TNO072: Connectivity and Community
A walk back through the career so far, and how connectivity work and community building ended up being the same job.
A walk back through the career so far, and how connectivity work and community building ended up being the same job.
What a network needs to look like before AI workloads run well on it, rather than becoming the bottleneck.
How and why to think holistically about your network instead of optimising one box at a time.
Why the people you know move your career further than the certifications you hold.
Where telemetry and AI actually help the handoff between network, security and platform teams.
Podcast panel on why most networks are still flying with far less instrumentation than they need.
On building community in networking, and why connecting people compounds in a way technical skill alone does not.
Where AI is actually landing in network operations, and where it is still a slide.
A practitioner conversation on automation and AI without the vendor framing.
Where AI is genuinely useful inside network operations, and what it still cannot do for you.
An honest account of leaving a job to start something, and what nobody tells you first.
Delegate session arguing that virtual network isolation is not the air gap people think it is.
Presenting USNUA to the Field Day delegates. A vendor-neutral environment to talk networks.
Panel on whether the complexity in modern networks is essential or self-inflicted.
Long-form conversation on the career, the community and the road from dial-up helpdesk to service provider engineering.
Breaking down where Fortinet's SD-WAN architecture differs from the rest of the field.
Pulling apart what SASE means once you remove the category name.
A walk through SD-WAN architecture and where it genuinely changes the operating model.
Scaling a healthcare network through acquisition without the WAN becoming the bottleneck.
The audio of the same conversation: why the network only makes sense read as a whole.
Why the people you know move your career further than the certifications you hold.
On building community in networking, and why connecting people compounds in a way technical skill alone does not.
Why the org chart breaks the network design more often than the vendor does.
What connectivity looks like for education networks, where the budget and the threat model are both unusual.
Unpacking IRR and RPSL for people who inherited a routing policy they did not write.
How a regional user group became a national practitioner community, and why that is harder than it sounds.
Operating dual-stack on an exchange fabric, from the board side and the switch side.
The parts of a technical career that do not go on a résumé.
Meetups for network engineers, and what makes one work.
The road from dial-up helpdesk to service provider engineering, and what an exchange actually does.
Network as a service, what it actually replaces and what it quietly does not.
Enterprise WAN economics with the people who count the cables.
Building network infrastructure and community from Cleveland.
Translating an architecture decision into something a CFO signs.
The obituary was premature, and the reasons why are the interesting part.
A market read from inside it, before the consolidation.
What the technology actually did once it hit production networks.
An early conversation on where enterprise connectivity was heading.
What network infrastructure as a service changes about how connectivity gets bought and operated.
Where machine learning earns its place in network operations, and the use cases that hold up in production.
SD-WAN does not repeal physics. What the underlay still has to deliver before the overlay can do its job.
Getting real visibility out of flow data without drowning the team in alerts.
An early look at making the public internet carry real-time traffic predictably enough to trust.
I am happy to come on and talk about transport economics, peering, internet exchanges, network automation, practical AI in operations, or what running a small consulting practice actually looks like. No prep deck required.
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