Tom Ammon

A while back I got interviewed on The Hedge podcast about Jurassic Cloud, old interfaces and the evolution of compute landscape. Sadly I neglected to tweet about it 🤦🏻‍♀️ 10x @tomammon @rtggeek rule11.tech/hedge-160/

Computers only have a history stretching back some 60 or 70 years—and yet much of that history has already been lost in this mist of time. Are we focusing so deeply on the future that we have forgotten our past? What might we learn from the past, even the recent past, and how does forgetting our past impact the future. Federico Lucifredi joins @tomammon and Russ White to discuss some of his projects finding, repairing, and operating old personal computers. rule11.tech/hedge-185/ #retrocomputing

When network engineers think of a data center, we think of fabrics and routers and switches. There is a lot more to a data center, though—there is power, building construction, environmentals, and a lot of others. What possible jobs are out there in the data center space for people who want to work in IT, but don't either want to code or build networks? Carrie Goetz, author of Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers joins @tomammon and Russ White to tell us about a few, and about the importance of other careers in the data center. rule11.tech/hedge-189/ #networkengineering #datacenter

Original: "EVPN-VXLAN is complicated. We'll use Ansible to automate it so we don't have to worry about it." Translated: "LOL, we can fix this gearbox by dumping a bag of wrenches into it."

@network_phil I'm starting to appreciate some of the engineering realities behind vendor-qualified optics. Not the absurd markups, but the fact that not all optics are going to automatically work with every NOS and switch chip. Don't come at me with pitchforks, people!

Was talking to a friend who runs a hospital network, and the total cost of SFPs for a DC upgrade he's doing is NUTS They're all high speed links, and I remember quoting SFPs back when I was in pre-sales so it shouldn't surprise me - but wow - the cost of SFPs always amazes me

@danieldibswe (smartalek answer incoming) Use SONiC on the switches and a Y-Cable! I wish I was joking...credosemi.com/wp-content/upl…

Let's say you have an end user that needs better availability than connecting its NIC to a single switch. What solutions would you look into? NIC with multiple ports and LACP to a cluster of switches? Some type of NIC that takes up one port when other goes down? Flexlink ish.

@supertylerc 100% agree. My team just finished an innovation sprint and it unlocked some pretty great results.

Additionally, your team should have quarterly design/architecture breakouts 100% unrelated to current business. Flexing these muscles outside of current business context helps the team think about business problems differently, resulting in the better overall solutions.

Unpopular (?) opinion: if you’re in tech, your team should have have one innovation day every week. This might be directly or indirectly related to business goals. The key is to stretch your creative and mental muscles.

Hedge 153: Security Perceptions and Multicloud Roundtable rule11.tech/hedge-153/

@networkservice why you give up so soon? ;-)

j/k there is no way

porting sonic to nix out of pure spite (and brute forcing my own knowledge acquisition)

Hedge 151: Cecilia Testart and the Value of the RPKI rule11.tech/hedge-151-ceci…

"I'm gonna get this perfect!" Perfect for...what? A changing world and problem set where that perfect match won't last anyway? The vast majority of the time, your design is against a target that shifts over time and chasing perfection is a waste of energy. Be practical too.

Hedge 149: Roundtable rule11.tech/hedge-149-roun…

@PeteCCDE How about "Principal Knowledge Engineer"? Or "Keeper of the abstraction between machines and humans". Docs are the ultimate API :-)

"network engineer" has been the last 15 years. I'm not that anymore. Docs guy? Docs engineer? (What even is that?). Cloud stuff?

The hardest thing about the career change is figuring out how to describe "me" in the context of a job/profession.

WEmulate v2 is released 🥳🍻 WEmulate is a simple and modern open source WAN emulator. Besides the Wemulate module, an API and a frontend module are also available. github.com/wemulate/wemul…

You can either deal with stuff tactically a thousand times, or deal with it at the systems level. It feels like more work to go the systems thinking route, but I can assure you it's not. It's not by a long shot.

@networkservice I'm not sure it's possible to be successful with sonic without a direct relationship with an ODM.

over the course of seven business days, the people who took the money was able to agree "the files are indeed missing!" and that the ODM would need to answer. I asked to speak to the ODM engineers directly, noting support RTT and building SONiC was key to a successful eval.

just gonna publicly tweet my experiences trying to successfully compile a SONiC release (or any git hash at this point) to work on a device that is supported by SONiC and vendors.

Hedge 147: The SRE with Niall Murphy (part 1) rule11.tech/hedge-147/

@PeteCCDE @showipintbri @TracketPacer Sorry, I meant to say " a time nerd ". Talk about needing precision, sheesh.

@PeteCCDE @showipintbri @TracketPacer NTP++, 🤣 there's an NTP nerd somewhere in the world right now who is utterly disappointed in humanity...

for the past 7 months i’ve been going really hard at rebuilding a partially-built lab rack basically from the bottom up… as frustrating as it’s been, i’ve learned a shit ton from this experience. when i finish it, i really wanna write all about it.