Of all good things…

Well it appears that I am well on my way to holding onto the title for two years running, and once again, I haven’t posted anything for a couple of months. There have been a lot of changes going on around here in the past few months which have really taken me away from my “janitorial duties”.

There are three key items that I would like to take the time to update everyone on:

1. All Good things…

The first piece of news, and possibly the biggest, is that in March I handed in my notice as the CTO of eintellego. I have spent the last four years working with an excellent team of engineers and support staff, helping to build up a really impressive list of projects and achievements. I must point out that I myself was only one player in this effort amongst a team of driven and talented engineers.

During my time here I had the chance to work on building Service Provider wholesale networks, Enterprise WANs with 100’s of sites, leading edge Security implementations, Video Content Delivery networks and not to mention a range of emerging “Cloud Provider” solutions. I also had the opportunity to work on my skills in management, sales, and human resources (Glad I’m an engineer!). These opportunities have been a large influence on shaping my career to date as well as helping me plan path into the future.

I would like to give a special thanks to the entire eintellego team, especially Skeeve Stevens who took a chance on me and gave me to opportunity and freedom to grow my skills and develop my own “style”. Many closed door meetings were held between the two of us to “thrash out” the best solution to a problem, and this was certainly an exercise in seeing things from every angle possible (even if it sounded like a battle royal to those on the outside 😉 )

I wish the best of luck to everybody working there, and the best for the future.

2. Of New Beginnings

In late April, after taking my wife on a long over-due vacation, I took on my new position as Senior Network Engineer at ICT Networks. ICT is a Juniper Elite Partner based out of Sydney, focusing on Data Centre and Security deployments for some of the largest enterprise customers in the Australian market.

Even in just the few weeks I have been working here at ICT so far I have already gained exposure to a range of Juniper products that I hadn’t used before, and am learning a lot from engineers who have been working with these products for a long time. Some of the projects I have on my roadmap for the next couple of months are going to provide quite a bit of interesting blog content based around Data Centre and Security implementation and best practices. STAY TUNED!

I’m still finding a bit unsettling to come from a situation where I knew pretty much everything about all customers and all networks to being “the new guy”. Going from a list of a million things to complete and not enough time to complete them to all of a sudden trying to get my hands on as many new projects and I can trying to learn as much as I can 🙂 It’s a good feeling but Im anxious to jump in and play 🙂

3. Of Getting Back On The Horse

Some of my readers may remember that I was involved in the beta program for the JNCIE-ENT lab in August of last year. Needless to say I didn’t go as well as I had hoped, and with the range of things occurring in my personal and professional life over the past 8 months, I didn’t feel up to the challenge of trying again.

Well the good news is that after my vacation and the change in lifestyle, I have gotten back on the horse. My JNCIE-ENT lab exam is booked for 9am this coming Friday (May 25th). This is another reason why I haven’t been visible much lately because I have been trying to study as much as I can to hopefully “bring home the digits”. I also have to get right back into my CCIE R&S studies as the end of September marks 18 months since taking the written!

Now that I have put it out there publicly in this post, Im going to have to work my hardest to pass 😉 Hopefully I will have a happy post in the next few weeks.

Mop and Bucket

Well I hope that explains some of the reasons why things have been quiet around here, though possibly not a great excuse! As I hinted at above, there are some very good blog posts coming out of these upcoming projects that I hope you will all enjoy.

Until then… may all your packets be forwarded expeditiously!