In this episode, we have a conversation with Nick Buraglio, a network engineer and a board member of the Route Views Project, a public service that provides a view of the global routing system.
Nick tells us how he went from being an art student and a skateboarder to becoming one of the leading experts on IPv6, the latest version of the internet protocol that enables communication across the network.
He also shares his experience of working on various volunteer projects, such as building internet exchange points, participating in the Supercomputing Conference, and teaching IPv6 workshops.
Nick is a curious and creative person who loves to learn new things and share his knowledge with others. Tune in to hear his amazing story and tips.
-
Don't take it too seriously, right?
Live life. You are not your Job.
You should enjoy what you're doing but also, don't don't take it too seriously.
-
Links:
--
Thanks for being an imposter - a part of the Imposter Syndrome Network (ISN)!
We'd love it if you connected with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-imposter-syndrome-network-podcast
Make it a great day.
In this episode, we have a conversation with Nick Buraglio, a network engineer and a board member of the Route Views Project, a public service that provides a view of the global routing system.
Nick tells us how he went from being an art student and a skateboarder to becoming one of the leading experts on IPv6, the latest version of the internet protocol that enables communication across the network.
He also shares his experience of working on various volunteer projects, such as building internet exchange points, participating in the Supercomputing Conference, and teaching IPv6 workshops.
Nick is a curious and creative person who loves to learn new things and share his knowledge with others. Tune in to hear his amazing story and tips.
-
Don't take it too seriously, right?
Live life. You are not your Job.
You should enjoy what you're doing but also, don't don't take it too seriously.
-
Links:
--
Thanks for being an imposter - a part of the Imposter Syndrome Network (ISN)!
We'd love it if you connected with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-imposter-syndrome-network-podcast
Make it a great day.
Machines made this, mistakes and all...
[00:00:00] Chris: Hello and welcome to the imposter syndrome network podcast, where everyone belongs, especially if you think you don't, my name is Chris Grundemann and we are sadly missing the rockstar Zoe Rose today, but we'll muddle through this is the Nick Buraglio episode, and I think you're going to like it.
[00:00:25] Chris: Nick is a person of many interests. Lucky for all of us. Networking is among them. He has worked in the network provider industry for a couple of decades now, holding network engineering positions at regional internet providers as well as at the National Center for Supercomputing applications. He's partnered, or he is, participated in SCinet on several occasions and was part of the network engineering working group that built and maintained the Terra grid.
[00:00:48] Chris: Uh, I gotta be honest, I don't know what all of that is, but I love the names. Uh, I do know. That his list of specialties is as long as his list of interests. And he's one of the foremost IPv6 experts on the planet.
[00:00:59] Nick: Well, I'll certainly take all that.
[00:01:06] Chris: Hey, Nick, do you want to introduce yourself a little further to the imposter syndrome
[00:01:09] Nick: network? Sure. Uh, yeah, like you said, my name is Nick Buraglio. Um, I've been doing networking for, well, let's just say I woke up one day and I was the old guy. Um, I started in the nineties sort of just, we'll get into this, but just sort of happenstance.
[00:01:24] Nick: Like most things in my life, I fell face first into it and, uh, kind of just gone from there. I do also agree that a lot of the research and education names for things like the TerraGrid or, you know, fabric, things like that are, uh, very good, you know, they've managed to market those things very well, but yeah, I've been around a little while.
[00:01:45] Nick: I do also like them.
[00:01:47] Chris: Well, cool. Let's dive in. You are currently a member of the board of advisors for the route views project, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. And that's one that, uh, I do think I know what it is. But I'm willing to guess that not everyone listening does, can you tell us a little bit about what the route views project is and why you feel it's worth your time and attention?
[00:02:06] Nick: Oh, absolutely. The route views project is very near and dear to my heart. It's a project that's existed for very long time, almost as long, actually, it might even be as long as I've been in networking, maybe even longer. Essentially what it is, it's a project that's run out of the University of Oregon by a guy named Steve Hooter that is basically internet royalty.
