Hedge 119: Product Marketing with Cathy Gadecki

Marketing is an underappreciated (and even demonized) part of the process in creating and managing networking products. Cathy Gadecki of Juniper joins Russ White and Tom Ammon on this episode of the Hedge to fill in the background and discuss the importance of marketing, and some of the odd corners where marketing impacts product development.

Hedge 118: Integrating New Ideas with William Collins

When vendors build something new—or when you decide to go a different direction in your network—you have to figure out how to integrate these new things. Integration of this type often includes cultural, as well as technical, changes. William Collins joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss his experience in integrating new technologies on Hedge 118.

Hedge 117: Mike Bushong and the Product Process

Continuing our series on how vendors build networking products, Mike Bushong joins this episode of the Hedge to discuss the overall process, the importance of the product manager, and the importance of managing and selling change. Join Tom Ammon, Eyvonne, and Russ White as we discuss how vendors build products.

Why Privacy?

I’ve kicked off a series over at Packet Pushers on the ; the first installment is up now.

Hedge 116: Schofield’s Laws of Computing

Jack Schofield, a prolific journalist covering computers and computing, developed three “laws” across his thirty years of reporting that have come to be known as Schofield’s Laws of Computing. What are these laws, and how do they apply to the modern computing landscape—especially for the network engineer? Join Tom Ammon and Russ White as they discuss Schofield’s Laws of Computing.

Hedge 115: Mat Duggan and DevOps

Devops is the new normal—but, far too often, operations folks (like network engineers) are expected to become full-on developers, and developers are expected to understand operations in ways they never had to before. Mat Duggan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss why operations is not development IT

Hedge 114: Hardware Hacking 101 with Federico Lucifredi

Hardware hacking isn’t a topic most network engineers are familiar with—but we always used to say that if I can get access to the console of a router, I can eventually get into the box. The same is largely true of all kinds of computing hardware, including laptops, compute nodes connected to a data center fabric, and, again, routers and switches. In this episode of the Hedge, Federico Lucifredi joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the many options hardware hackers have today.

Hedge 113: The PLM with Jeff Jakab

Over the last few episodes of the Hedge, we’ve been talking to folks involved in bringing network products to market. In this episode, Tom Ammon and Russ White talk to Jeff Jakab about the role of the Product Line Manager in helping bring new networking products to life. Join us to understand the roles various people play in the vendor side of the world—both so you can understand the range of roles network engineers can play at a vendor, and so you can better understand how products are designed, developed, and deployed.

Quality is (too often) the missing ingredient

Software Eats the World?

I’m told software is going to eat the world very soon now. Everything already is, or will be, software based. To some folks, this sounds completely wonderful, but—leaving aside the privacy issues—I still see an elephant in the room with this vision of the future.

Quality.

Let me give you some recent examples.

First, ceiling fans. Modern ceiling fans, in case you didn’t know, don’t rely on the wall switch and pull chains. Instead, they rely on remote controls. This is brilliant—you can dim the light, change the speed of the fan, etc., from a remote control. No unsightly chains hanging from the ceiling.