing a couple of these episodes together. It's like we're I'm watching you like all right, we'll figure this out. Not, you don't know necessarily what the end goal is, but you're figuring it out, and so it's. It's kind of fun to be part of that journey. But I also think it's kind of what's really resonating with me is this is an exciting show to be a part of right now, because we're figuring out, we're talking about topics, we're talking about things we want to do in the future and as engineers we're all a little ADD. So I don't think it has to be about one thing.

Speaker 1: 26:17

There's a lot of it's just let's figure it out and beginning like the fact that it took off and people, as many people listen, was a big surprise to us as anybody, because we were just a bunch of people and a study group who started studying together and then aj, one day was like huh, it's kind of funny, you think anybody would listen to us, just like talking, just because, like the universe put together these like four people, that just it was this weird synergy that we never could have planned and and and it just took. So here we are, all these years later and you know, the timing wasn't great because I started a new job right around the time all this went down. So I'm talking to my wife. I'm like listen, you know this is going down. I'd like to keep the show going. I'm going to have to do all this stuff to keep it going, including running it myself for a while, like cause I need-in, I am not gonna. I am not gonna piss off my wife or screw up our marriage over this right.

Speaker 1: 27:09

So there were many times along this path of like this might not. I love this show. I want to keep it going. I love the people who contribute to it and listen, but I'm not gonna end my marriage over it, and I don't know if I can do that and be effective in this new role, because it's a, you know, it's like it's a new type of role for me. So it's kind of a miracle that we're here doing this, because there's been a lot of barriers in the way. You know.

Speaker 2: 27:31

I think you have to figure things out too. Like you go and like I don't know if you all have had this experience, but there's been like, especially in the past five to ten years for me, you, you get to know someone that you like in your mind. You thought you know what. They have it all figured out. They know what's up.

Speaker 2: 27:47

And then you get to know them and you get to see a little more behind the curtain and you realize, wow, they, they don't have all this figured out. They're just gone a day at a time to just like I am. It's just they have, like you know, five years on me. They got a little bit of a head start.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Well, William said one of the funniest things to me when I met him in person and it just jumped in my head and I just want to tell the audience. So I guess he had been listening to the show or whatever. And we were in Knoxville, I think, or I don't know if it was KTEC Connect, it was some event. It was the first time we met. Do you remember what you said to me when you met me?

Speaker 2: 28:26

I do, because me, I do, because I still think it like uh, yeah, I look at andy and I'm like, wow, you're exactly in person, like you are on that show.

Speaker 1: 28:29

It's like the same person, there's nothing different because you're exactly the person I thought you were, or something like that, and and I and I took a minute and I looked at him and I'm like I don't know if it's a compliment or if you're like great, because why did you meet so many people?

Speaker 2: 28:42

it's like the like I I work with someone and I you know working with them on zoom for a long time and camera angles and stuff. You, you think it's this just little, this little small man, and I meet him in person and he's like six foot four. He's huge, he's a giant and I'm like okay, like wow, I mean it's a little bit different personality wise when you're talking. But a lot of folks on Zoom or on, you know, online, they're very different than how they really are in person a lot of times. And part of that is you want to put your best foot forward. You want to. You want people to see the best of who you are, but Andy's just raw. You know as raw as you can get you know in person.

Speaker 1: 29:18

And I still don't know if that's good or not.

Speaker 2: 29:20

But yeah, I think it's great. I don't know who he expected to meet. Authenticity these days is winning.

Speaker 1: 29:26

I don't know who else to be, though I'm amazed that people can be other people in different contexts. The last thing I would you know, I think we should pivot out of planning the show, but Linux automation I really like the whiteboarding thing. So again, we're talking about what. Would you need to be a network engineer today? That's different than maybe 10 years ago. Is anybody going to say the C word, cloud, yeah. Do you think you need to be versed in one of the CSPs? Should you have your AWS, whatever, whatever.

Speaker 2: 29:58

I'm a thousand percent biased here, so I should take myself out of the ring.

Speaker 3: 30:05

I'm a coward and I'm scared of it, so I'm going to go ahead and just shut up to you.

Speaker 1: 30:07

But William fully pivoted to cloud right, but you were a network guy through and through. So I mean, what do you think? I mean, if you're hiring somebody, they obviously got to be cloud, because you're a cloud company, right.

