Nicholas: 0:00

So we were just starting our Azure journey. We were on a private data center. We were just moving everything up to Azure networking. Wise, I had to unlearn a lot of things. Forget what I know, Just go back to basics. Stop looking for the nerd knobs and just break it down to okay, I need to do X Y, Z. How do I get that done in Azure?

William: 0:42

Welcome to the Cloud Gambit podcast, where we unravel the mysteries of tech, and maybe even the mysteries of the universe, one story at a time. I'm your host, william, and with me is my co-host, the brain, the cognitive scientist of CICD, the behavioral specialist of all the cloud services out there, yvonne Sharp. How are you doing today? What's the mental model for today's discussion?

Eyvonne: 1:00

I need to point out that you couldn't even say we're unraveling the mysteries of the universe with a straight face, and so I'm glad to get that in there Doing great. For me, it's the last work day for a little over a week of PTO, so getting ready to head to the mountains and hang out in a cabin, hope that there are no catastrophic weather incidents while we're traveling, like some friends of mine have experienced in the last week or so. So looking forward to a little bit of downtime, yay.

William: 1:35

Awesome, that sounds like a good time. Gallenberg's always fun, as long as it's not too too crowded. We're going during fall break, which is one thing routed.

Eyvonne: 1:47

Uh yeah, we're going during fall break, which is one thing. Well, our mo is. We stop at the grocery store on the way in, we load up, we go hang out at the cabin, we have a trunk full of books and then, you know, we just hang out a lot. So we are very low-key travelers. We will do some touristy things, but we're also going to get a lot of r&r, so, looking forward to that sounds like a perfect vacation.

William: 2:06

So with us we have nick calcutta now. I think both yvonne and myself. I know it was my first time meeting nick at the the k tech k tech connect event with the art of network engineering in knoxville, tennessee, last year, where they basically did a live episode with his name escapes me, but someone that worked for the high-performance computing ops thing in Oak Ridge, so the National Laboratory. Needless to say, it was a great event. We had a really good time. We got to meet Nick and I think you and I Nick, like after the live recording outside of that studio or wherever the event was hosted at, like we sat there and just talked cloud for like 30 minutes straight probably and we're just drifting, you know. Pretty awesome. So yeah, welcome on. How's this? How are things going? Great, Thanks for having me.

Nicholas: 3:02

And I think it was Daniel. I. How are things going Great, thanks for having me. And I think it was Daniel. I forget his last name, though the engineer Daniel. I think it starts with a P.

William: 3:09

I will have to put it in the show notes. I'm going to have to look it up. Yeah, so you're down in Florida. How are things going? How's the weather?

Nicholas: 3:19

The weather's great. So I'm in Jacksonville, so northeast Florida. Here Sometimes we call it southern Georgia because you know in Florida the more north you go, the more south you get Right.

Eyvonne: 3:32

Yeah, florida by and large is not really the south Right. It's a completely different subculture. So yeah, I'm hearing you there, I'm picking up what you're putting down.

Nicholas: 3:43

Yeah, yeah, Northeast Florida, I think would still be considered the South, but after you get outside this region, that's where it gets you know into Florida.

William: 3:51

Right on. That's a foul love that I'm going to have to remember that one.

Eyvonne: 3:56

We have the same thing in Kentucky, because folks from Northern Kentucky will often say that they are from Cincinnati. They don't ever claim Kentucky, they say they're from Cincinnati. They don't ever claim Kentucky, they say they're from Cincinnati. So those kinds of regional things happen all over the place.

William: 4:09

Do you blame them?

Nicholas: 4:11

Yes, Kidding, I know Ohio. I wouldn't claim. I lived in Youngstown, ohio, for like six months, so I wouldn't claim from any part of that state.

Eyvonne: 4:21

I'm an Appalachian girl, though, so that's where my roots are, so I can't claim anything other than mountains and all that fun stuff. I'm not even into these parts.

William: 4:33

I have nothing anyhow, so do you want to give us just a brief? You work in a few cool areas, nick. You do some pretty cool things. Do you want to give us just a brief overview of, just kind of your journey in IT? Just kind of you know, how did you get to where you are right now?

Nicholas: 5:07

um, growing up I wasn't a tinker on computers or nothing. My mother, we had a desktop, you know, gateway, back in the aol days. So using that to get online you're researching things or, you know, playing command and conquer on the computer. That was the really what we used before playing video games. Me, my twin brother and um didn't do much till high school.

