Ep 79 – LabEveryDay

In this episode, we speak to Du’An Lightfoot! Du’An has recently moved into a new role as Sr. Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services. Du’An talks about his time in the military and the experience he gained from it. He also shares with us how he started creating content and his brand – LabEveryDay! 

Netmiko training – https://www.youtube.com/c/Grelleum

You can find more of Du’An:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/labeveryday
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LabEveryday
Website: https://www.labeveryday.com/

Sponsors
NetAlly – Simplicity. Visibility. Collaboration. Visit NetAlly.com today!
NordVPN – 70% off the 2 year plan + 1 Month Free – visit nordvpn.com/taone or use promo code TAONE at checkout

This episode has been sponsored by Meter. 

Go to meter.com/aone to book a demo now! 

Transcript

this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers and just like that as time expires on the maintenance window the engineers pull off the successful change in the final seconds we now sh we now take you live to the data center to get the thoughts of lead engineer barry greg peterson or bgp as his teammates call him barry you and your crew picked up the w this evening but it did get a little dicey there at the end walk us through the window well you know first off gotta hand it to the team this was uh definitely a group effort a lot of time and effort went into the change prep for this one a lot of folks doubted us of course and some didn't even think we'd make it to the starting line tonight uh heck even earlier this week the approval board threw a lot of questions and concerns at us but in the end we got the nod to go ahead during the window tonight we obviously had a few things didn't go our way but we were able to regroup at halftime and ultimately push this thing over the line i'm sure though there's going to be an after action report heading my way but hey we'll clean it up and come back even stronger next time well there you have it the engineers came away with the wind in what will likely be known as the change window of the year we'll now cut over to the newest episode of the art of network engineering already in progress fantastic the first intro of 2022 of course you're not going to hear this until like mid-january maybe even february at this point but we'll see i am aj murray at no blinky blinky that was andy at andy laptop andy how you doing happy new year man happy new year how did i do it was my first time being in a tim intro well other than saying shit right in the middle of it i don't know i was hoping i was hoping you're going to ignore that and edit it out but i guess not well we can edit that out too i don't know that's fine dan can do an awful lot in post i'm well aj we had a nice holiday even though we were stuck at home we made the most of it was nice having some family time work is getting real this week in my first official week at uh juniper and i'm i'm i'm learning a lot i won't bore you with the details but today was evpn and vxlan and moto modi protocol bgp and uh i don't know man and a bunch of other stuff uh so yeah i'm in over my head but hang on hang on hang on product product manager tell them you're a product manager you're like being an engineer over there andy what do you do so i'm on the fabric automation team right because obviously i missed the automation so they hired me for my automation skills that makes sense so so right now i'm trying to do my best to learn fabrics and overlays and and data center design which i'm not too strong on but uh it's it's awesome i love it i'm learning and it sounds really exciting yeah it's good man thanks all right tim at tim burtino how you doing tim hey jay you know i i usually don't say much at the beginning of these segments but but this this week it's it's a new year i got some stuff i need to air i need to get out in the open and i'm going to start with andy all right so andy i'm going to start this you know practically the same way i start every conversation with you and it's hey don't take this the wrong way but i'm really glad you started back working again and and the reason for that is when andy was off those those few weeks in between jobs there was a ridiculous amount of barbecue picks going up on twitter and in our chat and stuff and i i was so jealous there for a few weeks i thought i was gonna puke so at least andy's andy's back working and and i don't have to see the delicious food anymore but that's the first thing so andy you're off the hook but now aj in all seriousness um things are going well i took a break for a while myself on studying and that kind of thing but now i'm back getting ready for the cisco enterprise design exam so back to studying so very nice things are good holidays are good family's good yeah the salad the end salad excellent and last but not least mr dan howdy dan how do you dan's new year's resolution is to be more engaging on social media so go follow dan at howdy packet and you might see him tweet live i'm gonna try i every once in a while you know i'll pop out from under my under my social media rock and i'll start posting a few things and then uh and then i usually go back under my social media rock and and hide for a while there was a big one there was a big one dan actually recorded a video of himself in a reply on how to pronounce worcestershire oh my god i guess that's right yeah i bought fell over when i saw that pop up on my phone that was dan that was impressive okay i appreciate that more from dan in 2022 hopefully more pronunciation yeah put a little twang on that how do you say that yeah yeah and now it's time for some wins kicking it off this week from our discord channel a name we don't see very often on the winning channel a deal khan was promoted to public cloud engineer congratulations a deal yeah it's good to see him finally get something done once in a while finally finally that's excellent a deal you've been doing so much and seeing the amount of study and certification work you've been doing really continue to pay off um professionally that's really cool to see nice work yeah congrats she manages to be in the audience live stream and everything oh man like two o'clock in the morning his time zone too like unbelievable uh next on the list is p allen 182 fellow co-host over at so you want to be in it past the pc nsa that is the palo alto certified network systems administrator or security administrator i forget the exact acronym but congrats yeah it was cool to see that win because i think i listened to one of their recent episodes and when they recorded it he was going to take it within like a couple days so oh okay cool to see the pass now this next one i have to send out a huge apology too because i have been saying this name incorrectly and they have gotten a bunch of wins it's like for some reason whenever i saw it my eyes just saw tata the automator and uh he hit me up on the side he's like hey i've been meaning to tell you you've been saying it wrong it's taha the automator and i'm like oh my gosh how did i miss that i'm so sorry so taha the automator uh started their new position as a network engineer this past week congratulations very nice with some great some really cool pictures too oh yeah oh yeah that was really cool plugging stuff in and whiteboarding it's awesome that was cool uh jared renewed their ccnp using ce credits which oddly enough we just had a conversation about so that was really cool to see someone take advantage of that yeah yeah i'm really glad jared highlighted that too because that i think was such a transformational change in cisco certifications that they support that now so the fact that jared pointed that out that that's how he got reserted that was really cool nittany cli passed the data center ops oh wait i'm sorry that's they didn't pass an exam there they they got a data center ops internship at aws congratulations that's right they'll be starting uh this summer uh in the internship at aw paid internship too i believe they said very cool wow i can't even imagine what that's going to be like that's got to be ah i know something else taco that's like the data center of all data centers right yeah ultimate data center uh chris miles passed the azure network engineer exam congratulations yay congrats river our friend from down under completed the terraform associate exam i didn't know terraform had an exam uh certification program so that's really cool hey if there's something out there to be found river is gonna find it and correct it nice work dale wheeler started their first role in it as an it support uh support specialist congratulations dale love to see those that's awesome yeah uh e-l-i-g-r-p signed an offer letter to be a network engineer congratulations very nice breaking in yeah jobs in i.t new network engineers oh it warms my heart congratulations that's awesome we got two new patreons this week thank you so much to paddy patol and kevin myers for supporting everything we do here at the art of network engineering we appreciate all of our patreons and all of our listeners for uh supporting us in many ways you can so thank you so much and we want to remind everybody that our listener survey is still going on we're still looking for feedback so if you have any thoughts you want to share with us any ideas for future episodes you can go to the podcast notes for this episode and there's a link in there it's just a quick google form you don't have to give us your name we don't want your contact info we just want to know a little bit about you how do you consume our content when do you listen how often you listen what you do for fun this kind of information helps us out with our sponsors so take a few minutes and do that survey also uh we've made it as a finalist to the cisco it blog awards uh voting is still going on uh so you can also find a link for that in the show notes as well as the description on youtube and uh vote for us no just kidding i mean please vote for us but there's tons of awesome content creators on that ballot uh so please go vote for your favorites and you can vote for more than one so you know get give credit where credit is due all right now back to the show all right i am so excited to welcome our guest to uh thank you so much for joining us this evening duwan lightfoot thank you thank you thank you how are you doing hey what's up aj tim dan andy thank you all for having me thank you yeah thank you this is i'm i'm meeting a celebrity right i know like i mean dwan you realize you're a celebrity right in the network engineering world no you are not even not even um shout out to everybody that's watching live everybody in the chat um yeah i think i don't consider myself a celebrity at all you know i've been blessed to help people share my my journey and um you know just make it off the help desk awesome well um let's let's start with what do you do today and then we'll kind of go back and and we can understand how you got there yeah oh so my name is dwane lightfoot today i'm a i would say x network engineer x system administrator x desktop support um extraordinaire and now i'm a senior cloud networking developer advocate at aws wow wow that's a that's a mouth full right there and i'm a fucking we have a guest yes you are adorable oh that was cool looks like dad is in the title too obviously yeah all the time it's up top yeah that's awesome that was so perfectly done so developer advocate i i've certainly heard the title before but what does a developer advocate do yeah so a lot of times you know developer advocates will be tied to marketing but the true essence of a good developer advocate doesn't market a product it's more so about empathy you know as a former network engineer i know a lot of the pain points that we suffer dealing with a lot of products i don't want to mention any because i don't want to talk about vendors specifically but you know there's a lot of times when there's a we may have um trouble with a device and let's say an interface flapping and we say man this device is always doing this and it's making my job very difficult so i can relate to that and so a part of being a developer advocate is telling the story and