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Worth Reading: Keys under the doormat
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Worth Reading: Speeding up the Internet
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Worth Reading: QoE and RAN Networks
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Refillable
People who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full are missing the point. The glass is refillable.
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Why certifications make me grouchy
While I support certifications, they also make me grouchy. Sometimes they make me really, really, grouchy, in fact — probably more grouchy than I have a right to be. You’ve probably heard the complaints a number of times.
For instance, there’s the problem of paper tigers, people who gain the certification but don’t have any real experience with the technology, or don’t really understand the technology. Paper tigers are bad, of course, but they’re generally easy to detect through a rigorous interview. In fact, paper tigers exist without the certification; it’s entirely possible for a solid resume to lead to a candidate that doesn’t have the skills advertised. Degree’s don’t really prove much, either, and it takes four years to get one of those (in theory), so I don’t know how much whining about this problem — as real as it is — is going to help.
Tony Li had a counter to this — he used to sit with a candidate’s resume in hand asking questions, and lining through skills he didn’t think the candidate actually had. At the end of the interview, he would hand the resume back to the candidate and say, essentially, “there, I fixed it Continue reading
Worth Reading: Networking with Fish
If anyone ever asks me why I write, or why I work so hard to draw other people into the larger networking world, I’ll point them to this post. One of the biggest goals of my life is to help people learn and grow. I’ll never become a millionaire in the process, but I’ll have a million friends, and that’s infinitely more important in the long run.
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Reaction: SD-WAN and Multiple Metrics
Ivan has posted a reaction to Ethan, which prompts me to… Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Ethan wrote a nice post on SD-WAN and the “shortest path we always wanted,” covering some of the positive and negative aspects of software defined WAN.
Ivan responded with this post, in which he says several interesting things, prompting some thoughts from yours truly…
Routing in SD-WAN environment is almost trivial…
Depends on what you mean when you say “routing…” If routing here means the discovery of the topology, and computing a best path through a topology, then controller based (centralized) “routing” is almost certainly more complex than distributed routing protocols. If routing here means, “take into consideration a wide swath of policies, including which link is most loaded right now, which link has the shortest queues, and lots of other things, and compute me a best path,” then a controller based centralized system is most likely going to be less complex. Take a gander through my last set of NANOG slides if you want to see where my thinking lies in this area — or read my new book on network complexity if you want a longer explanation.
The question is — Continue reading
Worth Reading: Currency and the Cloud
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Rule 11 Redux
Is it just me, or did we used to call this a mainframe?
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The Tinker and the Geek: Information Technology
Imagine you’ve just woken up and found yourself in a small kingdom someplace in Europe around 1200 AD. You wander outside, interested in your surroundings, and find yourself in the middle of a fair. Taking stock, you see a man standing in a tent across the way who appears to be tapping on something with a small hammer. Working your way to the tent, you find he is actually tapping out intricate patterns on a small silver disc. While you’re not certain what the disc is for, you take a moment to ask — as any geek would — “are you in the information technology business?”
The tinker, living in 1200 AD, probably doesn’t even understand the question. “What’s information technology?,” he might ask. But let’s consider the tinker’s business. What does a tinker really do?
He takes some material, combines it with technical knowhow, including the development and use of tools, to create a product he knows customers will want. He can’t just use any old tool, or any old technique — he must know something about the correct technology to apply to the problem at hand. And he can’t just hammer anything out on the little Continue reading