Nicholas: 5:23

I moved from Las Vegas out to here in Jacksonville well, middleburg, south of Jacksonville and they didn't have computer design, computer-aided design courses. So I took computer repair instead. So it was a Comp P A-plus class before. They did a bunch of things in that class. Now I think now if you go to that same high school you get CCNA pretty much out the door by the time you get finished high school. So it's changed a lot and it's great. But we really just fought over to fix the printers of you know teachers, sometimes right, we fooled around, fixed things and then I kind of just did all sorts of odd jobs Worked for McDonald's, a crew person, uh, I was a repo guy, rent to own, which I kind of worked on computers.

Nicholas: 6:06

When I worked for rent a center, a little bit too, fix people's pcs, and then, you know, went to michigan but did a garbage garbage job. I picked up garbage in mackinac island, michigan, by horse and buggy, so, uh, that was part of one of the best jobs of my life. I still love that experience. I still remember it fondly in my head and I have to take a trip back up there get some good fudge that sounds interesting.

Eyvonne: 6:30

When somebody says I had a garbage job, I imagine that they would hear that metaphorically.

William: 6:38

But you're not saying that metaphorically.

Nicholas: 6:41

Literally. I think it's amazing Garbage via horse and carriage. Well, actually, my first couple weeks I did garbage and if you've ever been to mackinac island it's just like an eight mile around island. It's an old trading fur trading post. Um, the british invaded. There is a french indy. They have a whole lot of history there.

Nicholas: 6:59

Um, our dorm rooms for the company pretty much was an old english barracks built back in the day and um, yeah, it was great. And then I switched to recycling, like a couple later on, and that wasn't too bad. That was awesome. Um, because you're doing more residential and so just going around seeing nice houses and picking up residential stuff and work the horses every day because there's no vehicles, it's all horse. So got got to know the horses a lot more and they have personalities. I had a horse named drake. He'd wait for me to get in the stall every morning just to use the bathroom, or he'd walk by, he'd fart in your face like, and he'd look at you the whole time doing it too, just to mess with you like he, he knew trolling you.

William: 7:42

That is funny. It was preparing you for a future career with internet trolls, right yeah.

William: 7:50

So I, we, for my sons I think it was his fourth or his fifth birthday we went. We went up there for a week and we had a blast. Like you said, the horse and buggy thing everywhere, no cars on the island and the like, the tours that you could take through the island. I remember like our tour guide was so funny. Everybody was laughing hysterically like everybody was crying. It was just hilarious, the brand of humor. Everything was so fun. And then, of course, I ate way too much fudge. We brought way too much fudge back home. I I made myself sick. It's so good, you can't stop.

Nicholas: 8:29

Yeah, did they tell you all the haunted stories on the island? That island actually has a book written about how haunted it is.

William: 8:37

Yeah, they were selling. We may have even gotten a copy of one of the. They had all sorts of stuff you could bring home. We brought home all sorts of stuff. Yeah, funny, crazy stories.

Nicholas: 8:49

Yeah I, I actually started that job a week after micro and dirty jobs filmed my job, so he did my job week before yeah. So I heard stories about him coming to the island and how great guy he was and and now if you watch his Mackinac Island bridge painting episode, just know the night before he was out with the guys, so you can really look at the episode differently now.

Eyvonne: 9:14

So how did we get from driving a horse and buggy collecting garbage to tech?

Nicholas: 9:20

So after I came back from there I went back to work at McDonald's, was managing there for about six years after that and during that time if there was a technical issue I was kind of the guy like, hey, I'll hang around with the technicians they send up and look at things. I tell you I picked this one up to call you next time Cool, Awesome. Well then McDonald's kind of created this program called the Operations Technology Person. I went to Oak Brook, Illinois, went to McDonald's corporate office, got trained on site, got to their OTP Level 3 program, learned how to fix all the point of sale systems for that and that's kind of what I did. So I was department manager and the technology for my franchise, for my franchise.

Nicholas: 10:08

And after that I started going back to college and then did network systems technology at a four-state college, jacksonville, and got back to networking because all my buddies in high school did networking and just did that and to work, start working for a government job locally and just rose from there awesome, yeah, so um you spent how many, how many years did you do local like government it?

Nicholas: 10:30

so that's seven years seven years.

William: 10:32

That's a long, quite a long time. So I I know that you know rumors. Rumors abound and assumptions are like like weeds growing in the garden out back.

Eyvonne: 10:44

But is it?

William: 10:44

true that local IT government is underfunded, pulled in lots of different directions and maybe lacking in skilled labor, which causes problems. Are those fair assumptions?

Nicholas: 10:57

Very, very fair assumptions. In fact, that's what my dissertation is kind of on, right now-ish, so right now ish, so right now go back and forth, but yes, 100 percent.