showing how whatever vendor you work for products can alleviate those pain points that engineers and developers may be having or talking about a product that may that may um be brand new that engineers and developers may have never known about in introducing it with the story that's relatable to engineers and developers in the industry so connecting like what you know for first sharing in the announcement of this new thing and then why is this important how is this going to help you as a network engineer or or developer right right or developer yeah yep that's awesome that's kind of like a bridge between the two right of course we're a bridge between oftentimes between the business units and the customer gotcha so how would you say you split your time is it is it pretty well 50 50 between customers and in the internal business units or how do you handle that every job is going to be different um so when i was at a developer advocate for cisco devnet a lot of my time was spent around with the customers because i was focused on start now helping you know network engineers get started with network automation so most of my time was around you know checking out uh's platform checking out other engineers that are in the industry seeing how they're managing their workflows and then seeing okay are they adapting to network automation how can i make this pathway into learning python and different tool sets easier for a network engineer okay that's that sounds pretty cool though i i like the idea of that because you know in my day-to-day job uh it would be nice uh to have someone like yourself show me how maybe this this pain area in in my world could be automated or how i could use dev tools to to make that a little easier right so i i could see a lot of challenges with this role though like uh i i'm just trying it's running through my head right now and i'm like because well and you really have to pay attention then don't you to to what people are talking about on social media and stuff like that i want to i want to jump on that dan because dejuan when you joined cisco is a developer advocate was that your first jump out of traditional i.t network engineering yeah um so yes it was but i actually didn't join cisco to be a developer advocate i actually joined to be like a content engineer and okay okay what happened was there was like some internal changes in the organization and so when that change happened they were like hey we want to want to be a developer advocate and i just happened to get into that role it wasn't something i actually sought out to do and okay was that a surprise when you got like you were in there thinking you're going to create content and then did they pop that on you're like hey developer advocate what's up yeah it was a total surprise because yeah i think the last two years of my life has just been i didn't plan for it you know oftentimes we work on certifications and we say okay this is what i want to be i want to be a senior network engineer check architect check principal check like you want to go to that path but sometimes you know you say oh this is interesting let me see what this is like andy you're in product marketing yeah i mean yeah you're you're ringing all my bells right now yeah this was never right you got to stay open right and keep keep your eyes open and and be be courageous to take a risk i mean did you feel like that was a risk going from you know i'm a network engineer i get certified i climb the ladder i'll be an architect to that role at cisco i mean that did you feel it was risky at all no i never felt it was risky um i look at network engineering as something i'm very passionate about but i do look at it as something that um to become a principal or to become an architect it's kind of hard and what i mean by that is because a lot of times when in senior level engineers getting roles they don't change jobs often so those jobs don't come available often so when i see an opportunity that may be interesting where i can learn and grow to me i'm more interested in that than having a title or you know something like that that a box that i want to check off my list i'm more learning the latest technology and helping people that's what i'm passionate about and did you have automation skills when you started the the cisco developer advocate role yeah that's that's a funny thing so um i started with network automation in 2018 i was working for a government agency and i kind of told this story before but my workload was like large and what i mean by that we had about 3 000 sites and the first large task i had was to upgrade or update the snmp location on 300 devices and i'm like i get about 30 tickets a day my work my workload was crazy and so i'm like i don't have time to ssh into all these devices and at the time my team lead was shout out to ron ron if you're watching this man i love you bro but he's extremely bright extremely smart from python to powershell you name the language he's automating it and so he kind of introduced me to that miko i was like hey why don't you try this out and so i hopped on greg mueller on youtube and i watched all of his videos which to me he's got the best net mecco training out there and it's free and so when i went through that that got me started and i had that project done in like two days oh my gosh yeah and so that's like part of the story in that same role in 2019 january the government shutdown and so i was a contractor time and the contractor comes like hey we still want to pay you but we can't just let you stay home so we're going to send you the training so they sent me to like a devops training so i i go to this training and i get a devops foundation certification and that right there was what really probably the most valuable cert that i i ever got was in that one training wow that's that's big to say right there yeah why do you think it was so valuable because the skills you learned or you mean in the market like what that skill pays just in the market at the time like yeah and not saying there's more value but in ccna and ccnp like ccna hands down that's upper extra line for my career that is what started wrong okay okay the ccnp got me paid but learning devops changed everything hmm okay so so were you about the first opportunity to do that kind of training like the devops stuff or or did when they presented it to you was that when you were like oh well yeah like you just kind of turned on the light bulb on i had no clue it was a free training i just went right right you got to go to training if you want to keep getting paid right that's what they said like you're shutting the government down yeah and i'm so i'll take whatever training you want me to yeah i'm like okay three ways what is this devops um feedback loops what i don't know it's cool i'll figure it out and that's that's kind of a neat example too i don't want to say like you know lemons and making lemonade but like you're a contractor i guess right the government shuts down that could have been a great feeling with a family you're supporting like you probably think you're going to stop getting paid right you know what man it's funny how my life works out when before the shutdown happened i was already trying to get like a network a senior network engineer position with um cerner and so i think it was before christmas they offered me the position so i was getting the i was getting a position but they had a hiring freeze so government shutdown i know i got another job during the hiring freeze and i just kind of had to wait it out which it all kind of worked out because if i would serve center i would have never got the devops training and that's what i mean like it works out at the time you're going through stuff right it's like damn this this isn't good but i mean that class set you up probably for you know all this automation you know devops stuff i wanted to ask you real quick before we we move on so like a developer advocate as you're talking i had to look up what a developer is i mean that's my that's that's my starting point right so so does that mean like like a coder a programmer is that what a developer is just another name for that coding is at the foundation when you think of developer advocate now what language it is that's up to you you know for me is python is my language but coding is at the foundation of a developer advocate and then devops builds on top of that and from there if you understand that then you could be a developer advocate probably anywhere so are you going in the company like do developer advocates go in so let's say you were in your you know you're in real role now and the dejuan of 2018 he's got 300 sites he's got to update an snmp are you presenting them like hey you could automate this quick like i'm going to show you some python i mean are you bringing tools to them to show them how devops can streamline and make them more efficient are you saying as a developer advocate yes developer advocate like what's what's the job like what do you so what are you doing for them or for you know what i mean you pick you kind of pick your medium okay whether you want to be on social media as far as youtube um writing blog posts going to different talks going to conferences right delivering talks whether it be on network automation whether it be on a vendor tool set that you learned and how it can automate um pgp or anything like that so you you you kind of forecast let's say for the next three months or six months how your workflow is going to be how much content what are your deliverables going to be you know and then you have metrics on your deliverables you know to say okay i'm going to write a blog post on this it got this many views it's reaching these customers and now once you start writing that content once you start developing that content and going to them talks you're also engaging with the customer to get that feedback to go back to the business unit to say hey we have this tool or that where the customer is saying they haven't seen this problems or the customer is saying that they see this need in their in their um organizations and so the bu will say well we can either update our tool create a new tool and deliver it that and then once it's kind of like a continuous loop of getting feedback putting our content bringing back feedback and then delivering more content on the new um items that are released hey a1 fans aj here for an ally you ever heard of net ally sure you have they came from the same group of engineers that brought us network tools from fluke networks netscout and now their net ally they know networking i'm a network engineer for a partner and when i go to customers and see they use netaly i know it's going to be so much easier to troubleshoot issues we might run into the name may have changed in an ally but the way they build tools hasn't changed a bit they ask what would a network engineer want to help make their job faster and easier and then they go build it just like this etherscope nxg net ally is here to help net ally simplicity visibility collaboration visit netally.com today now back to the show now dwan in your experience so far as a developer advocate have you been given kind of free reign to figure out your own path and how you want to reach people and build relationships or have you found it's been structured by the given employer most of the time is it's kind of free reign now you do most employers you go to are going to have some type of like event event event where you got to engage whether it be cisco live or some type of other event that you may have to speak engaged that way but a lot of times you can pick out what talks you want to go to blog posts that you want to deliver and you know you work with your business units if they got a new release coming out you may have to create some content around that and deliver it at a talk or blog post or youtube video or twitch live stream webinar there's so many ways to be um to be an advocate you know some of the some of the top ones is like a kelsey hightower not sure if you follow him but he's a i think he's a principal now at google but he's a well-known developer advocate and if you listen to him talk he's a great storyteller like he's an excellent storyteller and