Speaker 2: 30:20

I think, no matter what, if you're in network engineering and you work for a reasonably big company, you're going to do better by your career if you do learn a little bit about cloud and cloud networking. And the starting point is simple. The landing point is very simple, because you land and it's like, okay, how do we get to the cloud? Well, hey, at the end of the day, hey, this is just some VPN, tunnels or a circuit, a direct connect, which is essentially just single mode fiber going from this to that in a data center. It's very network centric, so it almost feels like you're not learning anything new. But once you are in that cloud provider, be prepared, as you're experimenting, to paint yourself into many corners and then get paint everywhere, including on your face.

Speaker 2: 31:04

It's just going can be a mess. It's complicated a lot of static routing, like functionality applied in many different ways, like route preference, shortest path first, like. Some things are still a kind of applicable to, like what you would expect, but transitive routing, routing across regions, like, and then it's all different across, mostly different across clouds. Same concepts at a high level, but it's not very deep either once you get in the cloud. Because I think, because of the economies of scale and you know because of how these cloud providers are able to, you know, scale up to support so many different businesses. They've built a system that they're very rigid in and because of the way that traffic, you can't just hairpin stuff everywhere that you want and you know things work a certain way.

Speaker 2: 31:52

Part of that is for scale. So you have to put on your engineering cap to design around a lot of things to meet the outcomes of your organization. But getting in there, free tiers are amazing. Get in the free tiers and just experiment. You can do it from your desk. While you're on that long Zoom call as you zone out, You're a project manager or something if you're not needed in the conversation. You know multitask.

Speaker 3: 32:15

And you guys change the names of things a bunch in the cloud. Oh yeah, just take things we already know and then just give them new names. Make it all confusing.

Speaker 2: 32:23

A WAN is not a WAN. It's a cloud when or when it's a v. When it's a v net it's a vpc or a vcn, what's the same subnet.

Speaker 1: 32:35

They assign to everything the default subnet was like 172. Like everything that's built is given. Like the same address, right yeah, I mean you.

Speaker 2: 32:43

If you don, if you don't give it anything, it's going to give you the default 10. Like it has a default address range, you'll give it. But whenever you create a VPC, you're definitely putting in your own slider range.

Speaker 2: 32:54

I think folks learned a lot of hard lessons about that because many businesses put in the same slash 20 or slash 16 for every VPC they created and then eventually they're like, oh wait, he's got to talk. Oh boy, now we need a network folks, we need some gnats. Uh, we need some folks to understand natting and want to do that exclusively for like five years now, because we've kind of mucked this up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 33:17

My cynicism there, all right. So, um, there's a couple comments in the chat I'd like to read and then if we could pivot to or maybe pop up a level away from the podcast and into, like, just change in our lives. And I have, I guess I have two stories from this past year that I think I'd like to tell because I think getting through hard things I think we can all learn from you. Know, if you talk to people who go through difficult times and get through them, I think there's some like common, uh, advice or common. I mean, we're all going to get our ass handed to us at one point or another in our personal and professional lives. So, um, change is the only constant right and everything's changing all the time. I mean, isn't that like what the Buddhists kind of say? Like you know, everything's changing all the time. So you got to, you got to figure out how to accept that like nothing's gonna stay the same. So, anyway, let's look at a couple of these.

Speaker 1: 34:12

So I like what Bill Murray said he's been avoiding learning network automation On his end.

Speaker 1: 34:16

He thinks this hurdle is really understanding use cases to automate for, and like I hear people say that and what I immediately think is when we had to change the SNMP community string on 600 devices at the job I had and they had to be done in like 48 hours because of some PCI compliance thing.

Speaker 1: 34:33

That, like you know something, we got hit with an audit and like, oh, we got, how are you going to do that if you don't automate it? 600 devices and we didn't have a big crew. Like you're going to go into 600 devices, do a show, run pipe, match, snmp pre-check, do your change, write post-check, look at the logs. You're going to do that 600 times. Like, how many maintenance windows is that going to take you to do right? Like so for me, every time somebody says, oh, I got to find a use case, I mean there's, what would you say to somebody who's like I can't find a use case? I mean, is that a valid thing or is that an excuse? And I'm not trying to pick on Bill Murray, but repetitive stuff is going to take a long time.