William: 11:10

How does that impact? I mean, I know that it's easy to sit in like my seat and blame. Like every time I have to go in and get something done with local government or even just anything like, the first thing I think of is, oh, this is so inefficient, they're living back in the Stone Age. Oh, I know that this is off topic, but last year I had to send a fax at a medical office. You come into some of these facilities and you see how things work and you just think, wow, this isn't an eight-month-long project, this is really outdated. This isn't a, you know, an eight month long project like this is really outdated. What, what, what can we do to to actually progress that forward? Or is there, is there, a silver lining?

Nicholas: 11:55

well, it's a silver lining. I think I think there can be 100 there. There can be, because when I first started work for government I thought, okay, so government jobs gonna be everything. All you know everything t's are crossed i's are jobs. It's going to be everything. All you know everything T's are crossed I's are dotted like it's going to be great. And it went in there. I'm like there's some bubblegum duct tape that's holding this whole place together, you know.

Nicholas: 12:13

And then I found out how actual governments work and all the constitutional offices and how they all have their own little kingdoms. And really that's where a lot of us focused on was hey, we all have our own little kingdoms, but we all help each other out. So we all had unofficial hey, I'll help you out. So even I was the network guy for the border county, commissioner. So we're at the main seat right for the local county I worked for.

Nicholas: 12:38

But I still interfaced with the sheriff's department, with the clerk of courts office, supervisor of elections office, all because by Florida State statute we had to provide them voice. Now the statute was written on the days where copper lines were voice and not VoIP. So that's how we're all interconnected and honestly, I think the way forward is start breaking down the kingdoms IT-wise and, you know know, start doing more shared model costs so you can kind of help out with the skilled labor. You know you'll pay for five it directors, for five different constitutionals. Maybe you pay for, you know, one. Get the skilled labor in there and get your economy to scale going that's a good point.

William: 13:21

I think one one thing too whenever I know that when I worked for like large enterprise, even one thing you, you have this thing where you're getting ready to prepare the budget, you're getting the budget ready, you're, you know, getting in all the things that are things you can't live without, but then you have like these nice to haves and you're trying to basically spend as much or more than you did the year before, because you don't want to lose budget.

William: 13:47

You don't want to come in and actually spend less, because next year you're probably going to get less at the end of the day. So one thing about government and these larger institutions that have been around for a really long time is they've they're kind of in that same thing where they have all these funds flowing in. And one thing that these, like I went through I worked for a company that got bought up by private equity, essentially, and they it was like they bought a company that had actually acquired a few other companies and they came in and it was just everybody's scared, Of course it's private equity coming in and you know, you know really what they want to do is they want to optimize and clean everything up as much as possible and all these things that we had on budget. They just kicked everything to the side. They're like nope, you don't have any budget.

William: 14:39

You're going to have to come back and we're going to go through piece by piece and decide what is actually real and what is not real. And hey, that makes you, that puts things in a different perspective, it takes you off of your comfort seat a little bit and you have to really think okay, we've got to make a difference. We have things that we have to have. We actually have to think about all this stuff now and solve some of these problems. Do you think that's a possibility?

William: 15:04

for government, or is that a little too intense?

Nicholas: 15:07

No, I think it'd be great. I think every system we use a shake up right, start from zero. I mean technology. I love doing that. Once a year I wipe my PC right Start from fresh, right. You know my phone too, and I tell my students to do that same thing too. Like start from fresh. I think any organization can benefit from that Start from fresh. Really think about what do I need? What are my criticals? I can't live without? And then go from there. Y'all know it'd be great because my budget was way different from other people's budgets and we're over here frugally buying like mid-grade hp, dells and then I go to like another consular office. They're getting xps's and stuff. I'm like what kind of your budget looks like? What the heck?

Eyvonne: 15:54

well, and I think the a lot of that too. Like it takes a little while in those kinds of organizations just to understand the rhythm of the organization, right, like you have to be there for a full year to even understand what the cycle is going to look like. And then the folks that manage it the best are those who try to keep an eye on. You know, from a vision standpoint, what is it that we need to accomplish, what is it we need to deliver? What are we actually here to do? And then try to figure out ways to make that happen inside the system and, frankly, like that's infinitely harder than just kind of going with the flow and, you know, living in the normal rhythm, without trying to marry the two.

Eyvonne: 16:45

But I think for organizations that actually move forward, there's somebody or several somebodies doing that work and it often is happening in very thankless, unrecognized pockets and corners. But there's somebody who really cares, trying to figure out how do we use this weird system that we have. And make no mistake, no matter what organization you're in, the deeper you go, the more you're going to find weird systems and and get what we need done done. There is nowhere in any organization that I've ever seen that doesn't have some weirdness under the covers.

