According to Roman philosophers, simplicity is the hallmark of truth. And yet, networks have become ever more complex over time. Why is this? Because complexity sells. In this short take, I talk about why complexity sells, and some of the mental habits you can use to overcome our natural tendency to prefer the complex.
A lot of people say just to save money, and watch it grow. There is more to life than just growing, though—you need to figure out what to sell, as well.
One thing I’m often asked in email and in person is: why should I bother learning theory? After all, you don’t install SPF in your network; you install a router or switch, which you then configure OSPF or IS-IS on. The SPF algorithm is not exposed to the user, and does not seem to really…
[time-span] Perfect and good: one is just an extension of the other, right? When I was 16 (a long, long, long time ago), I was destined to be a great graphis—a designer and/or illustrator of some note. Things didn’t turn out that way, of course, but the why is a tale for another day. At…
If I could choose just a handful of skills you must learn to be a successful engineer, being metacognitive would certainly be among them. What is metacognition? OOne of my favorite books on the virtue ethic applied to mental skills defines it thus— Metacognitive people are concerned not just with what they need to know…
One challenging aspect of being an engineer is interviewing other engineers. The interview process is rife with various problems, including the discomfort of interviewing someone who you perceive as being a better engineer than you are, or figuring out how to draw out actual engineering skill versus simply finding out how much someone has memorized.…
There are some days I wish I could travel back in time and “fix” the time I wasted through an hour, a day, or a week working on something that really wasn’t worth my time, or just wandering through links on the Internet, looking at things I don’t really (ultimately) care about. My time management…
Rule 11 definitely applies to most new technology that’s being hyped (and overhyped) in the networking world. But while some things stay the same, others actually do change. From one of my readers— Much of the current “trends” in networking are largely just new marketing-speak on old concepts, but some (I’ll propose) are actually new,…
Everyone wants your attention. No, seriously, they do. We’ve gone from a world where there were lots of readers and not much content, to a world where there is lots of content, and not many readers. There’s the latest game over here, the latest way to “get 20,000 readers,” over there, the way to “retire…