IT/IT: The Future of Network Engineering

Two different articles caught my attention this last week. They may not seem to be interrelated, but given my “pattern making mind,” I always seem to find connections. The first is an article from Network Computing discussing the future of network engineering skill sets.

It’s a new day in enterprise technology, with Chuck Robbins at the helm of Cisco. But John Chambers left a lasting dark impression with the audience at Cisco Live in June. He essentially dropped a hand grenade, predicting the end of IT as we know it, and walked offstage.

Patrick Hubbard goes on to talk about the hand grenade John Chambers left in the room 3 that there would be major mergers, failures, and acquisitions in the next twenty years, leaving the IT industry a very different place. The takeaway? That individual engineers need to “up their game,” learning new technologies faster, hitting the books and the labs on a more regular basis. Given the view in the industry of Cisco as a “safe harbor” for IT skills, this is something of a hand grenade in the room, coming from Chambers at Cisco Live.

The second article predicts a hand grenade, as well, though of a Continue reading

Worth Reading: Anti-Design Patterns

If you don’t want to risk your immortal API then be sure to avoid… via High Scalability

The post Worth Reading: Anti-Design Patterns appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: SDN Controller Benchmarking

But as useful as pondering the theoretical picture is, and as useful as individual tests are, there’s a middle ground that often needs to be filled and isn’t. The middle ground? How should we go about testing SDN controllers? via Packet Pushers

The post Worth Reading: SDN Controller Benchmarking appeared first on 'net work.

Clear Writing

For most of us most of the time, our dense writing indicates not the irreducible difficulty of a work of genius, but the sloppy thinking of a writer indifferent to his readers.
The Craft of Research, Kindle Location 2392

The post Clear Writing appeared first on 'net work.

HL: Navigating Network Complexity

The post HL: Navigating Network Complexity appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Watching: IPv6 Intro

If you want to understand more on IPv6, we’ve made a number of resources available. You can choose from a range of video interviews with leading industry experts as well as tutorials on different transition mechanisms. We also provide links to more information on these topics. via RIPE NCC

The post Worth Watching: IPv6 Intro appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Discovering PlugX Campaigns Automatically

One of the hardest things to do when you are receiving malware that have “anonymized” (e.g. name-is-hash) names or general samples that lack any indication of the infection vector is to determine the origin of the file and its intended target. via Arbor

The post Worth Reading: Discovering PlugX Campaigns Automatically appeared first on 'net work.

Engineering Sense

Why didn’t they ask Evans?

For those who haven’t read the famous Agatha Christie novel, the entire point revolves around a man uttering these words just before dying. Who is Evans? What does this person know that can lead to the murderer of the man on the golf course? Bobby and Frankie, the heroes of the story, are led on one wild goose chase after another, until they finally discover it’s not what Evans knows but who Evans knows that really matters.

Okay… But this isn’t a blog about mysteries, it’s about engineering. What does Evans have to do with engineering? Troubleshooting, as Fish says, is often like working through a mystery novel. But I think the analogy can be carried farther than this. Engineering, even on the design side, is much like a mystery novel. It’s often the context of the question, or the context of the answer to the question, that solves the mystery. It’s Poirot straightening the items sitting on a mantelpiece twice, it’s the dog that didn’t bark, and it’s the funny footprints and the Sign of Four.

Just like the detective in a mystery novel, the engineer can only solve the problem if they can Continue reading

Worth Reading: Shareholder Value

Maximizing shareholder return has given us our corporate malaise of today when profits are high (but are they real?) stocks are high, but few investors, managers, or workers are really happy or secure. Maximizing shareholder return is bad policy both for public companies and for our society in general. via Cringely

The post Worth Reading: Shareholder Value appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Security and the IoT

Interestingly I have never seen a company appointing their CSO to be head of legal or operations or finance or engineering but I have seen a lot of companies doing it the other way around. Is somebody able to explain me, why? via Roger Halbheer

The post Worth Reading: Security and the IoT appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Listening: Optical for the Campus

The post Worth Listening: Optical for the Campus appeared first on 'net work.

HL: The Art of Network Architecture

The post HL: The Art of Network Architecture appeared first on 'net work.

Good Works

As some one says, “The Devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a new trick worth two of that: he organizes them instead.”
C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

The post Good Works appeared first on 'net work.

Review: The Craft of Research

The Craft of Research
Booth, Colomb, and Williamns

Engineers don’t often think of themselves as researchers. After all, what does writing a bit of code, or building a network design, have to do with research? Isn’t research something academic type folks do when they’re writing really long, and really boring, papers that no-one ever reads? If that’s what you really think, then you’ve come to the wrong blog this week. In fact, I’d guess that a good many projects get off track, and a good number of engineering avenues aren’t explored, because people just don’t know how to — or don’t enjoy — research. Research is at the very heart of engineering.

Even if it’s never published, writing a research style paper can help you clarify and understand the issues you’re facing, and think through the options. Reading IETF drafts, software design specs, and many other documents engineers produce is depressing some times.

Can’t we do better? Of course we can. Read this book.

This book, while it does focus on the academic side of writing a research paper, is also a practical guide to how to think through the process of researching a project. The authors begin with a Continue reading

Worth Reading; The Great Man Theory

This matters because the great-man narrative carries costs. First, it has helped to corrode the culture of Silicon Valley. Great-man lore helps excuse (or enable) some truly terrible behavior. … And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. via MIT

A note to remember — I don’t agree with everything I put up as a worth reading article. There are some good things here, and some bad. Watermelon seeds are meant to be spit out, though, not eaten with the sweet red stuff. And don’t even get into the rind.

The post Worth Reading; The Great Man Theory appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Toxic Employees

A clear disconnect is occurring at organizations across the U.S. when it comes to employee satisfaction, according to a new study released by Fierce, Inc., leadership development and training experts. The survey found that four out of five employees believe a toxic employee is extremely debilitating to team morale, while the same number agreed that their organizations are somewhat or extremely tolerant of these individuals. via fierce

The post Worth Reading: Toxic Employees appeared first on 'net work.

Highlight: Why Your Presentations Stink

The post Highlight: Why Your Presentations Stink appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Expert Versus Nonexpert

The state of advice given to people today on how to stay safe online has plenty of room for improvement. Too many things are asked of them, which may be unrealistic, time consuming, or not really worth the effort. via USENIX

The post Worth Reading: Expert Versus Nonexpert appeared first on 'net work.

Barcelona

The post Barcelona appeared first on 'net work.

It’s About Time

I guess I’m semi-famous. Or maybe I’m a moderately sized fish in a rather small bowl. Whatever the reason, a lot of people reach out to me for career advice. Which is okay, of course — I make it a personal policy to answer every email that’s addressed to me, individually, that I receive. It only takes a minute or two, after all, and it drives me nuts when I send an email to someone that seems to go into a black hole. I try not to be the person that drives me nuts.

So a couple of times a week, I open my inbox to find either an email or a message through some social network (the only social networks I actively use, by the way, are Twitter and LinkedIn, so if you friend me on Facebook, or send me an invite to something else, I’m not likely to accept) asking some variation of a couple of questions. The one I want to address in this post is probably the hardest to answer.

How can I become an architect/really good engineer/really good writer/really successful/etc.?

The snark inside me just wants to answer, “just change your title on LinkedIn, that’s Continue reading