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
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
Several vendors at NFD37 described their products as air gapped. The delegates had questions. A Tech Field Day Podcast on what the term should mean, why "isolated" is the better word, and how to hold vendors to it.
15 Apr 2025 · 2 min read
Tech Field Day gave the USNUA a slot at NFD37. I walked the delegates through what it is, how the chapters run, how we keep sponsored events vendor-neutral, and Scott Robohn shared what year one of the Virginia NUG looked like.
24 Mar 2025 · 3 min read
An On-Premise IT Roundtable recorded at Networking Field Day 28 with Tom Hollingsworth, Jordan Villarreal and Martin Duggan. Overlays on overlays, stretched layer 2 that nobody wants, and the uncomfortable idea that a lot of our complexity exists because network engineers never pushed back.
24 Jun 2022 · 3 min read
An On-Premise IT Roundtable spotlight on Palo Alto Networks with Chris Grundemann and Rohan Grover. Recorded in the thick of the pandemic, when we were scaling customers onto Prisma Access in droves. SASE turned out to be more than a rebrand.
8 Feb 2021 · 2 min read