so a lot of that is like i said the empathy in in meeting the customers where they are and helping them solve their problems because network engineering is hard and if you know if i can make your job easier i look it's a struggle so if i can make your job easier you know that's what i want to do now you said the magic words a few minutes ago on cisco live so the last cisco live that was virtual you got the opportunity to to handle it virtually and we i think we all saw some really cool pictures on social media of the behind the scenes of you setting it up was that was that challenging to deliver that it was challenging it was challenging as as ever because like like the day before something i got like a script and so there's certain times you gotta like read certain things and you gotta read the word for word and it's like yeah i don't have this memorized so i had to figure out okay let me put this note card up here to make sure i read this word so yeah gonna need to invest in a teleprompter right there you go if you oh you do okay all right i bought it after the fact no i wanted not to defend hey you live and learn right yeah that's funny do you want before we wander too far away from it um what was the youtube channel that you use for the net meeko training i just want to jot that down and put that in the show notes greg mueller yeah yeah greg mueller yeah i wrote a blog post about it on my website oh okay all right we just grabbed that in the show notes yeah so aj should we go way back in time here and before dawn became mr developer advocate let's get in the time machine and go back and and figure out how duon got into network engineering in the first place yeah what what was the what was the thing that did it for you what was the bug that bet you the bug had bit me like i've been in it since the year 2000 when i joined the air force okay and back when september 11th happened i actually took my first like ccna class i was in okay oh wow yeah and during that time i didn't have a clue what the heck was going on you know i was probably like 19 years old and they're teaching me something that in and it's just going over my head but there was this guy named pat and he um was in the air force he was like one of those i would say system administrator just just does everything he knows sayings he knows windows server he knows networking he knows everything and so i think he had his mcsa and then he got his ccna and a company paid him so much that he got out the military early because they paid him that much money and i was like wow yeah and at that time i'm like yo i want to do that yeah and it's crazy i didn't do it until what 13 years later i didn't get it really get into networking because in the military you know i did um system administration i did some network administration but it's more like monitoring in hp openview and calling on alerts and that's not really network engineering you know if you're working in the knockout there i feel your pain you know that's a tough spot for sure yeah you don't have too much access you're looking at everything you're calling letting people know but you just don't have access so it makes it hard to really understand what's going on now once i got out the military i got i went to desktop support did that for six years and i was i struggled with that like i couldn't figure it out you know i had all this military background um i top secret security clearance and you would assume that when you get out the military you know it's gonna kind of be lined up for you for success in the public sector but it wasn't like that so i ended up going to a boot camp and so in that boot camp i got multiple certifications and one of those searches was the ccna this was in 2013. and so from like 2014 is when i got my first network technician job and the cool thing about that is that it was on like a manufacturing plant ammunition manufacturing plant we had about 40 buildings but it was all flat so all we had was like layer 2 and vtp i got really good at understanding that yeah man imagine a broadcast domain that spans 40 acres like i'd rather not that sounds like a nightmare i i don't i don't want to before you get any further one i don't want to let this go you got your first network technician so getting your foot in the door networking job in 2014 and we're here in essentially the beginning of 2022 and you're on your second developer advocate job 2014 was not that long ago that that's impressive man it's crazy yeah so from 2014 i was the network technician 20 from actually 2013 to 2015 i was a network technician 2016 to 2018 i was a system administrator like i was a knock lee in between there for like three months i hated that like noxious nothing against anybody worse for or not but i'm a real hands-on person i don't really like just monitoring i don't really understand the whole mss the msp model to where i can only do certain things i can't do this can't do that i just want to fix it let me fix it you know so i didn't really enjoy that so i went back to the government was a system administrator and so from 2015 to 2018 i did that and during that time i had my ccna but while i was a system administrator i got my ccnp which was okay hard and so 20 the end of 2017 2018 i started my youtube channel as a system administrator so i was still a system administrator at that time talking about network engineering that's one of the reason i started was because as i was working on my ccna ccnp looking at training there was nobody black that looked like me on social media youtube none of these platforms i was like you know what i want to stay current on my network engineering skills and i want to be a network engineer so i'm going to put out content to help people give back and continue learning and so 2018 i got my first networking engineer role 2019 i got a senior network engineer role and then 2020 i joined cisco as a content engineer became a developer advocate in 2021 and now i'm a senior developer advocate in 2012 that's crazy yeah no i mean no big deal it's easy so when so when did lab every day start 2017 2018 2018 yeah it was 2018 the end of 2017 2018. how did you come up with that i just lab every day i mean it's it's brilliant it's simple everybody knows it and you created it i used to rap and so when i would rap i was in the lab every day and i just applied that same mindset to network engineers we should have let you do the intro and spit man come on what do you want what are you doing next thursday i wanna i wanna jump on that too because andy said that you see that everywhere which you do and i've got kind of a funny story about that so when before i was on the show i was writing for the art network engineering website and one of the first things i wrote i was going through with aj and when we write the articles we throw in you know a tweet as well to go with them to kind of promote the article so i got it ready and aj looks at it he goes you know this is okay but you gotta up your hashtag game here you gotta throw some stuff in there he goes put lab every day in there everybody loves that everybody's gonna see it so dwan i don't know if you found a way yet but if you can monetize those hashtags you wouldn't have to work another day in your life that thing is everywhere you know the monetization thing is funny because i never set out to monetize anything like that was never my goal my goal was to go as far as i can in my career and help people while i'm doing it and so i believe i've been blessed throughout that you know and i there is going to come a point where i won't have to work again um but at that until then i'm gonna keep working and keep learning and keep growing you know because i don't see too many people you know that understand the industry and know how to navigate it and if i can figure that out and then give breadcrumbs along the way that's that's what i want to do and then you know do referrals and get other people in as well and network and build my network and help people i mean that's what i want to do and then once that's done then i won't work this might be a dumb question but have you always had that mindset i mean do you feel like you've had that since growing up that you've always wanted to help people or was that something you picked up along the way when you got into i.t no i always been that way that's awesome you know i i was homeless as a kid you know um yeah i come from a struggle and so i think my struggle just kind of made me understand that there's always going to be someone that has less than you and if you have a little bit more you should give some i love that isn't it amazing how struggle especially when you're young can kind of shape you and and your adulthood and it makes you realize if you've never been homeless as a kid and and i'm not i don't know what your experience was but we we spent about a week homeless as kids me my mom my sister were living in a hotel in atlantic city we had nowhere to go and we wound up sleeping on my grandparents floor for six months until you know my mom could get us somewhere but it those there's a i've heard you say that before and i wasn't going to bring it up here because i don't want to blast you like hey man what's it like to be homeless as a kid like i said asshole thing to ask right but because you brought it up and i had a similar experience at least a little bit it's amazing how that shaped me and how it's changed my i don't know if it's why i work so hard and why i'm always climbing like i never want my kids you know for a lot of different reasons right but i don't want my kids to have to experience some of the things i did and you know i don't know if we're just born wanting to help other people and pull people up but yes having those kind of experiences um definitely shaped me right to uh to want to help people and to make sure that my kids don't experience that and so anyway i just i i'm guessing that that experience shaped your world outlook right and and may might have an impact on your decisions today and yeah is that is that why you're trying to help people because you've seen you know what it's like kind of thing yeah it's like three things so that's one of them um the second one is my struggle from transitioning from the military and being on the help desk for six years and having no clue and not having the resources or the information to figure and navigate this industry you know and the third thing is when i was in afghanistan um my tour over there just kind of changed the way i look at life because you have people that or looks like kids for instance that um live in a situation that would be tough to live in right and they smile every day and they lift you up you know what i mean so for me it's like always be thankful and helpful you can perspective is huge right yeah yep that's it andy it's it's it's it's really everything um anybody can wake up and bitch about you know my coffee's cold or i mean whatever like just nonsense first world problems but then you live through something like that in afghanistan like whoa man like we i know some of the shit i've been through really makes me appreciate what i have today yeah i mean my house is warm i got food on the table my family's safe like really you know what else is there i can complain about anything but you know my my people are good yeah that's and and i want to say i love you know i i can't imagine what that's a couple things you're saying right like i'm amazed you're not the first person i've heard whis comes to mind as somebody who talked about how hard it was transitioning from like military life to private life and i always assumed especially like the air force right that's usually like the smarter people and they you know they get into technical stuff or like so like i would think that all the experience when you get out like you're you were saying earlier you'd be poised and ready and prepared and maybe they'd help you trans i mean how does a guy come out with a top secret clearance and he's like installing ram and laptops i mean i'm guessing and help desk like i'm sure you were doing other stuff but did they not i guess the military doesn't really is there no transitionary thing of like hey i i don't know like it was why was it so tough going