Training

have you thought recently how oversubscribed are acronyms you’re using daily if you’re in IT? i just spent the whole day listening about VPC, but not vPC or VPC - but about Virtual Private Cloud in AWS services. not about virtual Private Channel or Virtual Path Connection and neither about Virtual Packet Core. and i have to admit, i liked it. i’ve spent whole day on a Mirek Burnejkos training dedicated to clouds. as Robert Ślaski was preaching on recent PLNOG - every respectable network engineer should have good idea how cloud works, and what are capabilities of different providers - like AWS or Azure. that’s the way todays IT and OT world looks like. the better you are about understanding specifics, the better you’ll be at positioning them in your real-life projects. and advice to users or customers. ...

NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources. ...

it will be unique opportunity in Poland and in this part of Europe. with group of my dear friends and design masters - Piotr Jabłoński, Sebastian Pasternacki and Piotr Matusiak i’ll be delivering bootcamp-type of training for CCDE. we’re starting on 5th of may - and you can find more details here.

i’ve had a opportunity today to take the CCDE exam in London again. accompanied by two fellow SEs and one of the engineers working for Cisco Partner in Poland, we’ve took our chances. and it’s definitely better - feedback works. out of 6 scenarios you work only with 4, split statically by 2 for before and after the lunch. questions are more to the point, and there’s less of text to look for information from. there’s less of mistakes as well. finally it’s the exam you can pass, this time however it seems it is more focused on book knowledge not necessarily experience. ...

I’ve took a CCDE practical earlier today, and for the second time I’m pretty clueless how it went, however I have a strong feeling that it was similar to my first take: no go. this time I’ve spent 7 hours, not 5, to do the test, however most of the time I was trying to answer questions based on the small set of information provided. again I’m under strong feeling, that the set of information was not enough to judge on some of the questions, not to mention the effect Russ White describes as “you’d be confused for the whole time”. it basically boils down to the fact that you answer a question from the design that’s clearly up to the explicitly given scenario information, just to notice that couple of questions forward, the design, topology or set of “going forward” information is different. confusing, to say at least :) ...

today I’ve met CCDE practical exam heads-on in London. it’s a new one at the Expert level, focusing on designing and redesigning of the networks - according to the virtual needs of virtual customers. after the Networkers CCDE presentation delivered by one of the authors of the CCDE program - Russ White - it’s hard to expect anything different than what they say. it’s very focused on “why”, and “how” is touched only in some generic terms. in other words, CLI-masters will get bored, but you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about subjects like: ...

6 people responded to my call for a Cisco FAQ PL conversion idea up until today… but unfortunately there are no results so far. well, maybe it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself … in unrelated, but more optimistic news - a week ago i finished delivering SMB Bootcamp for Cisco partners. there was a lot of work (3 days, 12-14 hours each). you can read a bit about it in the link above on the CCIE.PL forum (i’d like to invite you to visit it). but everything thats good ends quickly - the equipment was packed and we went home. ...