Hedge 222: Get out there and publish!
Eric Chou joins Tom and Russ to talk about the importance of creating content, and the many tools and ideas you can use to get out there and publish. You’ve heard us talk about this a lot–now it’s time to get out there and publish.
New Course: Coding Skills for Network Engineers
This Friday, Marlon Bailey and I will be teaching a new four-hour class on coding skills for network engineers over on Safari Books Online through Pearson. From the course description:
Network engineers are increasingly expected to know how to perform basic coding, like building scripts to gather information and build or maintain an automation system. In larger organizations with full-time coders, network engineers are expected to effectively work with coders, on their own turf, to build and maintain network automation systems. All of these tasks require a basic knowledge of the structure and terminology of programming. There are a lot of courses that show you how to build your first program, or how to perform basic tasks using common programming languages—this course is different. This course will help you build a “mental map” of the software development space, gathering ideas and patterns learned across years into a simple-to-understand format. In this course you will learn data structures, program flow control, and—most importantly—how to structure software for efficiency and maintainability over the long haul.
For anyone who doesn’t know Marlon, you can find his LinkedIn profile here.
Architecture and Process
Driving through some rural areas east of where I live, I noticed a lot of collections of buildings strung together being used as homes. The process seems to start when someone takes a travel trailer, places it on blocks (a foundation of sorts) and builds a spacious deck just outside the door. Over time, the deck is covered, then screened, then walled, becoming a room.
Once the deck becomes a room, a new deck is built, and the process begins anew. At some point, the occupants decide they need a place to store some sort of equipment, so they build a shed. Later, the shed is connected to the deck, the whole thing becomes an extension of the living space, and a new shed is built.
Hedge 221: Energy Aware Protocols
A lot of people are spending time thinking about how to make transport and control plane protocols more energy efficient. Is this effort worth it? What amount of power are we really like to save, and what downside potential is there in changing protocols to save energy? George Michaelson joins us from Australia to discuss energy awareness in protocols.
Hedge 220: The Cost of the Cloud
Cloud services are all the rage right now, but are they worth it? There are many aspects to the question, and the answer is almost always going to be “it depends.” Do you really need to spin up capacity more quickly than you can buy hardware and get it running? Do you really need to be able to spin capacity down without leaving any hardware behind? Is cloud really the best use of your team’s time and talent?
Hedge 219: Are We There Yet?
We’ve been talking about many of the same things in networking since the late 1980s–autonomous, self-driving, autonomic, etc.–and yet … those things all still seem like some sort of Jetson’s cartoon episode. Why aren’t we there yet? Are these even the right goals?
On the ‘net: Networking Models
I’m writing a series on network models over at Packet Pushers; links to the first three are below.
Hedge 218: Longer than /24’s
Most providers will only accept a /24 or shorter IPv4 route because routers have always had limited amounts of forwarding table space. In fact, many hardware and software IPv4 forwarding implementations are optimized for a /24 or shorter prefix length. Justin Wood joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss why the DFZ might need to be expanded to longer prefix lengths, and the tradeoffs involved in doing so.
AI Assistants
I have written elsewhere about the danger of AI assistants leading to mediocrity. Humans tend to rely on authority figures rather strongly (see Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram as one example), and we often treat “the computer” as an authority figure.
Hedge 217: Doug Madory and BGP Security Incidents
We hear a lot about BGP security incidents–but what is really going on? How often do these happen, and how much damage do they do? Doug Madory, who monitors these things for Kentik, joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about BGP security in the wild.