from military to private life i guess is what i'm trying to ask i think i got out in 2007 and it's it's gotten a lot better but a lot of it is the lack of resources and the lack of information you know for for me that is i didn't know you know like they have a transition program helps you with your resume excuse me helps you with your resume and kind of guides you and navigate you that way when i got out oh excuse me bless you yeah thank you yeah that kind of guides you and navigates you you know creating your resume and applying for jobs but the thing about the military is that you you work on a lot of proprietary technology and so how do you transition that information and the things that your accomplishment to a technical resume for the public sector to say what you're actually qualified for and so if you don't know how to do that it's going to be hard to say that you more than the things of okay i worked on windows and i worked on windows server and then i worked on this thing i don't have no idea what this is in the public sector but i know i i supported windows and i know i supported some servers so at that point if you're telling your resume like that of course you're not hitting those key words you're not going to get call backs you're only going to get callbacks at the level that your resume is um prepared for yeah you said something else too that you didn't see any anyone black talking about or teaching network engineering and and you wanted to get in that space and start and i've i've always been impr i've been following your channel forever and i've watched almost all the guests you've had and i've really enjoyed everyone you've you've brought on and you know i'm glad that you've been able to do what you've been doing it just it's it's been really nice to see i think i think it's important for everyone to see that there are different folks doing this job right like every most places i've worked have been rooms of like white dudes like in tech and it just i'm not throwing a judgment at it or anything but it's just been my experience in 14 years in tech um and there aren't enough i hate to use underrepresented you know i'm not trying to like virtue signal like but like people that aren't white dudes right i i i think it's important to hear stories of folks like yourself and everybody you've had on your show like this is their story this is where they come from these are their struggles and this is what they're doing now because it's important we need i think to do better in general to include everyone there's plenty of room for all of us and i just appreciate what you've been doing for you know people that could use help from somebody like yourself you have a platform and you have a voice and you have success like thank goodness for people like you who are pulling people along with them you know what i mean because you don't have to do that and it takes time it takes time out of your personal life right you sacrifice time which is our most valuable asset to help tell stories that need to be told right so i just i appreciate that and i think that that's a real solid thing you've been doing with your time so sure thanks um yeah i think when it comes to technology you know i think a lot of it is the information and the opportunity that a lot of people don't know they have um we're all from different backgrounds but if i told you about my background i wasn't allowed to tinker technology wasn't something i was allowed to experiment with as a with as a kid and a lot of my peers were the same way and so getting introduced to technology you really don't get introduced to that until you know you're in your 20s or something like that because you don't even know computer science is a thing in in college because you know okay i'm gonna go to school for business administration or something like that but technology was something that was never introduced and um so my my focus is to really share my experience share the information that i have that i learned about and then also help others do the same because you know if you can't see it you can't be it you know everything that a lot that was created somebody had a vision or they saw it somewhere first and so to be seen is inspiration you know for someone else to be heard is inspiration for someone else you know so i'm i tried my best to just not only you know share my information but use my platform to give other others a voice as well and maybe for somebody younger who's trying to find their way and what do they want to do and you know to see buddy to see someone that looks like them and sounds like them that is doing this thing like you said you didn't have those opportunities as a kid but you know like representation like okay like there's juan and look what he's doing and well maybe i could do that too you know so that's that's that's really solid yeah and you're creating that now right so my partner um kaz shout out to cars but he was the first black ccnp that i knew when i got my ccna um he's the one that inspired me to get the ccmp because it's like oh he did it i can do it too you know what i mean because i've always heard it was hard it's three tests i can't afford it and it's gonna take a lot of work i don't think i can do this but to see him do it and him telling me man you can do it and that right there you know was everything that helped me to get over the hump and put in the work lab every day and get my ccnp yeah and that's been the power of the community too right like at least for me seeing other people like hearing that failure is just sometimes a normal part of this thing and your feelings like oh okay every exam i failed and i felt a lot of them they each made me feel like well i'm not smart enough to do this maybe i don't belong maybe i don't get to you know hang with these people but the power of the community and you know yourself and all these guys and and tech twitter whatever um hearing other people's experiences like we're talking about it it just it helps normalize some of this stuff like all right people fail test no big deal get back up it's going to be all right you know you have people lift you up when you do so it's it's it's been pretty cool i think that's what it takes to be successful in tech you know it isn't about being smart it's about having grit and you know kind of just figuring it out and willing to go however long it takes to figure it out and working with who whoever you need to to get the job done you know what i mean because it's been plenty of times on most teams that i've been on i wasn't the smartest person on the team but nobody would question my work ethic you know what i mean so i think you got to find out in this industry where can you add value because on a team if you look at any network engineering team there's so many different technology areas that you have to support whether it be firewalls whether it be routers whether it be layer 2 switches whether it be data center and so there's a lane for you to find out okay this is what i'm interested in nobody's really want to support this nobody in my industry is really strong on this let me focus on this area right here and let me add value here and then that's how you stand out that's how you grow in my opinion that's been my experience i i have to remember that i'm not watching the show that i'm participating in it this has been such a good conversation um i i want to highlight juan your willingness to to just jump in and help somebody um even personally so it was the end of 2019 no was the end of 2020 i i was actually looking at a developer advocate position at cisco and you had recently started there and i reached out to you to just get some idea of like hey what's cisco like what's the devnet team like and you're like man give me a call we'll talk about this i'm like really like you're gonna take time out of your day to talk to me on the phone like you hardly know you with through twitter so i've always appreciated that conversation you shot real straight with me and it was it was short but it was a great conversation you took the time to answer all of my questions and i can't tell you how much i appreciated that like from the day and it's just it's awesome to see you and it's inspiring to see you do that and and i've tried to pay that forward if if i see somebody struggling with something or they want to know something i'll be like hey let's jump into webex and i'll show you how to do this and you know i've given an ansible demo to so many people because they had questions about ansible and they saw my blog article you know i'm just trying to pass that same mojo forward and i i appreciate you for taking the time to do that for for me for sure for sure i have an automation question real quick so oh boy yeah so i got a question you got kiss now um so was it hard for you to learn automation because i have had a hell of a time let me give you some context i was a computer science major in college for about 15 minutes okay they made me take they made me take programming in c plus and calculus my first semester and both are just beyond my capability and at that point i thought okay i don't get to be in computer science i don't get to be you know i guess i don't get to work with computers because i'm not smart enough so fast forward all these years later i'm a network engineer and you're like automate or die right you're gonna be a dinosaur bro if you don't figure this stuff out so i've been banging my head against it for i don't know two years two two and a half years you know python and ansible and devops and even at work now i'm learning scrum and agile and swimlane i mean just you know software everything software now right like the net like so it seems to me and maybe this isn't this isn't correct but the network is becoming less and less important and it's more like the network is just assumed like man that just better work because you know this is all about the applications we gotta so i i guess the real question is like as a network engineer when you had to start learning programmatic stuff like was it that boot camp and was it hard for you because i've been having a hell of a time i mean i'm getting there but i keep pitching to mona the whole time that it's just it's so far into me and like i get if then statements but man you get me like three four lines of no python script i'm like wait what and what was the variable is that a dictionary no that might be a list is it a parenthesis is it a colon like all that syntax and keeping track of it i'm just not there yet so like was it hard for you or did you just get it like you were just oh this is easy i mean it's hard i don't even know lie okay good but i feel better it helps me it helps me because it's hard for me what makes it hard is taking the traditional route and trying to go through tutorials and learning that way like that's hard look because they're teaching you to do the foundations the basics of python and then you you may build like a a menu or you may do some simple network automation but now it's like okay now what you know you you got this thing that you can do and it's cool but what did you learn from it so what i found is that finding something that you're interested in in automating that like for instance i push this button on my stream deck and it controls the lights i wrote a python script to do that and so really i'm going to take that same code and i'm gonna there's the thing called arduino this um a nano device iot device and i'm gonna make like a little push button remote on this arduino to where all i got to do is use my arduino to push the button to control the lights in in my studio so wait a minute how do you how does a python script control lights in your studio this is what blows my mind like what i mean you wrote a python script and what your stream deck tells your computer to run the script and then the script talks to your ip enabled lights or something yeah so let's break it down you diagram it out my life i'm going to learn today my lights are huge lights so if you like exposing api the api is an ip address that you communicate with with git and post requests right and so from there on on my phone i go through all the settings of the lights that i want and i configure each