Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 5: People: Finding, Nurturing and Learning to Let Go

This is part 5 of a six part series based on a talk I gave in Trento, Italy. To start from the beginning go here.

So, let me talk a bit about people. Software is made by people. Sometimes individuals but more likely by teams. I’ve talked earlier about some aspects of our architecture and our frequent rewrites but it’s people that make all that work.

And, honestly, people can be an utter joy and a total pain. Finding, keeping, nurturing people and teams is the single most important thing you can do in a company. No doubt.

Finding People

Finding people is really hard. Firstly, the technology industry is booming, and so engineers have a lot of choices. Countries create special visas just for them. Politicians line up to create mini-Silicon Valleys in their countries. Life is good!

But the really hard thing is interviewing. How do you find good people from an interview? I don’t know the answer to that. We put people through on average 8 interviews and a pair programming exercise. We look at open source contributions. Sometimes we look at people’s degrees.

We tend to look for potential. An old boss used to say, “Don’t Continue reading

Juniper RIPv2

4 steps to configure RIPv2. Define a RIP group Assign interfaces to the RIP group Define a routing policy to export routes Assign the routing policy to the RIP group Configuration Define a RIP group. cmd set protocols rip group RIP-GROUP Assign interfaces to the RIP...continue reading

Juniper OSPFv2

3 steps to configure OSPFv2. Create a router-id (optional) Assign OSPF neighbor facing interfaces to OSPF area Inject routes into OSPF via passive interfaces Configuration Create a router-id. cmd set routing-options router-id 10.255.1.1 Assign OSPF neighbor facing...continue reading

Leveraging Desktop Real Estate To Decrease Distractions

I use a dual-monitor setup. In my setup, the main screen sits centered directly in front of me. The secondary screen, which is slightly smaller, is off to one side. The real estate provided by the two screens gives me plenty of pixels across which to splash my applications–ample “screenery.”

I use my screenery productively when recording podcasts. I display a script, conferencing app, and recording tool without having to switch between them. Research productivity is also enhanced. I display a note-taking app front and center, with research subject matter like a video presentation, Kindle book, or PDF off to the side.

No Pixel Left Behind

Acres of screenery has benefits, but lots of screen space is also a potential distraction. I fight the desire to fill every pixel with an application. If I don’t use all the pixels, I must be wasting desktop space, right? I don’t want to waste my not inconsiderable investment in fancy monitors. Hmm. Sounds like an example of the sunk cost fallacy.

Desktop operating system developers have catered to my craving, adding sticky edges to windows that ensure not a single pixel is wasted. I can make my window edges stick to each Continue reading

Understanding CSPF and the TED

In our last post, we talked about one of the major differences between LDP and RSVP – the ability to define EROs or explicit route objects. We demonstrated how we could configure LSP paths through our network by providing a set of loose or strict next hops for the LSP to take. This was a rather huge paradigm shift because it meant we could define paths that didn’t align with what the IGP thought to be the best path through the network. What we didn’t talk about was how the ingress router determined if these paths were feasible. In this post, we’ll deep dive on the traffic engineering database (TED) and how it works in conjunction with the constrained shortest path first (CSPF) algorithm to build RSVP LSPs through a network.

It’s important to remember that the ingress label switching router (LSR) is really the thing doing most of the work in regards to setting up RSVP LSPs. Well – to be fair – the egress LSR is the one that actally sends the RESV message back toward the ingress LSR with the label information which is what’s required for the LSP to work. However – the ingress LSR Continue reading

SDN Ate My Hamster

I posted a Tweet the other day which gained a lot of attention in the networking community:

As SDN gains more traction, people start fearing for their jobs. Some jobs will decrease in demand and some will disappear entirely. However, we can’t stop progress just to keep those jobs hanging around. In the Twitter thread I made what could be seen as an elitist comment:


If you are replaceable by a script or controller, you were never a Network Engineer to begin with.

This was not meant to insult anyone, but rather be a wake-up call. If the only value you provide to the business is that you deploy templates someone else created, configure VLANs on a trunk, or can trace a flapping MAC in the network, you need to reskill and find ways of providing more value. This is not about Junior vs Senior. It’s Continue reading

Research: User Fairness as a Quality of Service Problem

In networks, we tend to think of Quality of Service (QoS) relating primarily to classes of traffic. These classes of traffic, in turn, are grounded in application behavior driven by user expectations. For instance, users expect voice communications to be near real time so conversation can take place “normally,” which means delay must be held to a minimum. In order to provide support for the CODECs that make voice communication possible, jitter must be tightly controlled, as well; it is often better to drop a packet outside some jitter bounds than to deliver it. ‘Net neutrality, on the other hand, tends to see the key factor as access to a particular service.

In this diagram, assume Y and Z are two different video streaming services; A is streaming video from Y, while B is streaming from Z. The argument of ‘net neutrality is that the provider who runs the E to F link (or the network represented by that single link) should not be allowed to prefer the service at Y over Z (or the other way around). One of the basic problems with ‘net neutrality is the problem of not preferring one content provider over another is not as Continue reading

The Black Elephant in the Room

The Black Elephant in the Room

When I come to work at Cloudflare, I understand and believe in this main purpose of why we exist: Helping to Build a Better Internet.

The reason why we feel like we can help build a better internet is simply because we believe in values that instill a nature of freedom, privacy, and empowerment in the tool that helps individuals broaden their intellectual and cultural perspective on the daily.

Knowing all of this, our own great company needs to be able to build itself daily into a better company. And that starts with having those conversations which are always uncomfortable. And let me be clear in saying this, being uncomfortable is a good thing because that makes one grow and not be stagnant. Saying all that, here we go...

The Afrocultural community at Cloudflare should take pride in being diverse and inclusive for all just as we all work together to help build a better internet for all.

And one of the many ways we can build upon this effort is to do more than just belong in a work place and eventually build off of that, feeling normal over time. When I mean belong, it’s more than the "Impostor Continue reading

Coppell ISD Integrates Security into Infrastructure via VMware AppDefense

What do you get when you provide 12,800 kids with technology and programming classes? You get 12,800 people who are getting ready for the modern workforce of today and tomorrow. You also get 12,800 potential vulnerabilities. With the growing quantity of phishing emails, ransomware and malware that Coppell Independent School District (CISD) already had to combat with a small staff, this Texas school system was looking for smarter solutions.

“All these students who have taken programming classes, they’re often looking to bypass administrative privileges, looking for ways around the internet filters, or looking for ways to play games on the school computers,” said Stephen McGilvray, CISD Executive Director of Technology. “So, in addition to all these external threats we have to worry about, we also have a bunch of homegrown, internal threats.”

The school district recently underwent a data center refresh, which included updates for VMware vSphere, VMware App Volumes and VMware Horizon, and launched the implementation of VMware NSX Data Center. During the refresh, their VMware sales rep told them about a relatively new security product called VMware AppDefense.

At its core, AppDefense shifts the advantage from attackers to defenders by determining and ensuring good application Continue reading

BrandPost: Top 2019 SD-WAN Predictions

For the past three years, SD-WAN has been one of the most talked about technology trends. All the discussion around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build their wide area networks.As the market continues to gain momentum coming into the new year, here are my annual predictions for SD-WAN and the future of the WAN edge infrastructure market. You can also view Silver Peak’s webinar to prepare for SD-WAN in 2019.SD-WAN Market ConsolidationTo read this article in full, please click here

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