[00:02:28] Nick: Like, you know, he's in the Hall of Fame and all this stuff, and he's asked me to come on and be a, you know, on the board of advisors. But what, what it, uh, what it is, is, uh, essentially a time machine for the default free zone, you know, the DFZ within the internet. It consists of a whole bunch of software routers that record things like MRT files and what MRT files are essentially a special format that, you know, that contains the routing table at any given moment.
[00:03:00] Nick: And so essentially what you can do with route views, first of all, from operational perspective, is you can go and you can look at any of the route sensors that are available out there there. You can. They're free to use. They're open to the world. You can, in some cases, telnet into them. It looks like a router and you could do show commands and look and see are my routes being received the way I think they should be.
[00:03:23] Nick: What's the AS path look like? Um, you know, what is the churn that's going on with these particular ASNs that kind of stuff is extremely useful for day to day operations of service providers or really anybody that has to deal with the with the DFZ but in addition to that, and I think this is the thing that's maybe lost on a lot of the networking people at large, is that all that stuff remains.
[00:03:49] Nick: So, there is a nearly unlimited view of research data. that you can glean out of the MRT files and the existing data that's been collected and archived over, you know, decades of, of the DFZ. And people do really awesome things like make visualizations. Uh, there's recently a visualization that, uh, was going, you know, I was throwing it around everywhere because I thought it was really cool that showed from when they started collecting IPv6 information, how much it had grown.
[00:04:20] Nick: In the default free zone in comparison to the IPV4 backbone, and it's like an explosion of IPV6 in the last like 5, 4, 5 years. So, I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's an extremely useful tool.
[00:04:34] Chris: Yeah, yeah, it's very cool. I have seen some really neat visualizations that come from it. I think it's behind the data of one of the visualizations I use in my kind of like explaining how the Internet works and why Internet exchanges are important talks that I do.
[00:04:47] Chris: And, and that's not the only volunteering that you do now or that you've done over your career. I mean, you know, obviously, or maybe not, obviously you also right now, I think, are, are working with Albuquerque IX you've done previous volunteer work with NTIA and NSF. There's also the SCinet thing that I don't know what that is.
[00:05:04] Chris: And you've done it a bunch of times. I mean, one, I guess my question around this is like, what's the motivation that right. Is this just purely like, Oh, this stuff is fun. So I want to go do it. Is there an effect on your career? Has this, have these things helped you move things forward? You know, either at your day job or for your own career overall, or is it about like, like, why do all this extra work right for free?
[00:05:24] Nick: Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, there's definitely reasons for that. So first off the history of my path into networking is sort of odd, you know I've talked about it before so people may have heard it, but you know, basically this is not At all, what I thought my career would be like, I went to art school, like I was going to be a graph designer or, you know, I wanted to be a filmmaker, you know, I'm an early nineties college kid, right?
[00:05:47] Nick: So like clerks and, you know, all the indie films were really what sort of extreme, you know, Tarantino, these guys that were coming up and changing the way movies were made, that's what I wanted to do, right? That's really hard to get into, but I've always had a bit of a creative side. So I was like, well, I'll go to, you know, go to art school and do graph design, photography or whatever, but you know, college is expensive.
[00:06:10] Nick: This is from someone, again, who went to college in the early nineties. So me saying that is, you know, people to go into, they are just like, dude, shut up. Yeah. Right. But you know, for me, I didn't have a whole lot of money. And so I paid my way towards the, you know, after some false starts of school, you know, and just kind of goofing around and dreaming of becoming a professional skateboarder.
[00:06:30] Nick: My dad basically said, just to get a degree in something, just finish something. And I was like, All right. So I decided to do art and to do that, uh, had a, an awesome roommate. Um, that was childhood friend. We'd known each other since like preschool. Right. And he was doing telecom and we had started doing networking stuff.
[00:06:48] Nick: This was like mid nineties, right? So that we could play games together on the computers that we had built. And I was working at a video store and then I was working at like an art supply store and it just, you know, he was like, Hey, you can make more money. We need another team lead to do these installs at this.