setting that i want on the lights i send a get request to that ip address to get the settings i store the settings in let's say a variable just to keep it simple right for each one and then i modify my python script to create functions to send a post to that api to say okay i want my lights to be this setting my next my next my next post is to change my light to this setting right and so i package up that that python script just by saving it as an executable and then from there i tell the stream that to say okay every time i push this button run this python script and so every time the python script it goes through if statement to say okay if setting this change it to this if setting this change it to this and etc and that's simple that's like some basic automation now when we think of a network engineers a networking engineering instance when it came to let's say the updating the the um interfaces on or updating the snmp something simple like that taking that miko writing the python script and this was just like a 50 lines of code of logging into the device changing the snmp right mail exp um if if successful exporting it to an excel spreadsheet it failed tell me an excel search spreadsheet if it failed so i could go back and look and see why i felt i got you and so you just find things that you want to automate find problems that you want to automate and go from there and don't don't make it too complicated keep it simple when you said that snmp thing my my last job before juniper they gave me like all right we got i mean i don't know if it was hundreds of divi i forget how many but it's the same thing we need to update the snmp location you know a new standard came out like we gotta change all the and you know me i'm old school notepad bus plus just write them out ssh and i'm like i can't log into 350 devices and do this it'll be impossible and and i was working with a guy on on the python script it was just magical right and even aj he showed me that ansible thing last year he he you know he stood up a whole infrastructure of like 20 routers in like five minutes i'm like whoa that would have taken me a month like what just happened so uh you know i keep chipping away as is all i'm saying and it's it's i appreciate people like you people like aj that you know advocates really for for automation for development like because i need people to remind me like hey you can do it too man like it's it's hard but just chip away and because sometimes i feel like that freshman in college i go i don't know man you know we're back to software development and i failed out of that once how can i do it now 20 years later you know but there's so many resources now and classes yeah people like you and youtube videos and you know sandboxes right and there's just so much out there it's great books got john kappa bianco and eric cho and just so many people in the community that are helping given their time yep so one thing too is a a theme that i've set across a couple of these episodes when we've talked about network automation is for me what has helped me in at least getting somewhat started in it is finding a pain and you know something that's a pain for me in my network that if you have to do it now you have to you know ssh into just multiple devices and do the same exact config over and over again that kind of thing so you hit on that when you when you said you know you had uh would you say was it 3000 devices or something like that 300 devices yeah and uh uh and and but one i didn't even think about and i don't know why i didn't think about this but you just hit it was like something like your lights that that's outside of networking altogether right but it's a fun project that you can do around the house or or you know within your studio there and you still learn how to automate that at the same time so i i didn't even think about that but that doing something like a fun project would you know help with that yeah i'm glad you pointed that out yeah i've done a ton of fun projects like the whole 2020 i automated most of my twitter i wrote i wrote a twitter bot and so it that most of my twitter worked for me um yeah hold on hold on a second this is what i like dan's back on twitter now and now he doesn't even have to do it himself now here i thought juan had been engaging with me on twitter all this time he's talking to the lab everyday he's got he's got canned answers just for andy questions that he knows we're probably talking to a hologram right now with a python script i'm going to get a text from aj being like what the hell was that tweet man what are you talking about you've got something crazy we've got a few questions here duan in the patreon chat um but before we get to that you just mentioned that a lot of those coding projects were just kind of home projects things around the house have you you're a father do you pull your kids into that are they interested in that kind of thing yeah um so with my kids we sat down and we did a couple games together but when we did it i think my son was what six seven yeah he was seven and my daughter was nine and so teaching them python at their level it's hard so yeah and what i mean by that is i'm 33 years old i can't figure it out i'm a grown-ass man duane they're visuals so if we're doing um things in command line to show them executing and we're doing little math games and stuff like that they're like oh that's cool but they get bored and so what i did was i enrolled them in this program called code ninjas and so they they have this program in there called um what is it called scratch i believe it's called scratch and so it's like this series of puzzles that are if statements to kind of keep teach kids the concept of coding but at a way they can understand it so let's say you want to create a game you take these if statements and you take these little puzzles if this this that then the butt the palm ball will start bouncing on the screen you know what i mean so i wrote them in there so they can kind of learn coding from that but i moved on for that because i'm really focused on the education so right now i got them in tutoring for like math and english well math and reading whatever so okay mainly focus on that in sports and all that stuff gotcha awesome thank you i'm going to check out code ninjas from my channel yep yes let's go over to the uh to the patreon chat here we've got a three-parter here from smiling chris and traffic network and it goes like so what's your favorite technology that's out there now what's your favorite legacy technology and what do you think is the most exciting thing coming up that's that's a tough that's a tough tough question because there's so much you know before in my last network engineering role i was really excited about data center technology um i was also excited about palos and panorama and all that um and just network engineering as far as like enterprise and adrena and um service provider networks but right now i would say it would be the cloud that would be the most exciting thing for me just because it's so new to me you know what i mean and when you think about how hard network engineering is and now we're extending this into from your own premises to the cloud and we're talking about vpcs and where transit gateways and all of this and everything is just different you know what i mean so that's the most exciting thing for me and seeing how this will evolve okay are we going to keep our own premises or are we just going to have cloud everybody's going to be in the cloud and then when you think about that it's like okay we're spinning up ec tools but wait this we have these serverless applications that are just instances you know spins up does the job and it's gone it's not even a you know ec2 so that that's exciting to me and then when you when you break down these vpcs and how developers are developing in the cloud and how network engineers have to support their own premises the cloud monitor all these networks think about the security it's complex it's hard and i'm excited yeah nice i love it it is complex and it is hard i can tell you that the place that i just came from or in multi-cloud and on-prem and man it's a lot you know when something doesn't work you're like dear god where do i look like what doesn't work and where and uh you know the cl i mean so the speed of the cloud is amazing i've told this story before but when covet hit nobody could get on the vpn everybody went home we were not set up for that on-prem and overnight they worked with the cloud provider and got all of it spun up overnight and we never had another problem with vpn i mean it would have taken us forever to order all that gear and upgrade the cert you know blah blah like all the it takes forever to do stuff on prem i feel like and so that speed man is like you know you know you could just spin something up instantly the the serverless like like you said but but it's not i didn't find it to be simple i i thought and each provider you know they have their own terms they do their own thing they got their own it's it's pretty intense it's super awesome but we need people like you to like help us navigate that right because it's not easy i didn't find it to be easy i'm still learning like yeah this is all new to me too so we're all learning together and that's like the exciting thing because um i love network engineering like i'm really passionate about network engineering but we're in this we're in this the pandemic has changed the dynamics of being a network engineer like it is really changed on how we move forward in my opinion absolutely yeah yeah so dewan you touched on emerging technologies and and you're you're a mentor so let's put on your mentor hat for a minute i need i need a volunteer from the from the co-host panel here who can we pick on oh boy oh boy you can pick me aj aj talk first okay yeah so dwan aj is is brand new let's say he's he's just thinking about getting into i.t does he does this was a scenario even though i'm sorry i'm not trying to hit close to homie no hate aj can knock me out of the water any day technically so aj's just starting out he wants to dabble in i.t he doesn't know where to start what would your advice be to aj so this is a tough one because the foundation of everything we talked about whether it be on premises in the cloud wherever you're developing whatever you're doing is networking right the foundation of every tool we use is networking we wouldn't be doing this live stream if it wasn't for networking so i think understanding um tcp understanding dns understanding dhcp understanding like the principles of the why of how we communicate in ports and services is important but i also think learning the code is something that like spans the length of time you know because you got developers that's been around forever you know that you got cobalt developers that are probably making the most money in the industry right now yes yes so i i think um learning to code if you're really passionate about that is important i think it's going to be even more prevalent as we move forward throughout you know the next five years but it's all about what you really want to do so i would ask some questions about what you're interested in and then help you navigate to where you can land a role in i.t now when we talk about lending a roll i used to say certifications is the role but me as a mentor i have a lot of resources and connections and so if you're willing to put in the work let's say you get the a plus or the ccna or you're just working towards you've been working really hard um sometimes that's enough to get you to interview and then through relationships at that point you know somebody will give you an opportunity you know it's been so many times just by sharing somebody's interested in tech on linkedin that they've landed jobs just by me sharing on on linkedin you know i got i got a guy right now he's got his um he he was working on his a plus and i'm like man if you want to get to ccna just work on the ccna you know he was like in a call center or something and so he started working on this ccna and then i'm like well let's apply for jobs now so you can get you know get some experience interviewing to see what that's like and um when