Speaker 2: 35:10

It's like my child painting. Children are so funny because a lot of times I almost get creative ideas just by looking at my children. My daughter will sit there and create these beautiful pictures and she's only six. But it's like she thinks out of the box and like with that, just in tech, like, okay, so much stuff is free. Yeah, you need to buy maybe a computer. That's got some, you know, a good CPU and lots of Ram, but set up a lab and then put together you can literally map and mirror most, uh, a lot of networks I've worked in.

Speaker 2: 35:44

Anyway, you can get pretty close, like think about it, like you know, test yourself, like go back and think, okay, I worked on a network and this is what that network looked like. This is where the aggregation of all these routes is happening. These are how the branch offices are connecting back. And no, you don't got to do like 100, 500 branch offices, do like five or 10. And okay, now I have some automation that's going to go out and update the config or even bootstrap a new device.

Speaker 2: 36:09

You know, once it has TACACS or whatever and it's talking back to the mothership, it's being monitored, then go in and, you know, build out some automation to go and bootstrap the actual configuration. So really it's the one thing that I thought or that I experienced. That was fantastic and that's a good question, because I've struggled with this at some point too. But my best sort of thing that I learned was be creative. Just don't listen to a lot of other folks, just think about the experiences you've had, the networks you've worked on, and maybe even how networks are supposed to be built. Just, and you know, look through that lens and you just mess around test prototype.

Speaker 3: 36:52

I mean I. For me, automation, like I said is is is selfish, it's it's saving myself time or it's it's me wanting to learn something. So I'll give you an example of an automation I wrote in my own house I I have teenagers. Until recently, groundings were a pretty common thing, but grounding doesn't work in terms of you can't go anywhere because they're teenagers, they don't want to go anywhere, they just want to sit in their rooms and be on their phones. So what I had done was I'd set up firewall policies, because I'm a firewall guy now and firewall policies could just block my kids' access to the internet.

Speaker 3: 37:26

It's not that it was so common, but it got common enough that I wrote an automation script that I put into my iPhone using the scripting stuff that was in there, and all it did was it was a script that put SSH into my firewall turn on the ground Logan policy or turn off the ground Logan policy. That's all it did. But I was able to turn it to a little button on my phone. I clicked that button. It would SSH into my firewall, it would edit policy ID 71. It would turn it on with enable the policy. It would log back out and then it would ask me would you like to set a reminder to unground him? And it was all built to my phone and it wasn't that I was using Python, I wasn't using Perl, I wasn't using Bash, I was using the stuff that was right there on my phone. But it was a simple automation. That was kind of a fun thing to do.

Speaker 1: 38:13

And you're blocking all of his internet.

Speaker 3: 38:15

I was blocking all of his internet absolutely. And then, of course, he figures out that he just turned off the Wi-Fi.

Speaker 1: 38:26

That's where I was going.

Speaker 3: 38:27

Next, I got cellular. But here's the thing I want him to start figuring things out. So it's great, I'm okay. If he can hack around me, that's great. This is exactly what I'm hoping for. I guess that's what I would say. If you think automation of some sort is what you want to get into, don't worry about learning a language. Don't learn a language first. Come up with an idea of what to automate. If you can't think of an idea of what to automate, going back to the AI thing, go to chat GPT and say hey, I want to automate something, I want to learn to automate. Give me 10 ideas, give me 100 ideas, give me 1,000 ideas. That's something that AI is great for. It can give you 1,000 bad ideas and out of that is probably at least one good one you can totally do.

Speaker 2: 39:04

there's so much things in the cloud you can do very ephemeral for free, like the other day I was working on something and using something called Terraform Infrastructure as Code tool, completely generating this pre-can environment. So, using the random string resource set in the link, the numeric value, special characters, whatever of a name like a unique name, then I'm creating an AWS, vpc and I'm doing tags to format the name like VPC, hyphen, whatever that random string is. And then I'm creating an internet gateway IGW, hyphen, random string. And then I'm using the CIDR subnet functions with Terraform to actually take the slash 16 I have and like, etch it out into different subnets and then setting the route table and attaching it to the gateway ID. You know all the way down to creating an EC2 instance that I can SSH into. You know automagically bootstrapping tail scale within this device, so then I can connect to it. I don't even have to set um your security group rules because it uses udp hole punching to get through right down as long as I have that igw yeah love

Speaker 1: 40:12

me some tail scale, williams is talking 30s whoa tail c udb punch I I whoa hello there's so many cool things you can do.

Speaker 2: 40:23

Yeah, and it's free yeah, I like free stuff.