[00:07:04] Nick: Integrator that I was working at. And so I went and helped him doing that. Uh, and that got me into the, uh, this is actually very relevant to imposter syndrome. I got handed all the stuff that the quote unquote real engineers didn't want to do because, oh, he's just an art student. We don't even really know why he's here.
[00:07:23] Nick: Right. Just give him all the crap we don't want to do. He'll be gone soon anyway. And so I got handed routers and switches and. Unix machines and DEC alpha stuff and as for you know, all the stuff that like the folks that were doing the engineering didn't want to deal with got handed to me and so that ended up with me, you know, knowing a little bit about routers.
[00:07:45] Nick: And really wanting to understand how the internet worked. And so I started consulting for service providers and things like that. And that's how I paid for my art school. Oh, wow. Right? As I just worked full time doing that. And then when it came time to finish a master's degree, I realized, like, I'm already working full time making double what I would probably make as a graph designer.
[00:08:07] Nick: So I'm just going to keep doing this. And I talked for so long that I forgot what the original question was. Oh, why am I volunteering? Yes. Okay. So because, you know, there was no, there was no Google or anything like that. Like I had to like find people that would help me or read manuals or things like that.
[00:08:25] Nick: And it was, you know, it wasn't easy to sort of figure these things out. And I've always, I've always liked to share knowledge. And so when opportunities come up where I can provide skills that maybe I have that other people don't have or that are less common or that they want to learn, I feel obligated to do that right.
[00:08:45] Nick: Now, obviously I wouldn't do it if it wasn't fun. Like that first and foremost, if it's going to suck, I probably am not going to be interested in doing it. Like, Hey, when we do a bunch of data entry for us, cause you know how to do it and we don't, how about I'm not doing that. Right. But if it comes that somebody wants to learn BGP, or they want to learn, you know, how segment routing works, or they want to learn IPv6, I'm happy to teach them.
[00:09:08] Nick: And so these opportunities helping with the IX, I've built IXs before, it's fun, right? It's a, it's a cool little environment. It's self contained. It's all routing, except for the layer two piece, right? And it's, uh, you know, it's a turnkey ecosystem, I guess, right? You got systems. You've got a network, you've got routing, and you've got some switching.
[00:09:30] Nick: And so it's all this nice little thing in a box that like is incredibly useful for teaching somebody fundamentals because it's got all of it.
[00:09:37] Chris: True. Yeah. I never thought about that. It's kind of the microcosm of all the things.
[00:09:41] Nick: Yeah, that. And so I got involved with that, you know, wherever. People would ask me, I would be happy to help them.
[00:09:48] Nick: You know, as long as I have time, right. Time is the only thing you can't get more of. So, you know, that's got to be careful how you spend it, but you know, I like helping with that, the super computing SCinet stuff. I kind of just was involved with, I worked at NCSA and we were heavily involved with this conference and I realized that.
[00:10:05] Nick: Basically, every year you build the fastest network on the planet that exists for about 10 days, and then you tear it down. Wow. Right? And it's typically a heterogeneous environment. It's all donated hardware. They try to do something interesting with it every year, right? Sometimes it's like 400 gig interfaces when they're pre standard, or sometimes it's We're going to do, you know, optical deployments out to booths on the show floor rather than switching that kind of stuff.
[00:10:30] Nick: Right. So it's always something new. It's the best. I know that there's a conference called interop, but I would, I would venture that at least in my experience with SCinet, it's probably the best interop experiment experiment that you can do because a lot of the stuff is like not production. You know, it isn't, it's not available yet.
[00:10:48] Nick: Right. And it's, it's done things like, Okay. You know, vendors donate the gear because they know that they're going to get better, uh, input than they're going to get really anywhere else. Like, so for example, IPv6 was implemented on Force 10 hardware as a direct result of supercomputing, right? This is pre Dell owning them, right?
