Thoughts on Building Tools versus “Programming”
A couple weeks ago at Networking Field Day 9, Brocade presented with their usual A-list of networking gurus. One of the presenters was Jon Hudson, a very engaging, visionary speaker. His talk, shown below, was about the state of network programmability.
During the conversation (which is well worth watching), discussion turned to the question of “will network engineers become programmers?” posed by John Herbert of MovingPackets.net. Jon Hudson’s response elicited applause from the room. He said:
“The trouble I have with that statement is, most network engineers I know, like myself, we know how how to code. We went to school for it, and we chose not to.” – Jon Hudson
The conversation went on to discuss the value of programmability for the sake of consistency in the management and configuration of large-scale network fabrics (which I don’t think anyone would really debate as a “Good Thing”), but Jon’s quote about being a programmer and some of the sidebar that flowed from it created a fair bit of activity in the Twitter stream. Following the presentation, my attention was called to a mailing list on which a question was asked about networking engineerings being “given a Continue reading