William: 17:30

It's not in one place, it's in another. So you recently did a talk on like, basically, changes in networking skill sets or competencies or something along those lines. Networking skill sets or competencies or something along those lines, you know kind of like a like a packet walk through the shifting sands of like skill sets for network practitioners, maybe like industry requirements and impacts, things like that. And in the slides you kind of start like you go all the way back to to the eighties, like the ARPANET evolution. You know how, like when ARPANET adopted TCPpanet evolution, you know how, like when arpanet adopted tcpip, and you know sliding into like internet dominance, and you even like highlight some of the older tech. Um, like we all three of us had to study when we got our ccna's like frame relay.

William: 18:18

Oh, the token rings and so on. Um has wide area network or wan tech, and like, land tech really changed that much since the 90s. What are your thoughts on that? As far as like, has there really been innovation and what does that look like?

Nicholas: 18:36

well, I think we got a lot more tunnels right. You know, a lot of tunneling protocols have popped up, um, and then you know, know, I thought SDN, software-defined networking, wasn't the bigger thing than it actually was. And then I'm like, okay, well, it has a niche. Life, you know, has its own spots right. I think there's been some great improvements, like SD-WAN honestly has been a fantastic improvement, has really changed from MPLS thought right, so now you go from, oh, I need an MPLS to everywhere I mean, or man network, and now I can say, well, I can do SD-WAN, right, I can go get my, you know, meraki or Fortinet, I can auto VPN and, you know, start building things up there and get application. We got a lot better on the layers four through seven since the nineties, lot better on the layers four through seven since the 90s, instead of just layer three and four, especially application aware trafficking.

Eyvonne: 19:28

I think it's been fantastic well, and when we think about, like, software defined networking and all that, that was and it's gosh over a decade ago like it was. It was like 20 teens when that was all the rage, I think you know the goal of software-defined networking in a lot of ways was to make networks more manageable and to deal with the distributed nature of networking. I think that the challenge that we had with SDN is it is fundamentally a distributed system. Like networks have to be distributed and your data plane has to be able to function, and so you centralize it too much and you just can't get the performance out of it that you need. But I also think that the ideals of software-defined networking have driven a lot of what we're still seeing in the industry as far as a push toward automation, toward more centralized systems.

Eyvonne: 20:34

From a control plane standpoint, how do we get visibility and observability? All of those things that we talk about today were the dreams of software defined networking. It's just that implementation wasn't robust enough to solve our bigger problems, and you know, especially I'm thinking about things like OpenFlow and and technologies like that. Right, but that movement has fueled a lot of still the things that we're talking about today. Um, and and I think you know we need to operate at scales that could not have been imagined in the ARPANET days. Nobody, well very few people, envisioned billions of interconnected devices like what we see today.

William: 21:40

Yeah, I don't have the slides in front of me, but you had, like I think you're like listing out the older technologies and you had CatOS in there, which made me laugh and I guess I just asked the question of, oh, has it changed that much? And right now, as things pop back in my head like the all the set commands and the CatOS days you know I spent so much time when I first started in network engineering managing CSS, load balancers and I complain about it still it was to say things have changed. Things have changed a lot like generate you had to generate the CSRs. You got to output the CSR to PEM. You've got to, you know, submit the CSR to like a cert authority.

William: 22:19

You got to get the server and the intermediate certs back and then reinstall them back on the CSS and all the commands were just so bizarre and you know, sometimes I just want to like find a CSS on eBay and have like a CSS themed birthday party where all the guests have to follow handwritten instructions and install certs to win a prize. Totally kidding, actually, I don't know, that sounds like fun, but anyway, um, do you like with all the? So that theme there? I guess the the pain point really is you are going in and you're typing in all the commands you're doing. Every little piece of that is handcrafted and artisan.

William: 23:03

And just kind of back to what Yvonne just said as far as the progression and having a lot of automation in some of the things and how they've changed a lot of the products and platforms. Nowadays they're actually still doing a lot of these things under the hood. A lot of them are based on Linux, but you're just not doing it. It's happening in an automated fashion under a layer of abstraction that you don't really see. So I guess the crooks of it is it's changed how we perceive it, how we view it and how we operate it, but really underneath the, the hood, not a ton has changed. I guess Any thoughts?

Nicholas: 23:43

Yeah, I mean I think we got it easier right the software-defined networking, after that phase I think. Then you had a lot of cloud management popped up right, so you had the Meraki start coming out of the woodworks. Juniper, who did they buy Mist? You know, mist popped out. Aruba had their Aruba Central, so we kind of had GUI-ized instead of CLI a lot of things there.

Nicholas: 24:11

Firewalls got a little easier. At least I think they got a little easier to use, going from ASA to a 4DED or even a. I had a Sophos 5 room at one point and that thing was easier to use than an ASA all day. I had a Sophos Fiberoma at one point and that thing was easier to use than an ASA all day. I think we took a lot of the complexity out to get some basic things done.