he gave me his list of jobs i had him pick out 25 jobs that he was interested in in the local area et cetera so he cannot start understanding only job titles but job descriptions and understand what tech jobs look like and we kind of talked about it and so one of the jobs that he um he was going to apply for i knew the hiring manager so i'm like you know what let me reach out to this hiring manager since it's an entry-level position and see if we can get your opportunity i reached out to the hiring manager connected normally then he got hired and so i think in this industry right now people are not as introverted when it comes to helping people get opportunities and i think hindering yourself by thinking okay duane says get certifications take this route get this job get this entry-level job and become a network engineer that's not the same path for everybody you know there's a million different opportunities so i would really focus on what they're interested in and then seeing how i can help them in that direction so i my question wasn't uh wasn't a right or wrong type question but you answered it correctly um and for a couple reasons i i i really appreciate and i think we all do here because we we've all got network backgrounds but the first part of your answer was recommending that people have at least a broad understanding of networks because i know on the enterprise side we constantly sit in meetings we're constantly pulled into projects because we're the highway right we build the highway we connect the applications so we build that not only that network knowledge but we build the business knowledge because we're constantly being brought into that so you don't only you don't only learn networking but you learn about the different applications you learn about the business itself as is being a network person so i really appreciated that and then also the the fact that that you said you ask questions and listen you really want to know what the person's interested in to kind of guide them on the right path and then you use the tools that you already have the relationships that you've already built to go the extra mile for the people that are putting in that extra mile to help themselves so that that i love it that's awesome thank you i want to piggyback off tim real quick and ask you an unfair question dewan so i apologize up front oh boy well no it's almost like the physical verse virtual lab question but it's not right so i i saw some i saw the idea of that person that's getting started out like tim had mentioned and it's always been ccna i mean for the 10 years i've been around and i kind of sensed a shift in some of the answers when people ask that replaced by devnet associate so the unfair question and i think you might have answered it in your last answer but you know if you want to get started out let's pretend we're not going to ask them what their interests are like these people need a job and you know and they'll do anything um do you think going because everything's going programmatic you know do you still start with ccna to get the foundational network knowledge and then go for devnet associate because you have to learn the programmatic stuff today is devnet associate enough maybe to get like a job in i.t i don't know if it's a fair question to ask but is the devnet associate gaining traction as a great entry-level i.t cert to get a job you know similar to ccna has been forever yeah i can't answer that part but what i can answer is that when you look at this ccna 80 of it is focused on networking 20 of it is focused on automation right devnet 20 is networking 80 is automation it's flipped right so i mentioned before the foundation is networking yeah and so you can't automate what you don't understand and if if i'm never going to tell anybody what to do but i think the ccna is still you know the route that i would take personally because you know getting that foundation and networking is going to carry you way longer in your career you know regardless of the the way ap apis are presented regardless of the tools that are out there the foundation of networking to this day is still ringing true i mean i took my first ipv6 class like in 2004 you know what i mean we're still dealing with ipv4 so are we ever going to go to v6 though yeah i mean we're using it it's in use but it's not you know ip ipv4 i think just because of the inherent security of private you know private networks is it's going to be around in our i think i think the last time i checked with 35 global adoption of v6 standards been around decades like i don't know what it's going to take global adoption okay so does that mean um dual stack or does that mean totally ipv6 that's a good that's a good fair question that's a good point to bring up hey hey a1 fans aj here to remind you about nordvpn.com nordvpn will help secure you wherever you go i use nordvpn on all my personal devices whenever i'm out about i just go into the nordvpn app hit quick connect and away i go nice and secure don't have to worry about prying eyes anybody looking at my connection if i choose to go work from a coffee shop locally or you know even while i'm traveling if i bring my personal device devices i will use new vpn to help keep things safe and secure i'm using nordvpn right now and there's no degradation in my signal everything looks good when you guys watch us on the live streams so i i can't say enough good things about nordvpn they have some great additional services included with their vpn product they'll scour the dark web for your credentials and see if they've been involved in any sort of hacks or anything and then if they have they'll let you know and you can go change your passwords and do whatever you need to do to help keep yourself safe and secure they also have a mode that will block any websites or ads known to possess malware and they just have general ad blocking anyway because you know who wants ads uh as i record an ad anyway if you want nordvpn and you do go to nordvpn.com forward slash t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and you can get a really great deal 73 off two years plus four months free so again that's 73 off two years plus four months free of nordvpn if you forget that url just go to nordvpn.com at checkout you can use the promo code t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and we appreciate your support as well as nordvpn's support of the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show i i want to kind of piggyback off a point you you made earlier uh duane and i think something that i've noticed since i started blogging and interacting with folks on twitter it seems like there's somebody out there looking for someone just like you and if you don't put yourself out there and kind of make it known to the world what your intentions are they're never going to find you and you're never going to find them right because i i look at a lot of people within our community and you know i've i've seen them take much bigger steps than i've taken just in an even shorter time and and chris randle comes to mind right like he's he's only really been on the social media scene for like the last year year and a half and he has made some killer moves just by stating to the world i'm i'm trying to change careers i want to learn this i want to learn that or i'm actively learning this or i'm actively learning that and so i that's some of the biggest advice i give to people is just put your journey out there share with the world what you're doing somebody else is learning just like you and maybe you're going to put something out there that helps them you know learn something they're trying to learn so not that we need more content creators competing in this there no i'm just kidding there's no competition no no no i'm not yeah absolutely not and so when you talk about putting your content out there inherently it's like an online like resume that has like passive like dividends on your career um so if you're learning towards your ccna the when you apply for these jobs the thing that may help get you over that hump is the fact that they actually can see your technical chops from you putting content online you know or sharing on linkedin or having your own blog blog post that means you're you just are a little bit more serious about your career and they may trust you a little bit more or they're just interested to help you grow you know what i mean but if somebody is just submitting a resume all they see is a resume right right whereas like the blog is like a much more detailed version of your resume you know it's one thing to sit there and say i can communicate with my peers but it's another thing to put out a blog post you know describing how you tackled an issue and how you you know how you you know solved the problem right and aj i i think it's that combined with just a hiring manager knowing that you're you were willing to put in the time to do that i think that's i equate the same thing to certification so certifications show that you were able to obtain and retain this knowledge to be able to pass the test but we know that and especially cisco certifications is that these blueprints are massive and there's a lot of things that you need to go through and make sure that you understand and that takes time and effort so i think it's not only just the certification or just the content you're putting out but the fact that you're taking it serious enough to put the time in because times i mean andy's talked about it all the time time is the most valuable thing that we have and the fact that you're willing to do that i think speaks volumes to a lot of people i want to play devil's advocate uh-oh i used to think the same way when it comes to time but what i found is that the most valuable thing that we have is our energy oh that's a new one and the reason why i say that is like we can't control time things happens in our life but when we place our energy we can control that and so when you're working on these certifications and when you're trying to learn and you're trying to grow your career you really have to focus on where you put your energy you know because you may manage your time all day but some of those things that you are giving your time to you probably shouldn't yeah you know what i mean yeah yeah that and that's that's something the level of yeah sorry go ahead right that's kind of what you're getting at right what's that again there uh so are you saying like the the level of effort that you give towards like you can like if you took an hour of your time to go over a python class right but you didn't put a lot of effort into it so you didn't get much out of it is that is that kind of the path that you're going down there that's kind of kind of it's more so uh let's say you manage your day off uh let's say you manage your day like let's say you you manage from 8 a.m to 8 p.m you wake up you get ready for work how many times are you checking your email how many times are you replying it to twitter how many times are you doing whatever that's not helping you on your day because if you look at twitter and you put your energy in that you may see a post that just messes up your whole day or somebody may reach out to you and it just messes up your whole day or whatever may happen right so putting your energy there can be detrimental it may took a few seconds but it lasts 30 minutes an hour or eight hours in your whole day so it's all about where do you put your energy and be incontinent deep work thinking about it really thinking about how you apply your energy in your life and then managing that appropriately that's i like that i like that a lot because that's something that i've tried to change how i think about things in the last couple years because before i'd always say i mean what's the most what's the easiest phrase to say if you don't want to do something oh i don't have the time for that so what what i've tried to kind of flip it in the last couple years is rather than saying i don't have time for that i'll say i'm not willing to put the energy or the time into that because of other things so yeah i really like that the the where you put the energy is even more important than the time you're putting in i like