Scott Robohn had me on Total Network Operations to trace the path from a Commodore VIC-20 to a dial-up helpdesk in Cleveland to the US Networking User Association, including the day I locked myself out of 34 DSLAMs.
11 Sep 2026 · 3 min read
A talk at a Selector event on why most AI-in-networking projects stall, and six things to get right before you pick a model. Most of them are about people and data, not technology.
24 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray had me on Heavy Networking to talk through a blog post of mine, The Network as a Whole. Why one VLAN change can end in Wi-Fi complaints, why certs do not teach design, and why you should break your labs on purpose.
12 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Recorded in person with Andy Lapteff at Networking Field Day 40. How the USNUA went from fifteen people in a Cleveland restaurant to 33 chapters, and why getting in the room still beats anything you can put on a resume.
6 May 2026 · 3 min read
A short clip from the Tech Field Day Podcast at NFD40. Yes, networks need more telemetry, but only if the data is clean and you look at the whole system rather than the network in isolation.
13 Apr 2026 · 1 min read
A Tech Field Day Podcast panel ahead of NFD40 with Tom Hollingsworth and Scott Robohn. Modern gear can finally give us all the telemetry we want. The harder problem is what to do with it.
7 Apr 2026 · 2 min read
Bob Slevin asked what my superpower is. The answer is connecting people. We covered the USNUA, why certs still matter early on, the retailer who built their own router for 1,600 stores, and the punk-rock skate-rat path from a movie theater to network engineering.
1 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
A December episode of Laketec's Network Buzz with Mike Trappe and Phil Wightman: HPE Aruba Networking's new Central, what we brought back from AutoCon, how to make the business case for automation, where AI lowers the barrier, and Christmas ales.
17 Dec 2025 · 1 min read
Phil Howard's Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, with Doug Edmunds of Summit Design and Engineering. A real SD-WAN deployment across North Carolina, why MPLS is not dead but is not the default either, and the line the episode is named after.
31 Oct 2025 · 3 min read
Telemetry Now on SLED networking with Phil Gervasi and Laketec's Philip Wightman. E-Rate, one-person IT departments, why K-12 networks are not as simple as people assume, and the automation we were building for the summer refresh season.
18 Jun 2025 · 2 min read
Cables to Clouds had Scott Robohn on about leaving corporate to go independent. Tim and Chris asked me for the other side of the coin: eight years running WAN Dynamics, the exit, the burnout, and why I went back to a job.
13 Jun 2025 · 3 min read
Ethan Banks read my post on IRR and RPSL and wanted the long version. Jake Khuon, who ran RADb at Merit in the 1990s, joined us: what routing policy is, why you will not get routed without it in 2025, how the registries fit together, and how to get started.
30 May 2025 · 3 min read