Nicholas: 24:28

So I remember when I left because I worked in the county and then I left and then I came back and before I left I trained the server guys hey, here's how to use the Fortinet firewall, here's how to use the Merakis, and I kind of abstracted a lot of the concepts to like organizational units and actor directory and stuff, and within a week they're like okay, we got this, okay, no problem, and I think it kind of helped lower the bar. There's no commands they had to remember. They said, hey, click here, click here. Here's how this works. If you knew the concepts of networking and just some rule flow, you were good to go a lot. I think that's how we we've improved the barrier entry a little lower, I think, on getting things done. But also guis are known not to work too so yeah, I'm a cli first kind of person.

William: 25:21

Usually I'd rather write some code once and never have to log into a gui again, but you can't do that with everything, um, unfortunately I would have categorized you as an api first person, not a cli person all right just checking the code, as long as it's codified and repeatable.

William: 25:40

I don't care what the, the interaction service is, I'm good to go, but, um, I guess moving. So the one of the themes of this podcast anyway is like looking at things and sort of how they've progressed and then cloudifying things. So cloud has become such a major theme for so many different verticals and so many different types of technology. You know it's had a major impact on networking. So cloud networking is a huge thing and that was one of the things we talked about back in Knoxville that time, and one of the things I think you talked about in this presentation was like the impact of cloud on the modern day network engineer. Do you want to talk to that a little bit? Just kind of like how cloud has impacted the network engineering space.

Nicholas: 26:30

Yeah, so I definitely so. Back in Knoxville we were just starting our Azure journey at my company. So we were on a private data center and we were just moving everything up to Azure. That was during that time. We were doing a private data center and we were just moving everything up to Azure. During that time we were doing all the code, all the bicep and getting ready to rock and roll for a weekend, and that weekend was 17 hours one day, 19 hours the next day. It was a Herculean event with a bunch of other programmers and stuff on the call, but I say impacting the networking-wise.

Nicholas: 27:02

I had to unlearn a lot of things getting into Azure in cloud. I had to say, all right, forget what I know, just go back to basics, stop looking for the nerd knobs and just break it down to okay, I need to do X, y, z. How do I get that done in Azure? One great thing is I don't have to worry about QoS, which is fantastic, but also, at the same time, I can't do QoS. So if I have an application that's not performing that well, I'm like well, sorry guys, you know a lot of apologizing at that point. So the impact of cloud has been very, very much great for networking on there, relearning. It really helps you jumpstart the brain again and say all right, it's not a Juniper, it's not a Ruckus, it's not any other switch. This is a different platform. And how do I learn this first?

Eyvonne: 27:55

Well, I think where fundamentals become important is understanding, like when you can grasp hey, arp is not a thing in cloud, right? Like layer two doesn't really exist and any trickery that you were doing at layer two to make things work isn't really transferable. Now there are ways around that and there are technologies that are coming that make that statement not strictly true. So if my networking folks are listening, give me some grace. At the same time, you know bum traffic is very different in the cloud. You know that and you can't really rely on it the way you did in the past. And but what that also means is, architecturally, you have to make different decisions and if you just take your the architectures that you're used to on-premise and try to replicate them in the cloud, you're absolutely going to have performance issues and you're going to run into design constraints that you're not expecting. And so that, peeling back what are first principles, how do we need this thing to work, what are the constructs that are available to me and how do I implement.

Eyvonne: 29:27

And it gets even further complicated when you start talking about hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, because the rules aren't the same in every cloud, even from you know how does the routing table behave right and how it behaves in a VPC on AWS or a VPC in Google Cloud or a. Is it a VNet that we call those things in Azure A VNet in Azure? They all operate very, very differently and so you can't take the assumptions you make in one place to another. So I think, like understanding, yeah, you need to understand what a route table is, but then you need to understand how that is implemented in your particular cloud of choice so that you can make the right design decisions. So we've added a layer of abstraction and we've removed certain layers of complexity, but there are new layers of complexity with the abstraction that that we we have to think about. That maybe we didn't think about before.

Nicholas: 30:35

Yeah, I agree, the unlearning things, my basic default thing, trying to figure out the route tables in Azure. It was like all right, it can't get from here to here, let's do a packet capture somewhere, right? And then getting a packet capture in Azure was such an event I was like I don't even this, is you know what. We're just going to start poking around and figure out another way, Get things going.

