Bored Room

Truly Educated

But Does it Work?

When I was in the USAF, a long, long, time ago, there was a guy in my shop — Armand — who, no matter what we did around the shop, would ask, “but does it work?” For instance, when I was working on redoing the tool cabinet, with nice painted slots for each tool, he walked by — “Nice. But does it work?” I remember showing him where each tool fit, and how it would all be organized so we the pager went off at 2AM because the localizer was down (yet again), it would be easy to find that one tool you needed to fix the problem. He just shook his head and walked away. Again, later, I was working on the status board in the Group Readiness Center — the big white metal board that showed the current status of every piece of comm equipment on the Base — Armand walked by and said, “looks nice, but does it work?” Again, I showed him how the new arrangement was better than the old one. And again Armand just shook his head and walked away. It took me a long time to “get it” — to Continue reading

Beach

Knowledge

Leaky Abstractions

Much of our life, as engineers, is about building, manipulating, and using abstractions. For instance, C is nothing but an abstraction on top of the actual register set provided by a particular processor. HTML is nothing but an abstraction for formatting and display (a markup language), implemented in — well, C. There is a lot of power in such abstractions, of course. Without them we couldn’t build operating systems, applications, browsers, web pages — or networks.

Ethernet is an abstraction of electronic signals (anyone remember Manchester Encoding?). IP is an abstraction of every physical layer in the world. TCP is an simulation, or abstraction, of a reliable connection oriented link over (completely unreliable) IP. HTTP is an abstraction of a flow of information, a stream, between two computers. It’s all abstractions — as the philosopher might say, “it’s abstractions all the way down.” So what’s wrong with this?

All abstractions are leaky. What do I mean when I say abstractions are leaky? Let’s turn to the originator of the phrase, Joel Spolsky:

Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.

This is the Continue reading

Dog Prints

Self Evident

On Losing

When I got off the phone, I knew I’d blown it. I’d gotten so wrapped up in the discussion on eVPNs that I might have crossed over that magical line between, “this is a really neat technology,” to, “this technology will solve world hunger.” It brought back to mind my first “real fight” in the world of technology, a long ago argument between two network operating systems (Novell Netware and Banyan Vines).

At the time, I was a buck sergeant in the USAF assigned to the Small Computer Support Office. We were building a new base backbone, and trying to decide what network operating system to standardize on as an organization (as a base). The decision had come down to two options — Novell Netware and Banyan Vines. I was in the camp that wanted Vines. In fact, I’d written two papers (long’ish, on the order of 80 pages each), going through the positives and negatives in each direction. I’d been to a number of meetings, and we had small networks set up running both in our lab. In the end, though, I lost. The technology I was advocating for wasn’t chosen by “the powers that be,” and so Continue reading

Greenland

Success Is…

Not ever thinking the job that’s in front of you is too little for your skill set (or pride).

Why Your Presentation Stinks (Part 2)

Last time, we talked a little about making certain your presentation has a point — or a porpoise, as the case might be. This time I want to talk about a few other common mistakes I see network engineers make when building presentations, and actually presenting them.

First, you put too much text on your slides. I know you’re afraid you’re not going to remember everything you want to say, but that’s no excuse to have a 500 word essay on every slide. The bullet points on a slide are supposed to be just that — bullet points. They’re supposed to remind you of what you mean to say at this point in the presentation, not to be the actual words you’re planning on saying.

Okay, I understand we’re running head in to another problem here — what about folks who print my presentation out and take it home to read it later? That’s what hidden slides are for. Put all the text you really want to put into a slide on a hidden slide just after the slide itself. Then pull out just enough words for you to remember what’s on the hidden slide when you’re doing the presentation. Continue reading

Thinkers

Big thinkers think about giving, doing, and ideas. Small thinkers think about getting and having. If you’re comparing to or gossiping about others — you’re not thinking at all.

Beach

Business Drivers Talk at Interop 2015

This talk is a case study around some of the issues and solutions for TelePost Greenland. I’ll have to give credit to Denise Donohue and the folks there as I go along through the slides, but it’s a unique network with some extreme requirements — and therefore some interesting solutions.

Why Your Presentation Stinks (Part 1)

Powerpoint doesn’t stink. Our presentation skills do. So how do we fix it?