[00:11:09] Nick: Same thing with Foundry, right? Foundry had, you know, some of the, some of the IPv6 pieces were added as a direct result of SC. And there's, there's other, there's lots of other stuff like that too, but. I enjoy working with other people. I enjoy teaching when I can. And I always want to be the dumbest guy in the room because that way I'm always learning something.
[00:11:28] Nick: So some of those things don't necessarily go together, but like, if you can find a nice balance between them, you know, if you know the things you should share the things.
[00:11:36] Chris: Yeah. I like that a lot. That makes a ton of sense now, you know, on this. Not to be mercenary, uh, thinking about it, but you know, for me, I started out really just super, super, super curious about this stuff, right?
[00:11:48] Chris: Kind of similar to what you said, right? As soon as I got exposed to networking and especially the Internet, it just really, really fascinated me, um, the inner workings of it and how it works and stuff. And so I started, you know, volunteering because Early in my career, I didn't know anything and I didn't figure anybody would hire me to do stuff.
[00:12:04] Chris: So I just started volunteering to do stuff. And that's how I learned a lot of things, I think. And it was just curiosity was driving that. But looking back, I've found that a lot of that stuff I got involved in, right? Whether it was, you know, advisory committees or program committees or those kinds of things, just, just offering to help out now, looking back.
[00:12:21] Chris: A lot of that stuff has has actually shaped and driven my career, and I wonder if the same is true for you. I mean, have opportunities come out of those relationships and those skills and things like that? I mean, has that actually in turn turned around and kind of been a benefit to you personally and your career?
[00:12:36] Nick: 100 percent my career is 100 percent driven by that. So, you know, like I said, you know, when I was early on in the nineties, you know, I did, I was doing whatever I could get my hands on, right. Well, mostly because I needed to pay rent and pay tuition and, you know, I would just take whatever was available.
[00:12:53] Nick: Then I got a job working in an enterprise, fairly good size enterprise. And it wasn't for me, you know, it was like putting an outside kitty indoors. It's just not. It didn't work for me, right? It may be fine for other people, but my personality type is. Not conducive to that. So I ended up taking a significant pay cut to come and rebuild and a very early broadband provider, uh, where I live now, um, I got married and moved and I was commuting back to the old place.
[00:13:22] Nick: And so there was local, it was a big pay cut, but it was stuff that I was very interested in. Right? And it was a huge, huge risk. Now I've said it a million times and I'll say it more because it's continues to be true. I have very little fear of failure. It's just a attribute I don't have probably comes from 30 years of skateboarding, where if you're tentative, you're going to break an ankle.
[00:13:43] Nick: Right? So I just don't, I don't have that. So I took this risk with, you know, a wife and professional, a new wife and professional school. And I was the sole provider. I took this risk to go work at the service provider. Well, you know, one of the things that came out of that, probably the most beneficial thing, even well above learning how to work on a shoestring budget, provide broadband services to, you know, big chunk of Illinois was that I had a customer that worked for NCSA, the supercomputing center.
[00:14:11] Nick: And. We had, you know, we, he became one of my, one of my greatest mentors actually, but he was, he was my customer and I worked with him off and on and, and he had moved to go do some development work out of network engineering to become what one would probably call today, you know, an automation engineer, an orchestration engineer, wasn't really a thing 20 years ago.
[00:14:31] Nick: But he was going to go do that and he's like, Hey, my job's going to be open. You should apply for it. I was like, I don't know, man. I'm kind of, you know, I'm the, I'm the big fish in the small pond here. And then I realized I'm big fish in a small pond. Right. So I applied and I got the job and quickly realized I was an idiot and everybody around me was brilliant and I should just shut up and learn.
[00:14:52] Nick: And that's what I did for a handful of years. That job got me a job for the University of Illinois campus. Right, because NCSA is part of the campus and I worked on, you know, a lot of the research pieces on the campus. I worked on the wide area network. That job, along with the guy from the ISP that was at NCSA, had gone to work where I work now.
[00:15:12] Nick: Same thing. He's like, hey, we got a job open. You should apply for it. So it's all been a direct result. Yeah. Uh, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I mean, I, I like to do things organically. Uh, I'm not really a planner when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like I like to experience things. I mean, I like to steer the boat, but I don't want to micromanage things.