William: 30:59

Yeah, well, even basic things. Like somebody, I was talking to someone a few months ago that was that they're this person's like, really they're like a routing, top-notch routing, you know, route switch person. And they have realized that the company that they work for today, they're, they went really big in cloud. His budget is kind of getting reduced a little bit on the network engineering side and he's just thinking, okay, I need to learn something about one of these adjacent areas. So he's getting more into cloud now and as he's doing that, you have that sort of I don't want to say nervousness of like, okay, this huge thing is looming here and I've been so stuck solving these problems over here that I haven't really had the time to take and go into this new area and really do anything. And I, just as we're kind of talking because he was asking me just for oh, you know what, I don't have a ton of time. What are some good introductory resources? Where should I start, you know? So we sort of had a conversation and I just was talking to him about how, like, look, a lot of your skills are going to, you know, transfer over, because when you think about it, like even connecting to the cloud.

William: 32:16

Okay, if you're connecting from like a colo or on-premises somewhere you have internet. You have connecting from like a colo or on-premises somewhere you have internet. You have to run bgp over it. You have a gateway in the cloud. Um, on that gate, I mean in azure, like you were talking azure specifically, um for a while there, um, you couldn't do um, um, what is it? Were you um bi-directional forwarding detection with bgp, so azure didn't. You have to have that set basically on both sides, and azure didn't have that feature available until 20, I can't remember now. Um, it was like not that long ago and you know.

William: 32:54

Once you zoom out though, so you're still doing all these things you're using, you know, as path prepend, you're doing like really common routing. You know policy and design and architecture that you've done historically. You're just doing it in a different place. It's still tunnels, still vpns. Yeah, there's different endpoints and different availability zones maybe, and you have to configure redundancy a little bit different, but those skills transfer directly, like if you're connecting to cloud providers. In that sense, you have a lot that you're bringing with you. So start on those solid foundational things of what you know and then just start taking on a little more a little more a and these cloud providers.

William: 33:40

they have great free tiers.

Eyvonne: 33:42

All of them do really?

William: 33:46

And what do you have to lose to go in and mess around in a free tier and poke around and start learning these things? It's not as bad as what it seems. I guess is what I'm saying. So when I hear, I guess, one of the things in the slides too, I remember distinctly seeing. I don't know, I can't remember where it was, so forgive me, but you had like, is, I think it was like is network engineering a dying field, or is it going away, or something along those lines. So do you want to expand on on that a little bit?

Nicholas: 34:19

so I mean I'll have to call out Andy on that one, because that's what he brought up. Actually I think it's a topic they covered on one of their not their podcast, but the one he was on. He talked about it and I said you know, that's a good thing, because so I teach at the local Florida State College of Jacksonville and of course, everybody there I ask first day class hey, what's your name is and what's your degree path and what do you want to do? Because your degree path may not also be what you want to do. So a lot of them are like I have mainly security, everyone's BIT security. I'm like okay, and I have like maybe one or two networking. This semester I had the most networking. Actually, this semester I had the most female students too. Usually it's like one out of 24. Now it's like seven each class, so that those numbers are going up too. That's positive. And I go guys, thanks for showing up. You know like this is great. I'd love to see more diversity here. But yeah, there's not a lot of networking. People want to do networking. I try to convert them over and I said, okay, guys to do network security.

Nicholas: 35:22

Maybe you should learn the dark side of networking. First, like come on, we have cookies. I think so do. I think it's a dying breed. You know, I don't really think so. I think we forget about the plumbers. You know we forget about us. You know making things work. And also, I think we have to wear different hats a lot more. I think our titles have just been maybe changed to architect or cloud, even though we're still doing things on prem Right. So I think titles might change or abstraction, say oh, we're here now, we don't worry about this, but you still can get the internet Still has to happen.

William: 36:00

Yeah, yeah, that makes that makes sense. And you know, t T, c, p, I P hasn't changed since the you know nineties. Bgp hasn't changed much, and just how we control them. That's one thing that I think a lot about is like okay, the technologies haven't changed, but especially for network engineers. About is like okay, the technologies haven't changed, but especially for network engineers, the thing that I see that changed the most as I pivoted to cloud was a lot of the things that I'm actually interacting with are almost the same thing, but the way that I'm interacting with them is very different.

William: 36:37

It's a tooling change. So instead of using, instead of attaching text files to change orders and then copying commands into CLIs, I'm committing things into a Git repository. That's triggering something and then it's using, you know, api calls or hooks or something or another to go and configure a component somewhere, a component somewhere you know, and that that is some. There is a lot of hesitancy to learn and to get into those tools because it's like, oh, immediately. It's like, oh, I'm, I've got to be a software developer now. And no, not really. It's a far cry from being a software developer and it's really not that hard if you can, if you can memorize cisco commands and debug and do different things in a Cisco CLI. Believe me, you can do all of those things.

Nicholas: 37:25

I agree with you a hundred percent. So I was one of those people where I was afraid to do automation with a networking stack and I was like, well, first I didn't have that many switches 70 to a hundred, I think. At one point I had 300 devices. But it's between different brands and I was fine doing a lot of manual stuff on them because a lot of them are static, right.