Speaker 1: 40:27

Free stuff is good. You said infrastructure as code, which I actually put on my list as we were talking with a question mark. I had a guy I worked with at Juniper, Chris Marget, and he was big in infrastructure as code and he built a Terraform provider for one of our tools and he spent some time showing me Terraform and IAC. And again, someone who has historically been repulsed by coding he was that guy that was like listen, dude, let me see your Cisco CLI and I'd show him in my lab. He's like you're telling me you're not coding. Look at all this logic in this arcane language you're doing If you can do this and you're telling me that Bash or Python is beyond you. Like, it's not true, You're lying to yourself.

Speaker 1: 41:08

So he showed me infrastructure's code and Terraform and I was just blown away because I really love. I really love the. I don't want to call it like beautiful, That'll be like a little too far but seeing what he was doing, just I was really. I thought he was doing just I was really. I thought, huh, like I, I would like to try to like if I had a small environment, maybe at home, like maybe that's where I should start like, try to try to lab with some terraform and just kind of you know see, see how that goes it is beautiful, though.

Speaker 2: 41:36

You're right looking for it. Right, it's very beautiful. Imagine like logging into an excel sheet or a word doc and like writing some stuff out, versus opening a vs code with a beautiful theme pretty colors, dark theme. It's like glowing in your room because the lights are off. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's gorgeous code magic I love it.

Speaker 3: 41:57

Home automation get into some home automation stuff. There's some really cool stuff you can do with home automation and it at least gets your brain working in the, in the, in the area of writing scripts it's fun.

Speaker 1: 42:07

You just read my mind. So like, if we're out and we come home, I get in my driveway, I have to get on the phone, flip it up, hit the alarm, turn the alarm off. Then I have to hit the garage door opener and hit that. Then I have to go and turn the heat back up because we turn it down before we left, like this is what I do every time we come home, when we get in the car to leave close the garage door with the one button, turn the alarm on with the other button, get the music going on the other, and it would be so nice. Every time I come home I have to do those same steps.

Speaker 1: 42:32

Now I have no idea where I'd start, but for the gentleman Bill Murray, I think he was looking for use cases for automation. It doesn't have to be network automation. If you get home every time and press 32 things on your phone every single goddamn time to get your house like, maybe I could automate that right here. I don't know how, but I know jeff clark and and william and they could probably. You know you got google, I do that you can.

Speaker 1: 42:53

You control your own destiny, andy well, even chat gpt, right like jeff, you were telling me that weren't you going in there, like didn't you ask it to teach you ansible one night?

Speaker 3: 43:01

yeah I literally went in there, was there and was like teach me. I have no idea what Ansible is. I did not know if Ansible was a program I had to download off the internet or Ansible was a webpage I logged into. I mean, I was that clueless about two weeks ago and I went into ChatGPT. I said I want to learn Ansible. I already had a couple of Bash scripts going back to Bash. I already had a couple of bash scripts going back to bash. I already had some bash scripts.

Speaker 3: 43:27

I knew what I wanted to be able to string like five or six different things together, because every time I turn up a brand new firewall in my lab, I would have to go in. I'd have to give it a management IP. I'd have to go in and set the username and password. I would have to go in and give it a host name. I would have to then go. If it was a lab that was going to stick around, I'd have to go create a DNS entry for it. All of these things are things that I do in my sleep and I can just type them out and I can turn up a firewall in five minutes or I can run an Ansible script and do it in less than 30 seconds. And if I can do something in 30 seconds instead of five minutes, I'm going to do it in 30 seconds. Even though it took me an hour, two hours to learn to write that I can now turn up a hundred firewalls in the same time, it would have taken me to turn up one and that two hours I learned something that I wouldn't have learned by turning up a hundred firewalls, because I do it all the time. I already knew that, so I might as well learn how to do the same thing I do constantly in a different way. That was automated. That was faster.

Speaker 3: 44:22

So this whole episode is about change. I think that's really what change is about. It's kind of about we get so stuck in a mindset that this is the way it has to be and this is what I know and I can't do this other thing. Just do what you already know in a different way. That's change. That's an easy way to get moving, like this podcast. You know all the stuff to put it together. You're now just kind of you're moving. You're moving some pieces around at this point.