that a lot dawn the energy the focus the attention right it's all where you're spending your time too i think they're a little bit related and cal newport that's such a good book because if i ever tallied up all the time i've just burnt doom scrolling twitter or you know looking up whoever owned facebook just all the nonsense right like trying to get the oh look somebody like my somebody like my barbecue rib picture yay like you know it makes me feel good for a second but i'd probably be a triple ccie by now if i dedicated that attention to something that had a better return on investment than just helping the social media platforms drive up their you know advertising price because they got more of my attention man dandy can you say that andy what can you say that word anymore which word ccie dan what you said a second ago i i am uh patiently anticipating uh the start of andy's tick tock oh yeah it's gonna be a beautiful thing after talking to dwan i think it might be deleted the hell is a tick-tock a talk tick i know tick tock man i check out she network she's the bomb i might go delete all of my social media stuff cause every time i circle back to this and i i'll i'll check out cal newport this book sitting right over there and then i see it behind juan i'm like man it just holds me accountable like i waste so much of my time on i lie to myself and tell myself i'm promoting the podcast or like oh you know i got to be on there because i got to promote episodes but i don't think it would make it then if i disappeared off of social media i think we do just fine man you know i think if i would have never started social media i would be a ccie right now that's what i'm saying or a jncie like i literally got my ccnp as a system administrator working yeah you know what i mean not even doing network engineering i got my ccnp yeah so i think and i do my best to really focus and live every day but when you're on social media there's so many distractions of the things you should learn learn this right now do this right now you know this is the latest technology and it looks really cool and sometimes we get baited in and then we get down these rabbit holes like yo i should learn python but we're not even doing that on our jobs you know what i mean so it's one of them things to where when i worked in my last network engineering role i literally had to say you know what i'm gonna talk to my manager and i'm gonna split up my time 50 50. i'm gonna do 50 automation in the day and i'm gonna do 50 network engineering and i'm a block off my calendar i literally had to tell my manager that and they were okay with that once i once i gave them the blueprint of what i was going to do so my day was broken up to 50 network automation 50 operations and then somehow i was still managing projects in there but i didn't take it away from network automation because that was the most important thing for me and i knew where i had the most impact on the organization gotcha that's huge that they gave you the bandwidth to dedicate to that because it it's easy to say hey everybody learn automation at work but if you got people doing 12 hours of work and an eight hour work day when are they supposed to do that so it's it's yeah that's huge from the org that's all it's it's big operations is totally right operations can be brutal like it can be brute too but at some point you have to say no right yep i think i think the blocking out your calendar might be the best in that scenario but but like you were saying earlier wha what what was the number you gave like you were saying you get like 30 tickets a day or something like that uh when you have stuff like that going on and then and then you had to update 300 devices on snmp and whatnot it's so hard to justify or well it's so it's so hard for me to justify to myself that it's like all right i'm going to take this hour hour and a half to just tinker with some of this automation you know learning something that's specific to my job role but if someone starts you know hitting me and see nowadays like it's worse because we have you know like like teams or you know whatever people use slack or anything like that but the instant messaging right because you know back in the day when it was just mostly email you can push emails off a little bit you know what i mean you can kind of like let those build up a buffer a little bit but when it starts coming to instant message and they can see that you're online and that you're available and that you're active it's harder to push those back a little bit uh but so what i'm getting at is it was it's hard for me i struggle with this at work to block off that amount of time to tinker with something when i have stuff pinging me and like hey we have this issue or hey can you make this change for me because i'm stuck on whatever i'm doing until you make that change uh it's hard for me to block that out and feel like you know well i'm doing this for the better of the company does that make sense okay all right it does stan are you so hard are you becoming a grumpy old man you said back in my day before it and all these instant messages but now today with these kids and their ims and teams and what just happened to you get off my phone i don't know you're rubbing off on me so there's a couple ways to approach this now some organizations if they're not that large um if they're small and you are like the only network engineer then those burn people out you know what i mean let's be honest though those those type of operations sorry those type of operations where you don't have any support you can't take any days off those can burn people out but if you are an organization to where there are other engineers out there one of the best things you could do is ensure that that everyone trusts everyone on the team you know what i mean and that can be done through training that could be done through you know different outings or whatever you need to do to build that trust but building that trust on a team will help understand everybody's strengths and then the workloads because of course you're gonna have the engineer that everybody goes to but what would happen if you said no or what happened if you didn't reply would you get fired or would somebody else oh okay no i'm saying would you get fired with somebody else do it would they reach out to somebody else yeah i think eventually they're going to reach out to somebody else right i don't think i get fired for it right especially if you communicate with your manager say hey you know um i want to focus on this task and i want to work on operations but this will add a ton of value to the organization if i can just complete this project or if i could just learn this automation so let me block off this time in my calendar to work out with your manager understand your team everybody in your team may not like it and that's okay because at this you're trying to help the same and you're trying to help the organization and that's why i said you can bring in training because at that point if you're learning automation you can invite your team to be a part of your journey and everybody grow together but everybody's not going to take want to take that route and that's okay too so communicate with your manager to say hey 20 of my time i'm going to block out let's say on thursdays from from noon to the rest of the day i'm gonna focus on this if it's not a severity one then i'm gonna focus on this and okay your manager may say no and that's okay too so then you gotta be creative do you come in early do you stay late or do you just not respond to those to those ielts because you're not what if you're working on somebody else something else how do they know that you are right there and can respond right now how do they honestly know that right i guess they don't yeah i i shut my teams down like i shut all that down when i'm doing deep work i have to because i will respond to every i am because i don't know if our brains are wired for that and that's why all this stuff is so distracting but as soon as i see a light or a ping or a ding i'm like oh somebody needs me and your point duane like they can wait it's not that important like i'm not that important right but there's something about that pull that draw like oh i gotta get like even working from home right when i went remote i really felt the need to like oh i better respond to ims real quick because they won't think i'm working and i want them to let me work from home you just like pre-code it um but but but yeah and you got to defend your calendar too like you said if you're blocking time out because i've been guilty of that as well i i talked to my boss last job and you know hey you know every tuesday from one to three i'm going to work on such and such stuff would get booked other calls would come in or i would just try to catch up on other projects and i never studied for that thing i was supposed to because i wouldn't defend my calendar and i didn't prioritize you know it takes discipline like tonight it comes to mind like you got to have discipline and do the things you don't want to do and say no to yourself and and that's not easy sometimes man i'm gonna tell you our story i'm gonna be totally honest my first senior network engineer role i thought i was ready i thought i had it all figured out the one of my first outages that i had um there was a router had intermittent traffic right and so i'm troubleshooting and i'm not seeing anything going on i'm not seeing nothing no acl hits i'm not seeing anything in the logs the only thing i'm saying is um an issue with the router there's some type of bug in this router this code and it's oh it's the old routers in the life right so my idea was let's just let's replace the router let's get a new router out there right well i was just trying to do something to get something done it turned out to be an acl that was being hit i just didn't see it right router didn't need to be replaced that was that was a huge mistake on my part and it cost you know a couple days of although we had traffic on one side we didn't have traffic on this other side but what i learned from that after talking to the architect he was like you know the difference between a engineer and a senior level engineer is that senior level engineers respond entry-level and like level two engineer network engineers that react you know there's something going on with the network the interface is bouncing well let's start no shutting the ports let's start bouncing the ports let's start doing all this without asking questions without doing all the research and all the things you that and so when it comes to being a senior level engineer in your organization you're in control of that you decide how you're going to respond because they trust you to know how to handle and manage the infrastructure and so you really have to approach your job to say okay these are the priorities that are important to the business and so if your priorities on your role are in line with that you're in communication with your manager and your team from that point you just block off your calendar respond however you need to right yeah i think that would be a discussion that we need to do in the future sometime what the difference between like an you know an associate or you know junior or something like that versus a senior um do a little bit deeper dive on that and i don't know if it's the same for everybody but it's hard for me when things break and it always has been even when i had seen here in my title um to slow down and work the problem and stay calm because like you're saying duan you want to do something right the building's burning down there's a bridge executives want it fixed people are losing money well shit i got to do something and that's not you know majority of the time you got to slow down you gotta like the the real the real heavy hitters that i've i've had the pleasure of working with over my career they they seem to just do the same thing every time they know what to check they have a checklist they go through it they're calm when people are freaking on the bridge and it's something i've always tried to work on is is to stay calm in an outage because if you're not calm you're going to miss stuff and