The importance of designing things the right way the first time - and the problems that pop up if you don't.
The things they don't teach you in school, but are necessary for the job - and the lessons I've learned.
You can never stop learning - A bit on certification studies and random new technologies.
A little about the magic that happens in the background - and sometimes saves the day.
Things That Helped One of the big things that helped me was just the experience I had prior to starting on the CCIE. My experience going into the studying likely gave me a huge step up compared to if I tried the exam earlier in my career. If I tried the CCIE eight years ago like I originally wanted to,
In the weeks leading up to the lab exam – I felt very unsure of where I was at. On one side, I felt like I was doing pretty well at most of the practice labs I was working on. But on the other side, I felt like I didn’t have any true idea of what challenges the real exam
Written Exam Finally in early 2019 I gave up on trying to gauge where I was at – and figured it was time to just give the exam a shot. I had already been studying for almost a year and a half, and I was craving some definitive way of figuring out where I was at. I went ahead and
Now that we’re firmly into 2020 – I finally decided it was about time to get this posted. I actually wrote most of this shortly after passing the exam, but it just sat unedited and collecting dust since them. In about a month, most of the exams will be changing over to the new blueprints so I’m not sure how
I’ve been spending a bit of time over the past few weeks building up a wireless lab. Trying to get a good understanding of how the new Catalyst 9800 wireless controller works, and how it differs from some of the previous iterations. In order to play around with the new controller, I decided to try to build a new configuration
Over the past year and a half (and still ongoing), I’ve burned through a handful of books and other resources while working toward the CCIE. I know quite a few people have already dumped out their recommended reading lists – but I figure it’s still worth writing out what has been working for me 🙂 I went ahead and studied
A few weeks ago I got my hands on a Cisco UCS C220 M4 server – which I’ve set up in a lab to install and test Cisco’s Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure Software (NFVIS). I really wanted to get this running on an Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS) box, but you can’t always get everything what you want :). The
Just over a year ago I posted that I was starting work toward the CCIE R&S exam. My original goal was to take the written exam by June of this year – so what progress have I made, and where am I at now? Well I ended up missing the original goal I had set. It’s now October and I
With the release of Android 9.0 recently, Google enabled a big change for how user’s can protect their privacy: DNS over TLS. While the concept isn’t brand new, it also hasn’t exactly exploded in usage either. This is going to start changing as Google rolls out the new version of their operating system that not only comes with the feature,
The future is APIs! SD-EVERYTHING! Automation! Orchestration! Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning! Sound familiar? It’s all part of the messaging going around in just about everything IT-related. With as much as you keep hearing about it, you might think that it’s all anyone is doing anymore. Yet it still just seems like not a whole lot of people are really