Nicholas: 37:47

But this job, when I first got there, we want to rotate the Wi-Fi passwords on the guest Wi-Fi for Meraki's. And I'm like, all right, I think there's an automation way to do it. And I got to tell you, between John Capbianco and another guy, angel, on the group there, you know I stole a lot of things from the Internet and I referenced them. So you know I gave everybody credit and you know those guys kind of pushed well, how about you add a QR code? How would you do this to it? And then John's like, why don't you submit this to DevNet? And so, yeah, yeah, so now I have a DevNet published Meraki Wi-Fi rotate to rotate your password, the API, and then emails you the QR code and just a little CSS HTML inside Say, hey, here's your password, post it somewhere.

Eyvonne: 38:36

But one of the things I take away from that is you know that what if? Question is so important. Right Is just embrace the curiosity of well, what if? Like, could you Wouldn't it be interesting if? And to ask those questions and then try and answer them? I think that's, frankly, a really profound way to learn. It sounds so simple, frankly, a really profound way to learn. It sounds so simple, but the folks that are doing the most interesting things in our world right now are asking those kinds of questions.

Eyvonne: 39:12

And, William, as you were talking about how the implementation is changing, the move from oh okay, I'm going to write a script and I'm going to attach it to my change control system and instead of that now I'm going to check something into a repository and trigger some actions.

Eyvonne: 39:32

You know, I've I've been trying to articulate some of the challenges that enterprise IT has and some of the things that we need to understand about how they operate, and I think one of the things we need to be on guard against is linking the implementation to either the policy or the goal or objective, and so often we get so wrapped up in the implementation, in other words, how I do it as cli commands or our change control system or like someday there's going to be something beyond get and then we're going to have a whole universe of people that are like I I do it the old fashioned way with get right.

Eyvonne: 40:23

I mean, we have to hold all of those tools loosely and really think about what we do in terms of what we're accomplishing, not the particular tool that we're using, and I feel like that's so much of where the conversational churn is. It's really just around the tools and the tools are tools. They're what we are using today to do the thing. In another decade, ai is radically going to change those tools, and I know that folks are tired of hearing about it and we're entering the trough of disillusionment. I believe, around that technology, but it is going to change how we work and we need to start thinking more in terms of function as opposed to specific tool.

William: 41:09

Those are great points. Yeah, speaking of AI, like I was just reading something last night my wife was getting annoyed. She's like can you stop reading that, because it was like later and I'm like I can't. I got to get through this thing. But it was like a group of PhDs in biology and like all these different fields that were testing the new Chad GPT 4.0 model and these two of them I know like one of them especially, which is where I found the article, because I was looking this person up because he's done a lot of like research and writing on how dismal the previous models were with their field but this whole group was like, okay, this 4-0 chat gpt model is the real deal. This is solving things. They had like a series of tests that they use for all the phd students and different things and it's scoring better than even the professors were scoring at some of these things and the answers were really good.

William: 42:07

It was not hallucinating as much and the whole chain of thought thing is apparently really really strong and and fine, you know getting to the root cause of like really complex principles and questions and things. So, yeah, I think the change is coming and it's coming faster than what I expected it to. I remember when, so the first time I remember ChatGPT actually I'm sorry to sidebar here, but ChatGPT came out and I hadn't even created an account. I'd saw a few things. I think I actually saw something on the news and I was helping somebody that I know write a little bit of a web crawler. They were trying to do something really specific and they're like hey, can you look at this Python code? So I was helping them out and this person's not a coder, doesn't like to write code, took something that they'd already found on the internet.

William: 42:59

And then they come back a week later and they have like a full fledged like. They have classes, they have all this object, like this beautiful thing that's solving their exact use case and so much more. I'm like we're how did you what? Who did this for you? And they're like I did it. And I'm like no, you like really no way. And he's like, no, I use chat gpt and I'm like wait, that thing that I saw on the news and and that's where it hit me like wow, this is, this is kind of a game changer, this is pretty cool, um well, I think.

Eyvonne: 43:33

I think the thing to think about there is you need to be familiar enough with it to know what things is it making easy and what things are still hard, and you need to lean into the hard things right, knowing that that's going to continue to change. But if there's something you're doing today that it makes incredibly easy, what that means is that work is going to be less valuable in the marketplace. That is an objective reality that we have to embrace, accept and then look where things are still hard, because there's always going to be hard work to do. Um, and that's how we are all able to to grow and have economic value is to to do the hard things. So, um, so yeah, but it but it's, it's a new tool and we'll figure it out.