you might react because you just want to do something at least to show that you're trying you know and it's that's that's rare in my experience that's rarely been the right thing like just need to slow down and be calm and i don't really know how to do that when you're surrounded by chaos i don't know if it's a personality thing or if that's a skill you know you got to manage that chaos yeah you're right you got to manage the chaos i mean it's tough it's hard but i think experience is a great teacher to learn how to manage that chaos the more you are in the fire and that's another thing about network engineering there's a lot of there's a lot of times you will work on a team and um people cherry picked tickets right that that's like really a thing and so the ones that dive into the fire are the ones people go to so if you really want to go as a network engineer you got to lean into the fire when i started at the comcast knock it was terrifying and i had no idea what i was doing and i had been a cable guy previous to that and i'm like oh my god i'm in over my head so the first few months i avoided the fire because i'm like i don't know what that is i've never seen that and then my buddy monsoor i worked next to he kind of was like yo bro you you you need to if if something scares you here you need to just jump in because you're always going to be scared of something here it's a huge network and and that really changed my perspective and my success there i just started jumping into anything no matter how hot it was 300 alarms coming spectrum you know there's people who'll be like oh i got to go to bathroom like you said like i'm not going in that but the more i jumped in the fire the less scared i was of the fire like okay this is just you know you can't sit at a knock where your job is to fix stuff and be afraid when stuff breaks but i was and you're right that experience and having a senior guy next to me just guide me along like here's what you need to do man i used to be like you all right that really helped you know man i used to be scared like terrified to do like acls on like an edge device like terrified i would put it in the wrong direction and i let the entire internet into the organization like i used to be so terrified of that but i mean you lean the turtle fire you figure it out you lab it up at home you talk you talk to senior level engineers you draw it up on a white board you do everything you can to learn it to feel that pain make mistakes learn from them and grow it's hard to be new right like you're doing everything for the first time and studying something or taking an exam is a hell of a lot different than sitting in prod pushing the button like damn i mean i think this should work and i talked to somebody about it but it's it's hard to be new because everything you touch you could break stuff you know and that's that's terrifying it was for me at least the first big job i did dwan i i broke a tunnel i overrode a tunnel policy to a big financial client up in manhattan and you know the bitch of it i didn't know tunnels had 24-hour timers at least these did so i overwrote this policy and when the tunnel tried to renegotiate 24 hours later it broke and they were hard down and everybody's screaming i sat next to the knock and everybody's scrambling and saying like yo you're the last to touch us i think this might have been you i'm like yo that was yesterday man that can't be me because i had no idea that you could make a config change and have a 24-hour grenade waiting for you you know it it's the stuff you learn when you're new yeah yeah it's tough to be new man unfortunately i had good leadership they protected me people were pissed their ceo golf with our ceo and it got bad but leadership protected me i was a contractor with a six-month-old baby at home that took a risk you know and they protected me so that's that's huge too right not that we're talking about that but when you're gonna take that first job and you're not really sure how to do the job and somebody gives you a chance if there's any way to vet the culture there that are they gonna you're gonna break something are they gonna protect you and shield you when you do because they could have easily been like oh man it's that new idiot man he's out it wasn't us it's cool you know to protect themselves from the fire it happens man i think it's happened to everybody where you make a huge mistake and or you miss something that you shouldn't have missed it happens nobody's perfect and i think that's one of the major needs for automation is to you know kind of make our jobs a little easier as a network engineer because it can be really challenging you know fat fingering configurations there's some byte code in your notepad as you copy it over to a router breaks your whole configuration like i mean there's there's so much that can happen you know in this being a network engineer and mistakes are i don't want to say common but they happen to all of us that first time you edit a triple a config and lock yourself out of a remote device yeah and your butt is like did you really reload in ten i'm like what's that you know i think it's one thing to have that kind of like fear nervousness anxiousness whatever about uh you know making a change learning something new but it's it's what you do with that energy right like you kind of spoke to that before like if you use that energy and put it into labbing something every day or or trying to practice the scenario make sure you're covering all your basis like no one's going to fault you if you still screw up in the end you you tried to do your best and that's all anybody can ever ask for yeah i mean we'd like all right we uh we got probably the most important question of the evening from chris what is your favorite outcast track southern playalistic there you go chris cada like funky music what do you do for fun i know i know we're getting probably toward the end you're going to get tired of it soon and be like all right guys but you know we all know you from your career and and your amazing climb and all your contributions and how you help people like what does dwan do when he's not developer advocating and and networking and you still rap nah i don't rap i don't do you know what for the longest i stopped having fun like to be honest with you like my life got real depressing because all i was doing was lagging and like i love helping people but at some point when you're pouring out your cup your cup gets empty you know what i mean and so i think over the pandemic it really helped me realize that because in 2020 i was working for a hospital well uh a tech company that supported hospitals right and when hospitals were expanding their infrastructures adding vp vpn concentrators and all that i was the engineer engineered i was standing up a lot of these networks and so i was working from like 5am to like 7 00 p.m every day because i didn't have nothing else to do i would just work do my job do projects and cold and that was pretty much my day and then i try to make youtube videos or whatever and then like that summer of 2020 my grandmother passed away and that really put me like in a real depressing like state and it's crazy because a couple of months later i got hired by cisco and you would have thought i would have been extremely happy but i was really like empty on the inside for months and it kind of helped me realize that i really wasn't doing anything to like be happy you know that outside of tech and i think as people it's easy to pour everything you got in tech because you want to advance your career you want to provide for your family but you still got to be human you still got to have fun and so i think i i try to just take a step back and really spend more time with my kids appreciate them be thankful for life and um hey just find things that i like like i'm simple man i don't need much and so if i can just like find a coding project i'll be happy if i can do something creative paint with my daughters or you know go somewhere with my son play some sports i'm good yeah that that self-care is important whatever it looks like you know to be tech will will eat you up and spit you out it did for me and i i had a legit i mean i you know not a nervous breakdown but i burn out hard around 20 20. you know i know a lot of people that's why we did that mental health episode a while back because people were just suffering and and and i think people like i think you would alluded to kind of had that experience of it was almost like a life reset you kind of had to step back and look at your life like you know am i happy am i doing what i want what do i want to change and it's it's been i mean i think that's a good thing if anything good came out all this you know mess um at least it made us kind of re-evaluate because like you said you just want to climb and and build your career and make more money and you know help you know earn for your family you know whatever it is and uh yeah i mean there was a point i was working the same thing man like way too many hours every day and neglecting the family neglecting myself there was no more you know taking care of me and doing fun things and you we are human and we need a balance you can't just work and study and lab and create content all day for months and then you know feel good yeah it's tough i mean it's tough that's why i said you know i admire y'all because y'all can do this all together y'all can build with each other and you know lean on each other while you're creating content and i'm doing what you're doing so you know i do admire that thank you it's nice having a team you know we can we can share the load it would have been a hell of a lot harder if it was just me talking to duan you know tim comes up with something funny aj says something we kind of yeah it's it's nice which is why i have so much respect for you that you've basically done lab every day you know youtube all by yourself hugely successful so inspirational and um it's just been amazing that it's been a one-man show so good on you i've been a fan a long time and i really appreciate you coming on thanks yeah i think you know my platform has been a lot of me but a lot of you know my my the community growth has been the community you know whether it's been a like with me involved or not i think just because the nature of being in tech people understand how much works it takes how much work it takes and a lab every day resonates you know with the community so i think a lot of most of that is from just people wanting to you know just be a part and uh help others grow you know so i love it i love it i think that's a great point to start uh winding this one down dwan thank you very much for joining us is there anything that we didn't ask about or or talk about tonight that you want to mention before we sign off no just um thank you for you know having me on you all's platform in in podcast keep doing what you are doing you know talking about network engineer and how hot and how fun it is how exciting it is how hard it is is um something that's inspiring not only to engineers in the industry but engineers that are our future engineers as well so salute thank you thank you very much and for it for anybody that's on our platform that's uh maybe hearing you for the first time where can people find you lab every day on twitter youtube my website libraryday.com and yeah instagram and the one i like for it on linkedin as well all right i i need i need a lab every day aj can you get a get a twitter poll going actually wait never mind that's a terrible idea let's not listen last time we did that we came up with a name for our goat and it just went off the rails dan dan got a good twitter name out of it though good twitter yeah i'm happy with it yeah i don't think i'm gonna have that same luck daniel yeah right you never know i trusted the internet and it treated me nicely i can't do that with everything well again duane thank you so much for joining us uh shout out to our patreons for hanging with us tonight if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge and we'll see you back next week for another episode of the art of network engineering podcast hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you