networking

Cisco Live: Lessons Learned as a First Timer

Posted on by Mike Bolitho

After around 12 years in the industry, primarily working on Cisco gear, I finally got to my first Cisco Live. I want to keep this fairly short so I’m just going to jump right in with my seven lessons learned.

1: Get in early. Get the earliest flight into town as you can. If you plan on taking a session or two on Day 0 make sure you are there the day before. My flight was pretty uneventful getting in on Sunday but there were a few stories of people getting delayed and showing up very late Sunday night. That makes for a pretty rough Day 1 on Monday. I am considering coming in a full day early so I can settle in a bit more. I felt rushed to check-in and head down to the Cisco Champions events we had planned. I also had a team dinner to get to that night. If I flew in on Saturday night, Sunday would have felt a lot less stressful.

2: Stay as close to the convention center as possible. I stayed at the Luxor because it was cheap. For an extra couple hundred dollars I could have stayed at the Mandalay Bay. I walked about 31 miles, in Vans. Probably half of that was walking between the convention center and the Luxor and then down to the MGM for a few events. Aside from not getting in almost 80,000 steps, I could have had more “down time”. Have 30 minutes between sessions and feel like kicking your legs up? Head upstairs. To my room was about 3,800 feet in a straight line from the convention center. With all the turns, you’re probably looking at a 1.5 mile round trip.

3: Wear comfortable shoes. Did you notice how I said I walked 30+ miles in Vans? Yeah, that was a huge mistake. I didn’t want to look like a full blown dork so I didn’t wear my running shoes. Don’t be dumb. The conference was full of giant dorks. Just wear your trainers and don’t get blisters. Even if you stay at the convention center, you’re still gonna walk a lot.

4: Book out your week but be completely willing to bail on sessions or events. Just make sure you unregister on the app from your sessions so others can join. Most of the sessions I attended were fantastic. I had one dud that should have been called 6GHz for dummies. It looked like a more in depth class but really it was very entry level. That’s not a bad thing, however I wasn’t the target audience. I actually stepped out early on it. Look, I know these guys and gals spend a lot of time preparing for their sessions but at the end of the day you or your company are paying a lot of money to attend. Use your time wisely. I was able to head right back down to the World of Solutions to do some more walking around. That was a better use of my time. You also might not feel like attending a session you registered for. I missed one on Thursday morning because, well, Elton John. It’s OK. Be flexible. Don’t go crazy and crash and burn on Day 2.

5: Kinda following in number four’s footsteps is: Make room for the World of Solutions. There are so many really incredible things to do down there. From Capture the Flag events, to vendor demos, to just hanging out with folks you came with or just met. Take advantage of what is there. As an individual (and a team) I had several very good conversations downstairs with Cisco teams and a tons of vendors. In fact, we are kicking off three proof of concepts in the next two weeks based solely on those conversations. One with a Cisco product and two with vendors.

6: Go to the dinners you get invited to, within reason of course. There were some really good ones this year. I also heard there were a couple of flops. If it’s a 100% sales pitch, skip it. But if it’s about networking (the people kind), go for it! Cisco Champions Banters and Beers was a ton of fun. So was my VAR’s event. So was the ThousandEyes event.

7: Most importantly, make new friends! Be awkward, ask to join a circle of folks chatting. During meal times sit with people you don’t know and introduce yourself. Every single person I met during CLUS was awesome and willing to let me in. Further, I have spent a considerable amount of time on Slack, Discord, NUGs, and Twitter over the years. Meeting all of those people in real life was by far the highlight of the week for me. The networking community is the best in the IT world (especially us Wi-Fi nerds!). Get to know people. They can help you with problems you’re facing both at work and in your personal life. They will rally around you no matter what. It’s what we do.

I think I did pretty well for my first CLUS. I had a great time and feel like I was able to maximize my experience. Let me know in the comments what things you have found to work well for you.

2021: A Recap and Looking Forward

Posted on by Mike Bolitho

2021 was an interesting year to say the least. I had some big plans for career progression and a handful of certifications to knock out along the way. I wanted to get both CCNP-W exams done (ENWLSD and ENWLSI), start playing around with Python, and get the DevNet associate taken care of to launch into network automation. The CWAP was a moon shot target for the end of the year/early 2022. After that I would look to make a career move into WiFi full-time. As they say, reality gets in the way sometimes and only one of those goals was crossed off the list. It is important to remember that it’s OK to “fail” at these sorts of things which is a big reason I mostly “write goals down in pencil”. At the end of the day they are just goals, don’t beat yourself up too much if you don’t hit them all. Projects ramped up at work, some disappointments left me disillusioned with an exam, and personal stuff slowed me down quite a bit. That didn’t mean the year was a waste or that I didn’t see any progression.

