A New Year, A New Job and New Challenges

Well by the time I get around to clicking “Publish” on this post it will no longer be a secret, and you don’t know how hard its been for me not to talk about this in overly public forums.

As some of you may have heard, after five months of interviews and immigration paperwork, I have accepted a new role with Juniper Networks as a Sr Data Center* Technical Marketing Engineer. This role will see me move to the San Francisco Bay Area in the next week or so, and be based directly out of the Sunnyvale office for at least the next two years.

On Python, Networks and the py-junos-eznc library

One of my recent forays into Increasing the Awesome has involved learning about NETCONF and the Python programming language. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jeremy Schulman during my trip to Sunnyvale for the Juniper Ambassadors Summit, and he introduced me to the new py-junos-eznc Python library he has been working on. I had spent a little bit of time earlier in the year looking at the original Ruby library, and I was amazed at how much thought had been put into this new library - obviously Jeremy’s learned a lot on the way!

MrsJanitor's Aus-Some Tour of SFO / SJC

Well I just got my itinerary for my trip to Sunnyvale for the Juniper Ambassador’s Summit in October and my wife and I have decided to spend an extra couple of days either side to get out and see the sites. We will be arriving in San Francisco at 11am Sat 5th of October and flying out around 11pm on Friday 12th, and we are looking to fill our schedule!

This is my wife’s first trip to the US, and I know she wants to get out and about and see things (also probably while Im in conference too). I know her list includes seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz… oh… and… “The Full House House”.

Software Defined Data Centres and the blending of cultures

As some of you may know, I have spent a fair amount of my time in the last few years designing and improving multi-tennant hosting environments. Each revision attempts to learn from the mistakes of the previous iterations, as well as bundle in new features and “advancements” from each of the different vendors in the stack.

New offerings on the storage fronts, developments in the server space in the form of the boom of virtualisation, and the simple existence of the network amongst the fact that none of these technologies changed the existing/fundamental laws of networking.

Vendor mandated certs only degrade integrity

I dont doubt that vendors have a tight line to walk when it comes maintaining their brand integrity. To build up a skill set in the market the certification teams put in many weeks developing a program that is relevant, useful and achieves the goals required. Followed by countless hours reviewing each of the certifications regularly to ensure integrity. There is the added benefit that these certifications build of community of loyal followers - The Cisco and VMWare certification programs are evidence to this.

The Smartest Guy in the Room

There is one thing that anybody who has been in a room with me longer than 5 minutes can tell you - I am not a smart guy! I have lots of smart friends. I am not one of them. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done more stupid things, more often than I would like to admit, and its only that I have been stupid enough often enough that I have eventually learned “dont do that!”.

On accents, colloquialisms and proprietary extensions

I may not be the most “travelled” person in the world, but over the past couple of years I have managed to find myself in several places across Asia, the Pacific Islands and also the US. One thing has always stood out - Speaking the same language is the hardest part of travelling! Now when I travel to parts of Asia and Im dealing either in hand gestures or with somebody trying their very best speak English (Their English is 1000x better than my Cantonese or my Khmer), and we both make allowances for the difficulty of not speaking the same language.

Increase the Awesome

I’m sitting at my desk right now (9pm Sydney time), waiting for my 3am change window that I need to be onsite at the data centre for. Now I am supposed to be working on a presentation I am giving on Friday entitled “Automation, Orchestration, and SDN”. I’ve been given about 20 minutes to cover these topics, so I’m spending quite a bit of time trying to get the right mix of content without geeking out too far for the intended audience (C-levels, project managers and lead engineers).

Eventually - My JNCIE-ENT Success!

Finally… it was bound to happen. My three year journey is complete.

It was about this time last year that I posted about my second JNCIE-ENT lab attempt, and sadly it didn’t go the way I wanted it to!  Due to work commitments I was not going to be prepared to sit the 2012 Q3 round of lab offerings, so I resolved to sit the December / January round.

I picked up my studies again and worked on my weak areas noted during my first two attempts. I paid particular attention to areas of multicast and switch security as these two topics were areas of weakness for me last time. I was lucky enough to work on a project at the end of last year that included nearly 1000 ports of 802.1x with dynamic VLAN allocation, so that proved to be an excellent “lab environment” for me.

The VAR-y good upsides to being a consultant!

Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR”. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.