[00:15:32] Nick: You know what I mean? Does that make sense?
[00:15:34] Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and I think that's, I mean, not to get too philosophical, but I think that's kind of how life works. Right. I mean, I don't know. I tend to prescribe to the stoic philosophy of, of the, like, we don't really have any control other than how we react to things.
[00:15:48] Chris: And so just kind of accepting that and like, I'm, I'm floating down this river and you know, I can, I can maybe paddle to the left a little bit of pedal to the right a little bit, but overall, like we're going down, we're going down the river. Yeah. I like that.
[00:15:58] Nick: Yeah. I think the more you try to control things, the less happy you become.
[00:16:02] Nick: At least, you know, if you try to be, well, this is what I always tell my kids. What happens to things that don't bend? Well, yeah, they break, right? You gotta be flexible. So I just, I try to live that way. I'm not always successful, but again, you know, it's a good, it's a good philosophy to strive towards.
[00:16:20] Chris: I agree.
[00:16:21] Chris: I agree.
[00:16:22] Chris: Speaking of things breaking, have you ever broken anything, uh, in a, in a production network?
[00:16:26] Nick: Oh my God. Anybody that tells you that never broken anything in production network is either not doing their job or they're a liar. Yeah. Yeah. I've broke many, many things.
[00:16:37] Chris: What's the, um, we'll take it, take it to the extreme, right?
[00:16:39] Chris: What's the most embarrassing mistake you've made in your career?
[00:16:42] Nick: God, probably the most embarrassing mistake I've ever made was. Removing the default route token on a national backbone, even after peer review of the config changes, it was missed. It was my config, but we do, you know, we, we did peer reviews in a way that was, you know, fairly efficient, but I think that no one realized that the router that I was replacing was the last one that generated a default token.
[00:17:07] Nick: And so when it went down, you know, when, when it got replaced. It was a new platform and oops, you know, mistakes happen, right? It was, it was really clear what it was, you know, within a very short amount of time. And so it wasn't very, it wasn't broken for very long, but it was, I was pretty new at that time in this job.
[00:17:27] Nick: And I was, you know, I mean, I was a full on adult man. Oh man, that's, I'm going to probably get fired or at least reprimanded, but it's a mark of a good employer and a good, uh, culture where you basically just circle the wagon, say, yep, a mistake was made. It doesn't really matter who made it. What can we learn from it?
[00:17:50] Nick: Let's try not to ever do that again. And we'll put out a, you know, here's what happened. Uh, you know, I don't, I can't remember what it's called. Cloudflare does them very well. Right. Uh, first Mortem. Yeah.
[00:18:02] Chris: Uh, yeah. For some reason now I'm blanking on it as well. RFO, RFO, the reason for outage.
[00:18:07] Nick: Yeah. Yeah. The failure, like, boy, I don't, I, it's all escaping me, but.
[00:18:13] Nick: And so that's what we did and it was cool. Like, okay, well. Even, even though the change was peer reviewed, I was still, I still felt very responsible. Of course. Yeah. Because I said it was mine. And, uh, you know, ironically, that's not the only national scale back early on in my NCSA career. We, uh, had this thing that you mentioned called the Terra grid, which was, uh, it's a research network, right?
[00:18:37] Nick: So it's not like Like nobody's going to die if it goes down, right? Some researchers might lose their data and put them back a little, a little ways, which stinks, you know, it's sort of unnecessary work. But I took that down from Illinois West with a spanning tree loop. Ooh, Alex, that's a, that's a fun one.
[00:18:54] Nick: I don't do, I'm not very good at layer two. I don't like it. And so, you know, that was something that I hadn't considered and because I'm used to working in layer three, so I guess, shoot, this was like 2004 or five. So it was quite a while ago, but still, I just went home after we, after we realized what it was, I fixed it.
[00:19:13] Nick: And I was like, I'm done for the day. I went home, but again, I'll never make that mistake again. I'll never make either of those mistakes again. And I think that's the important takeaway is failure is the best teacher.