Speaker 1: 44:51

You're figuring out different content for it and it's scary, it's the, it's the, it's the unknown. Yeah, it's scary, you're uncomfortable and like so. So I don't know if I don't know if you guys are comfortable sharing a personal story, but but I will. Maybe we'll spend the rest of this just talking about, maybe, a change in like a personal professional lives and kind of how we got through it, because I think it's. I think it's relevant. I mean, we started out with the podcast because this has been so.

Speaker 1: 45:17

One very brief story I'll tell you is I was sitting at the bank opening up the business account that that I needed to to continue the show, and the guy who I was doing the paperwork he'd think, oh, let me make a bunch of copies and I'll be right back. And he left the room and I'm sitting there by myself and the loneliness that I got hit with because I'm at this bank by myself, opening a bank account, because I no longer have anybody on my team that I've had for all these years. That felt like family to me and the unknown ahead of me, like I don't know if I can keep the show going. I don't know if anybody's going to be willing to come in and help me. I don't know what the future holds, but it means something to me. I love it and I'm going to, in spite of possible failure. Like success isn't guaranteed and you know, maybe it would have been easier just to shut the doors when everybody else decided that they were going to reprioritize. But I just remember that moment of sitting there and it was like I got like a lump in my throat because I'm like God, I hope I can do this right, because it's scary and it's the unknown. And so two other quick stories this year.

Speaker 1: 46:23

But I guess the point is, even though I was scared and I felt alone and I had a lot of feelings around it, it's been hard to maintain the friendships when all these other feelings of you know, whatever, I don't want to get too like mushy, but it just brings up some stuff, you know. But I decided I'm going to do it anyway. This is important and you have to do things and maybe I'll fail, maybe I won't, but I'm not. I'm not going to give up, I'm not going to let fear stop me, like I I was I was alluding earlier to like younger Andy and the choices I used to make Like I really let fear rule my life as a younger man and I've learned and I got another example coming up but one of the biggest lessons I've learned in life and it's helped me in my career as well is what's the thing about like courage, like it's not lack of fear, it's taking action in spite of fear, right, like it's okay to be afraid. You just can't quit.

Speaker 1: 47:16

So I guess, like a year, year and a half ago now I get laid off from this job. Right, I wasn't expecting it. Some of my other friends and stuff were getting laid off, but when I took this job, this you know, somebody I really looked up to brought me in and I thought we were good and everything was said. And like I didn't take that job knowing two years later I'd be out of a job. I didn't take that job as a product manager, having not managed a product, knowing that I hit the market later and all anybody wanted to talk to me about was managing a product and I'd have to tell them I didn't manage a product. Like this was not a short term decision, this was like I'm going to be here a while, I'm going to get laid off, and I thought it was okay.

Speaker 1: 47:55

Like the first day goes by. I'm like, yeah, I've been through a lot, I'll be fine. Second day goes by right, it's right before Christmas, right, which is great. The first Monday comes around. It was like a Thursday. So like Thursday, I'm fine. Friday I'm fine, we do the weekend, I'm distracted. Well, monday comes around. My wife goes to work, the kids go to school to do that day, and it just hits me like a ton of bricks. I'm like fudge, like what the frick, like sucks and I I felt like I'm like I'm just gonna stay in bed, I'm gonna pull the covers up over my head, I'm just gonna hide here, like this is right, I'm an ass grown man, if I can quote dan richards. But like I'm a grown ass man and I'm like I'm going to hide in bed, right, and, and that's not good Cause again, earlier times in my life I didn't feel so great about things and I didn't make great decisions at the time. So I'm like, well, I got a wife and I got kids and I got a family who's depending on me. I can't hide in bed. What am I going to do? I started to run Now I hadn't run in 10 years because I got bad knees. I got a bad back. I got a story I tell myself, right. But I started to run because I'm like, well, I got to keep my head right so I can interview and keep my career going. So anyway, I run 400 miles in eight months. I run so much that I fracture.

Speaker 1: 49:06

There's something called a femoral neck at the top of your femur bone. It's what turns into your hip. I don't only fracture that, it was a grade three fracture. So grade one is a crack. Grade two is a worse crack. Grade three there's bone marrow leaking out of your bone and I'm still running through it. Right, but I needed to run.

Speaker 1: 49:21

So I lose my job, I'm running for my mental health, I get injured, I can't run anymore. So where am I going with all this? So you know my wife's still working the whole time and we got two little kids and she does all the food shopping and the cooking. Usually I'm not proud of this. I've changed it since, but so anyway, you know she's like, oh, I got to go to you know the food store and get some food. So I'm like, listen, let me do it for you. Like you know you're busy, you're working, like, let me go get the food.