First, you must decide: what do I want this presentation to be? We’ve all seen the brilliant TED talks about new ideas. We’ve all seen the really cool sample presentations from those online presentation sites about someone’s trip around the world. When you’re looking at those talks, though, remember this: they are selected out of millions of talks for their content, and their content fits their format. I’ve seen folks do fairly standard slideshows with Prezy. It doesn’t work. I’ve also seen people do “let me tell you about my trip” presentations with Powerpoint. Again, it doesn’t work.

So, just like network engineering, pick the right tool for the job. Since most of an engineer’s presentations aren’t going to feature exciting trips down the River of Doubt, or even up Doubtin’ Mountain, we’re probably pretty safe to stick with a fairly standard presentation package — slides, warts, and all.

Yes, it’s important to get the flow right. I once stood in for a presenter who’d lost his voice — the material was router architecture (hardware and software), so it’s a topic I know well, so I wasn’t Continue reading

Powerpoint Doesn’t Stink

“Presentations are just a waste of time.”

“Powerpoint stinks.”

“Can’t we do something other than another long, boring, presentation?”

“We should just ban Powerpoint.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone complain about Powerpoint, or presentations, I’d be rich enough to quit work and stop blogging. Isn’t it about time we were honest with ourselves, though? Isn’t it about time we told the truth about this particular problem? Blaming Powerpoint for bad presentations is like blaming word processors for badly written books.

The problem isn’t Powerpoint. The problem is the person you see every morning looking at you in the mirror. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s that we stink at organizing and presenting our thoughts in any sort of reasonable way. So let’s talk about how to build a better presentation.

To begin: forget everything you’ve ever read in a book about making elevator pitches, making a presentation that impacts, with dash, flair, or whatever. There is a set of presentations that present as a story, with flair and dash, and there is another set that just doesn’t.

As an example, I was the Routing Protocols SGM for Cisco Live for Continue reading

The Degree or the Certification: Answering the Question

Okay, finally, I’m going to answer the question. For some value of the word “answer,” anyway. I’ve spent three weeks thinking through various question you should be asking, along the way making three specific points:

• Stop asking “should I get a degree or a certification,” and start asking “what do I want to learn next.” Neither degrees nor certifications are a “final point,” in education (terminal, in the vocabulary of the educational world).
• Learn to see beyond the question of specific technical skills — to think about the underlying skills, like abstraction.
• Stop acting and thinking like a widget. You are more than a money making machine.

Okay, so how do I actually decide?

First, ask: where do I want to go? Who do I want to be as a person, overall? This question needs to be a “bigger life” question, not a narrow, “how much money do I want to be making,” question. One of those other turning points in my life as an engineer was when Don S said to me one day, “When I’m gone, people aren’t going to remember me for writing a book. They are going to remember me as a father, friend, and Continue reading

The Degree or the Certification: You are Not a Widget

One of the things that bothers me the most about the Internet of Things (IOT) is how blithely we slip from talking about objects as things to people as things. Among all the things I do not want to be, a “thing,” attached to the “Internet of Things,” is not one of them. What does this have to do with the question of whether you should get a degree or a certification? Simply this: You shouldn’t treat yourself as a widget, either.

Let me explain.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say, “You should get a certification because it provides more bang for the buck.” In fact, in one rather amusing line of reasoning on the subject, Peter Thiel (who started the Thiel Foundation to encourage smart young people to quit college and take up a career instead), said in a recent interview:

Educational institutions are far too often interested in churning out graduates (i.e., getting their money) without imparting the ability to think rather than just work the system.

To paraphrase, you should opt out of college because colleges are just in the game to make money off you, and you’ll make Continue reading

The Degree or the Certification: Learn to See

This week I was reading through various RSS feeds, and ran across a couple that fell within the scope of last week’s topic. So, rather than moving on to more practical concerns, as I had planned to do — well, I thought I should respond to some common lines of thinking.

First of all, the IT space is in constant change, and the speed of change is just increasing. That change manifests itself in new technologies coming about, and new processes associated with the technologies. Secondly is work experience: What you’ve done in the past is not necessarily useful for the future. Like in the financial realm, where it’s recognized that past performance is no guarantee of future performance, it’s also true in the work environment. When you look at past experience, it’s already dated, from a technology perspective. -IT Business Edge

Now, I’m not one to argue with the idea that the IT world is always changing. Certainly new technologies come, and old technologies go. As the saying goes, legacy just means what you’re currently installing. And certainly there will always be a need to learn the new language, the new command line, the new hardware choices, the Continue reading