[00:19:25] Chris: It is. It really is. I mean, it definitely drives it home for sure. And I think there's some things you can't learn without making mistakes.
[00:19:30] Chris: I mean, obviously the world's a little different now and networks are a little different now, but in general, right? I mean, you, you have to be willing to, to, to fail and then be willing to like admit it and reflect on it to, to learn from it, I think for sure. Right.
[00:19:42] Nick: Yeah, I mean, I think the most important advice I could ever give anybody is if you break something, don't hide and try to fix it yourself.
[00:19:49] Nick: If it's specially, if it's very visible, go find somebody that can help you. Even a second set of eyes, it doesn't have to be a senior person. It doesn't have to be, you know, just get more eyes on it. Put your ego away, right? It's only going to cause you problems. Just put it away, solve the problem and deal with whatever the fallout is later.
[00:20:08] Nick: And again, if you, if you're in an environment where blame and, you know, sort of, you know, one can maybe expect if you're losing money to be reprimanded for something, but I don't feel that blame is a particularly good use of resources, right? Solves no problems. Right. Blame blame really doesn't solve anything.
[00:20:27] Nick: So you're in an environment like that where you're scared to get blamed for a mistake, then, you know, maybe that's not a great environment. Right. It sounds kind of negative to me as I sit up here from my, you know, 24 years of high horse experience, right. You know, take it for what it's worth. Right. Some people don't have any other options, but...
[00:20:45] Chris: exactly.
[00:20:46] Chris: Yeah, that's fair. That's a good point. So what about the other side of that? I mean, what would you say at this point, looking back, I mean, obviously you're not done yet, but, but, you know, so far, what's the greatest achievement? What are you like really proud of having accomplished so far in your career?
[00:20:59] Nick: Just being able to do the things I do every day. I mean, I get to work on cool stuff with cool people and. I mean, if I had to pick something, I don't know, it's hard to top that, but that's, you know, that's very meta. Uh, I think one of the things I'm most proud of probably is some stuff that I've done. You know, I used to teach IPv6 workshops.
[00:21:22] Nick: I really enjoyed that. Um, I like to push innovation and change. Um, I don't like things to be stagnant because I, I feel like, you know, we should always be learning. Whenever we can, even if it's just in a lab, right, sometimes I get frustrated because, you know, the things that I want to do in production, you know, maybe are a little bit too radical.
[00:21:45] Nick: Um, and so, you know, more conservative voices tend to win out on some of those things and that's okay, right? I can be frustrated, but like if I, if I, if I aim to move something a mile and it ends up moving 50 feet, I still consider that a success, right? Because progress did happen. Um, so I think the biggest thing I'd be proud of is just the things that I've managed to move forward and progress.
[00:22:09] Nick: I think V6 is a big one for me. You know, I've been working with IPV6 for 20 years at this point. And sort of now that it's. You know, every every person in the United States and probably most people around the world have IPv6 probably in their pocket right now, right? It's on every mobile device because it has to be and we forget that a lot of times when we hear things like, Oh, no one uses v six.
[00:22:35] Nick: Well, you know, maybe look again. But I think that the amount of progress that's happened there. I'd like to take 0. 001 percent of credit for some of that, maybe, I don't know. I like working on it.
[00:22:48] Chris: Awesome. Awesome. That's great. Well, as we always do, we've run out of time again. Nick, do you have any, any projects or causes, anything?
[00:22:56] Chris: We may, maybe we talked about it already. Maybe we haven't that you'd like to highlight, um, for the imposter syndrome network.
[00:23:02] Nick: Um, I'm just, I'm still doing a lot of work in v6. I've moved kind of into the standards process at this point. If people are interested in how that works, the IPv6 ops in this, the six man working group within the IETF are a place to start looking if you're interested.
[00:23:18] Nick: I never really understood how the standards process worked until a couple of years ago when I started getting involved. That's, it's interesting to me. Some, it's not for everybody. So we're trying to make some changes that are beneficial. The other big thing is, um, I'm one of the co leads for removing IPv4 across.