Speaker 1: 49:45

I'm driving home from the food store and the thought occurs to me that my family would be better off without me, and then I should just take off my seatbelt and drive as fast as I can into a tree. Now, I've never said this publicly and this isn't something that I'm really looking forward to anyone or my employer hearing, but the reason I'm telling you this is getting laid off and being out of work for nine months brought me to a point, even with running 400 miles in eight months, that the thought occurred to me that my family would be better off without me, because I got a pretty good life insurance policy on my head and I thought well, they'll have the money, she'll find another husband, the kids will be fine. Now, it was just a passing thought. The seatbelt didn't come off, I got home.

Speaker 1: 50:24

But as soon as I got home I told my wife, because I've had mentors in my life, and some guy told me once like well, you're only as sick as your secrets. Man, you got a bad thought, you got to get that out, you got to work on it, and so why would I share this and be vulnerable and possibly embarrass myself publicly? People who find me on the show and hit me up like William you kind of alluded to it earlier you seem to have everything together and you have this great job and you have these people that listen to you. And like my son was in here earlier and I showed him some stuff on the internet, he's like daddy, are you famous? I'm like, well, not really.

Speaker 1: 50:53

And there's a handful of nerds who know. So he's like he watches these guys on TikTok and all and he's like, well, daddy, go on Google and put your name in, that'll tell if you're famous. So I put my name in, my face just comes like everything is mean. He's like, oh, my God, daddy, you're famous. I'm like I seem like, oh, I wish I had that life, or I wish like right, but I'm a guy who a few months ago, wanted to take my seatbelt off and drive into a tree because I got laid off.

Speaker 1: 51:25

Now the point of all this is I've been at a new job for six weeks. It's the best role I've ever had in my life. It's the most fulfilling role I've ever had. It aligns with my strengths more than any other role I've ever had, and I think I'm going to be the happiest I've ever been in my career as a 40-something year old.

Speaker 1: 51:48

It's taken me a long, long time and a lot of jobs and a lot of pain and stress to get to a job and a company and a role where I'm like this is what I was born to do. It's been a hell of a year and I've had a lot of struggles and there's been a lot of change and there was a moment when I thought about giving up. So what's the point of all that Like for me? I think that you have to be afraid but do things anyway, and I think that it's okay feel so lost and find yourself in a dark place that you consider giving up the fight for a better life, because if you can just keep taking action and keep doing the next thing that you got to do to change, right. This is all about change, then, because if you give up, you can't get out of a bad situation if you give up, right. So as long as you fight and stay in there and and and kind of believe that things can get better and just hang in there long enough, you can.

Speaker 1: 52:40

So, um that was a lot of shit to drop on you guys and the audience, but I think it's important because I've had a lot of people come to me and say, oh man, can you help me with this or that? Or resume like. You seem to have your stuff together and just know that everybody that you might put on a pedestal, they're as human as any of us and life is a bitch and change will come and some of it's going to be really hard and we can get each other through it. I'm joined here by two amazing men who are helping me keep the show alive and going and creating a great podcast right now, and that means a lot to me because you guys don't have to be here. You have families and careers and stuff to do. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to my story that turned dark but ends happily.

Speaker 2: 53:24

Thank you for sharing, like. I know so many folks that would benefit from listening to that, that are in the sort of the same situation. The job market's hard right now and when you know, when you if it's just me, I can you know, I can you know, live and just figure things out. But when you have a wife, that's depending on you, you have a family, you have children that are like looking at one thing that now, with the ages they're at, they look at you like you're their hero, you're like the most important person in their life. You can't do any wrong. I know, going from when I was younger and sort of getting my career going and I wasn't married, all I had to worry about was numero uno. I could study as long as I wanted. I can do as many fall nights as I wanted. I could. You know my structure, my schedule was so rigid I could just throw time in blindly to everything, to where you know. Okay, I'm three kids now, three young children. They all have different activities. I'm doing a ton of driving. I'm traveling a ton for travel, sports.