William: 44:29

I wanted to ask one more question. I know we got it. I think we have probably like five minutes here, but I wanted to hit a little bit on your teaching. So there's one thing that I learned in the past is when you go to teach something, you think you can teach something, but it will challenge you on all those small details. Like, maybe you don't know something as good as you thought you did At least that's my experience but you teach a few comptia classes, right? Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about those and how that's impacted your learning, and you know the pros and the cons trade-offs oh yeah, so I started teaching.

Nicholas: 45:07

This is my going in my third year of january, so this is my second year of January, so the end of my second year of teaching and, um, luckily, a+. I could start off like I have no lesson plan. So I have a syllabus, I have a tracker, but I don't lesson plan. I just kind of go look at the syllabus, pull the chapter PowerPoints, say alright, guys, let's go, let's rip and roll. Um, and I will tell you yeah, sometimes I'll go through some things and go you know what.

Nicholas: 45:33

IRQ. Ooh, why was that in port before? You know? And we'll go through that a little bit. Then I say hey guys, by the way, though IRQs for the test, yeah, you should know it. But practicality, anymore we're not Windows 98. We don't worry about how many IRQs are open anymore. You know, we've gotten better Like, when I talk about drivers I'm like okay, since Windows 8.1, we got really good self-loaded drivers, so there's very little things you have to do drivers for now. You should know what a driver does and you should know you might need to install drivers. But I got to tell you Easy Button's been hitting a lot of these things and I tell a lot of this teaching with stories, and I tell all the stories when I teach, and that with stories, and I tell all the stories when I teach. And that's why my lectures are three hours long, because I'm from new york, I like to talk so well, even in linux.

William: 46:20

Even in linux, the driver stuff is largely solved. I installed ubuntu the other day on a spare machine and, like even the wireless, I didn't have to do anything. Everything just worked yes, wait, wireless.

Eyvonne: 46:33

What about bluetooth? Did you try bluetooth?

William: 46:34

everything, so I have the laptop sitting right there and it's an older laptop too. Everything just worked.

Eyvonne: 46:40

I was, I was it's been a long time, yeah, since I've done that, so it's good to hear ubuntu has been great.

Nicholas: 46:47

I installed the arm on my m1 mac the arm version because that's what I use for teaching, and it's so I followed the book along with the students. I kind of do the that side by, because that's what I use for teaching, and so I followed the book along with the students. I kind of do that side by side. It's funny because Linux changed so fast, so the new Ubuntu doesn't have the commands that even the book wants you, so I'll sit there. Oh, here's how you install the command, guys. You know this is an older one, here's the newer one. And yeah, it's always fun doing the fly there. The Linux class is knocking out some rough buckets, that's for sure.

William: 47:15

Linux is important. If there's one skill that I think anybody should know, and it doesn't matter, with your database network security server, if you learn Linux, you're going to set yourself up for You're starting with a good foundation. In your Linux course that you teach, do you have a lot of receptive listeners like are they actually interested in learning it, or is it kind of like, oh, we just need to do this or what is your take there?

Nicholas: 47:43

I think well, first, the class is called operating system fundamentals, so it's kind of shadowed as like linux plus. I go, hey guys, birthday. This is linux plus guys. I don't know why they call operating systems fundamentals, but also this is where the nerds happen, this is where all the fun stuff happens. You want to be a good tinkerer? You want to have fun in IT? You want to mess around? This is the OS for you right.

Nicholas: 48:05

And at first they're like now they actually enjoy it. I have students say, hey, how do I install Ubuntu on my PC? I'm like, all right, here's VirtualBox, here's VMware Workstation. Now it's free, which is fantastic. I love that. Broadcom did that, I think the only positive out of that change. But yeah, I think they've gone from I don't know to. A lot of them are still using it and they're tinkering around with it and they're loving it.

William: 48:31

That's awesome still using it and they're tinkering around with it and they're loving it. That's awesome. Good to know I think we're coming up on time. Do you have anything else, yvonne? I'm good, good. Do you want to just tell the audience where they?

Nicholas: 48:48

can find you, Nick, Mainly I do have a Twitter account. I really mainly follow you guys on Twitter. I'm not active that much, but I've heard my following on the. Hey, no, it's great stuff. I it's always great, Like Yvonne, watching your house being built. That was fantastic. It's beautiful. The shed, the house, yeah, those are great and but usually LinkedIn. I kind of stick to LinkedIn for that one. But I'm on LinkedIn. I have a website which I probably should buy the domain for, so I'm just using the Wix site there. But, yeah, LinkedIn there and just all around you know, doing a lot of different things.

William: 49:28

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate your time and, yeah, I'll link everything in the show notes that we talked about throughout the episode.

Nicholas: 49:36

Thank you, Thanks for having me Appreciate you guys. Always good to talk with you guys.