[00:23:34] Nick: You know, one of the major, uh, U. S. agencies, so I'm pretty proud of that. That's something, you know, turning off IPv4 is, is a huge step and, uh, you know, it's uncovering a lot of interesting problems that are fun to work on.
[00:23:49] Chris: I'm sure. Yeah, it's wild. Right. I mean, turning on IPv6 is one thing, but then actually IPv6 only is, is a whole nother can of worms, as they say, I guess.
[00:23:58] Nick: Yeah. In fact, I'm, I'm v6 only. During this call right now, I have no IPV4 on this in any of the systems here.
[00:24:05] Chris: Awesome. Nice. That's very cool. And then is, is, uh, is ZTVI still active? Are you still doing stuff there?
[00:24:10] Nick: It is. Oh, that I forgot about that. It's funny. That was, uh, you know, that was a project to, uh, basically see if I could build a backbone.
[00:24:20] Nick: On completely virtual circuits that was essentially V6 only and so I obtained an ASN and a block of V6 space, um, eventually got a block of V4 space, a PI address space, and we built out a virtual backbone. And it's still, it's still running. Actually, I'm looking for more POPs. Like if someone wants to donate me a couple of U and a, you know, 1 or 10 gig feed.
[00:24:44] Nick: It uses very little bandwidth because it's really an experimental network, but. You know, any, any IXs that have Hurricane Electric and would be willing to donate me a couple of you and some power and a, and a port, I'll ship you equipment, right? It'll help out with the, with the experimental network. And, and basically it's a, it's a mechanism for trying new things on a real network.
[00:25:04] Nick: Um, so if people have experiments that they want to try and maybe they don't have access to stuff. That's another option, you know, but, you know, I take applications for projects and if they're reasonable, you know, we'll let you do them.
[00:25:17] Chris: Cool. Cool. Well, I need to get you some space at IX-Denver it sounds like,
[00:25:20] Nick: Oh, I would happily take that.
[00:25:22] Chris: Nice. We'll see that. Well, well, Nick, thank you so much for sharing your story with the imposter syndrome network. This has been a lot of fun for me and I think probably great for our guests as well, or listeners. I mean, And thank you to all of those listeners, everybody who's out there right now, tuning in, uh, for your time and your attention.
[00:25:37] Chris: I know that those are the most valuable assets you have, and I really appreciate you spending them here with us. Please consider paying it forward by letting others know about this show and the great guests we have on. One last thing before we turn off the lights, uh, Nick. I'm curious. What would you say is The most important lesson you've learned in your career so far.
[00:25:56] Nick: Oh boy, don't take it too seriously, right? It's, you know, live life, you know, you are not your job. You, you should enjoy what you're doing, you know, for large portions of your day, but also. You know, don't, don't take it too seriously.
[00:26:11] Chris: I love that. I try to remind myself. There's definitely days where I need to like sit down and remind myself of that.
[00:26:15] Chris: Like it's, it's going to be all right. It doesn't matter that much. It's not going to like, you know, we're not, uh, I don't know what it is. Sometimes it seems like everything right now. It can be all consuming really, really quickly.
[00:26:26] Nick: Yeah. I'm a very competitive person. So. I have to continually tell myself that and, you know, perfection does not exist.
[00:26:34] Nick: So, just practice makes progress. Kind of, kind of, boy, I'm just full of anecdotes today, aren't I?
[00:26:40] Chris: I love it. I love it. It's great. They become cliches because they're true, usually. Yeah, yeah, it's true. But I like that one, actually. That's not even the cliche. That's, uh, an improvement on it, which I like.
[00:26:48] Nick: I can't remember where I heard it.
[00:26:50] Nick: I'll take full credit for it, even though I
[00:26:51] Chris: 100 percent attributed to Nick Braulio. You're here to hear first.
[00:26:54] Nick: Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:26:57] Chris: Yeah. Thanks for being here. We will be back next week.