Speaker 2: 54:19

You know, the other day I was in I don't know what city I was in, either Fort Wayne or Detroit at a hockey tournament. The whole family had come along. I'm sitting there like an hour and a half, or no, about an hour, before I have to get them to the rink. The rink's like 30 minutes away. I'm holding my, my new daughter, and she is spit up all over the last pair of clothes I have I've. I'm like a target for her. Like I've been spit up on every outfit, like it was so bad we had to find a laundromat to do laundry in, because, like always, I only pack exactly what I need, not accounting for spit up accidents. So I look and it's just I'm covered in it. Like, oh, my goodness, you got to be kidding me. Um, and then I turn around and I noticed a whole bunch of yellow stuff on my sleeve.

Speaker 2: 55:02

So not only did she spit up on me, she was having a blowout, I'd poop all over my mom and it's like oh goodness and and at this at the same time, like what's streaming through my head is all the stuff I have to go back to work for on monday that i't done that I, you know I have queued up and it's like this is the peak of stress at the moment for me. But you know, having other folks that are dependent on you, you really got to figure out time management. You have to consider stress and burnout your personal relationships and you think about your career plateau. You have to take time for the people in your life that matter. You have to be able to adjust your priorities. But when you do that I don't know about, for you too, but there's this feeling in my chest like okay, now I'm missing out, I'm not learning or all these things are happening and I'm not going to be able to keep up, and that's hard. It takes a toll on your mental health. Anyway, that's all from me, totally.

Speaker 1: 56:01

Totally, dude, I'm right there with you. It seems like family and career are just two diametrically opposed forces and you never know what the right balance is. And in tech, you're right, you're always.

Speaker 2: 56:13

Tech is different, though. Like I, a friends in a cat, like I have lots of friends that do other things and they are like nine to five and they make real good money and they're doing just fine and dude, like you gotta work on my sister-in-law's.

Speaker 1: 56:26

My sister-in-law is a pediatrician. She teaches medical school at the college, like and her continuing education credits are a joke. Like. She tells me that like she's she's nine to five, she's got a ton of aka. Like right. A freaking doctor with like lives in her hands and us schmucks in tech are like oh gotta learn the next thing.

Speaker 1: 56:44

Tech, though I love learning out, it's just well, you have to, you have to are you, but to your point, with like a family and kids and like it's it's it's really hard. I stopped studying for a couple of years because I did get burnout at the tail end of my fintech thing and we went from zero clouds to multi-cloud. We went from no automation to automate or get out, and I was so burnt out with it all. I'm like you know what I'm going to do, my job. I'm going to do my maintenance windows. I'm not learning anything. I've had it and I don't know if that was a great choice or not. Probably not.

Speaker 3: 57:20

I was going to say. I think that kind of brings us all the way back around to how we started, which is what's something that you think it takes to become a good network engineer was one of the first questions we asked, and that episode's about change. I think that, in reality, part of being a network engineer, part of being in IT I mean, hell, part of life is embracing the change. Network engineers, we figure stuff out. We don't know things. We figure things out and things are constantly changing. Things are going to change, the jobs are going to change. What you used to have to know you're going to have to know more and that thing that you know really well is no longer going to be as important as it used to, and it's going to take a toll on you personally. If you can embrace the change, if you can embrace that, I don't know that there's many better jobs out there, because, frankly, I think this is a really good time.

Speaker 1: 58:07

Good Well, thanks for being on here, guys. I'm hoping to do it more often with you guys. For all things, art of Network Engineering you can check out our website, ar, artofnetworkengineeringcom. That's where all of our episodes are. We have a link tree, linktreecom, forward slash.

Speaker 1: 58:21

Art of NetEng All cool things, art of NetEng. Most notably, it's all about the Journey Discord server. There's about 3,500 folks in there studying for all kinds of things helping each other out, patting each other on the back for wins, picking each other up when they fail. If you don't have a community, you can hop in there and check it out. It's a great collection of like-minded folks in there. So we're going to keep the show going. I hope that you continue to enjoy it.

Speaker 1: 58:50

If you have any feedback, let me know. Reach out. If there's something you'd like to see or hear that you haven't, I'm happy to consider it. If you want to get on the show, hit me up, and I'm hoping this time next year. We're through this little transition, through all this change, and we're keeping on, keeping on. So, as always, thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Hey, folks, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. You can find us on socials at Art of NetEng and you can visit linktree forward slash Art of NetEng for links to all of our content, including the A1 merch store and our virtual community on Discord, called it's All About the Journey. You can see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering. That's youtubecom. Forward slash Art of NetEng. Thanks for listening.