Short Take: Time Management

18 September 2018 | Comments Off on Short Take: Time Management

Think Like an Engineer, not a Cheerleader

10 September 2018 |

When you see a chart like this— —you probably think if I were staking my career on technologies, I would want to jump from the older technology to the new just at the point where that adoption curve starts to really drive upward. Over at ACM Queue, Peter J. Denning has an article up on…

Site Reliability Engineering at the Network Collective

19 July 2018 | Comments Off on Site Reliability Engineering at the Network Collective

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role often seems a bit mysterious to folks working at smaller and mid-sized companies, where the team isn’t large enough to separate into SRE, operations, and other teams. What does and SRE do, and how is it different from what the average network engineer does? In this Network Collective Off…

Thoughts on Impostor Syndrome

17 July 2018 |

How many times, on reading my blog, a book, or watching some video of mine over these many years (the first article I remember writing that was publicly available, many years ago, was the EIGRP white paper on Cisco Online, somewhere in 1997), have you thought—here is an engineer who has it all together, who…

Short Take: Practical Career Advice

12 June 2018 | Comments Off on Short Take: Practical Career Advice

One problem I’ve heard in the past is that much of the career advice given in the networking world is not practical. In this short take, I take this problem on, explaining why it might be more practical than it initially seems.

Short Take: Telecommuting

16 May 2018 | Comments Off on Short Take: Telecommuting

The Network Collective One Year Anniversary Show: War Stories

19 April 2018 | Comments Off on The Network Collective One Year Anniversary Show: War Stories

Engineering versus Metaengineering

2 March 2018 | Comments Off on Engineering versus Metaengineering

In my latest short take over at the Network Collective, I explain the difference between engineering and metaengineering.

Reaction: Billing by the Hour

26 February 2018 | Comments Off on Reaction: Billing by the Hour

A very common mistake I see among engineers of all stripes is a failure to fully appreciate the value of time—both what it is worth, and how to make your time more valuable. What I normally see is something like this—I should be making $x/hour, because I have this specific experience, or that specific skill…

Reaction: The Pace of Innovation

12 February 2018 |

Dave Ward has an excellent article over at the Cisco blog on the three year journey since he started down the path of trying to work the standards landscape (called SDOs) to improve the many ways in which these organizations are broken. Specifically, he has been trying to connect the open source and open standards…