A busy year at work

The first year of COVID saw a ton of projects put on hold due to the potential risk to infrastructure stability during a pandemic. Once we had a better understanding of what we were facing as a country and a hospital system, the floodgates were opened up. We had a big backlog to get through plus everything planned for ’21. Some of these ended up being quite the mental drain and I just didn’t have the drive or capacity to open up a book at the end of the day. It seemed like one thing after another was last minute or on a very short timeline to begin with. One of my largest projects was bringing a new tower online at one of our hospitals. We dropped in nine 9410s, a pair of 5520s, and an additional 150 APs to support ~100 new patient beds. With all of the supply chain struggles and COVID restrictions it dragged on. This project ended up being a lot of fun and a huge pain all at once. It definitely felt good to get it done and it is probably the one thing I’m most proud of so far in my career. Less so for the complexity and more so for the community impact.

The entire left side past the ED is all new.

Frustrations with certifications

On the certification front I had some fairly ambitious goals. I was coming off of my CWDP in late December 2020 and was able to roll that momentum straight into the ENWLSD. I passed with flying colors in March. That exam was really straightforward and accessible after the CWDP. Honestly, it may have been TOO easy for a CCNP level exam. If you’re thinking about targeting it, maybe go get it out of the way before Cisco figures that out and makes revisions. I kept pushing to finish my CCNP-W track with ENWLSI and absolutely bombed it in August. This was very demoralizing after spending hours upon hours studying. Without getting into too many of the details (NDA and all that) the OCG (and frankly some of the blueprint) really didn’t line up well with the actual exam.

I vented on Twitter and /r/networking and found that I was in pretty good company. Most people found the exam to be troubling from an expectations perspective. The OCG was woefully inadequate making things much worse. I had been passing my Cisco Press practice exams in the 80% to 90% range setting me up for a false sense of security. I got frustrated early in the exam and things unraveled from there. My score report is below, needless to say, it was rough. I ended up walking away from that one unsure if I would ever sit for another Cisco exam because of how frustrated I was.

Taking a break

I put the ENWLSI book on the shelf and haven’t looked at it since. I did not even crack open the DevNet Associate book and I didn’t write a single line of Python in 2021. Things were pretty crazy around here with an insanely busy year at work, both kids in school, extracurricular activities for them, my wife ramping up from part-time to full-time work, and just the mental drag that has been the last two years of living in a pandemic. I let myself relax for a while which was a great decision. It was a very good season for me personally. It really is important to make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Grinding all of the time is hard. I’ve spent the last decade chasing certifications, promotions, and that next raise because I started this career later in life. I had to play catchup. I honestly don’t think I’ve taken much of a break from pushing for the next thing since I started in 2012. The rest was long overdue and I plan on working that in more over the next few years.

A new gig

There was one pretty unexpected win that came in November. Through some discussions and a possible opportunity outside of my org, I ended up landing on the wireless team here at my current employer. I had been having conversations with leadership about this for the last six months and we were trying to put together a road map to get there. Staffing in a very large organization is complex and slow but a window opened up and I was able to get placed on the team. I officially start with them in the new year and I’m really looking forward to expanding my wireless experience.

Looking forward

Even with the job change, I’m not going to stop pursuing progression. After taking all of that time away from certifications, I am feeling much better about jumping back in. A common piece of advice among those who eventually did pass the ENWLSI was “Pick up the CCIE-W v3 book”. I purchased that and started on some Anki cards this fall and will ramp up heavily in January. The plan is to finish the ENWLSI and then get after my CWAP. As for DevNet Associate, I think I got caught up in that whirlwind. Although it does look very interesting and there’s a ton of use for automation in my job, I’m going to focus on settling in over the next year. I’ll approach automation again sometime in very late 2022 or early 2023 if, and only if I have the capacity to do it right. Like I mentioned above, I’m going to slow things down a little and focus more on other aspects of life outside of work and career.

I hope everyone had great Christmas with family and friends. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2022!

A bit of background on me and my career

Posted on by Mike Bolitho

I figured I might as well kick this thing off with an intro post. I live in Phoenix, AZ with my wife and two kids. We have a son and daughter that are both in elementary school. We’ve been here for over a decade and although both my wife and I are transplants, we are fully rooted here in the desert. Most of that has to do with our amazing church community. That and it doesn’t snow. We are what you might consider “mildly outdoorsy”. We like exploring the parts of our state that we can drive to. If you could do overlanding via minivan, that would be our jam.

I’m originally from a small mountain town in Colorado. In classic angsty teen fashion I left immediately after high school and spent the next decade or so bouncing around the country pursuing a couple of different degrees and careers. Neither the degrees nor careers worked out for me. IT was actually a bit of a fall back. I had always liked tinkering around with technology but never seriously considered it for work. A good buddy of mine is a sysadmin, I knew he enjoyed his work and made a decent living so I asked him for some advice. He sat down with me and we worked out a path forward so I could try to get a start in the field. I built an ESXi homelab and started diving in.

Through a mutual friend, I was able to land a job in a NOC at a VAR doing server support. We also handled networking and security. I quickly found out that networking was much better and started working towards my CCNA. I ended up falling in love with the technology and began looking for a pure networking role.

My next stop landed me at a Tier I ISP doing break/fix in their national ethernet NOC. I spent four years there honing my craft and working my way up to a senior technician. I picked up my CCNP and was able to jump back to the enterprise side as an operations engineer for a large hospital system.

My team was tasked with implementing, maintaining, and fixing the campus network. I was heavily involved in all things break/fix as well as a ton of project work deploying technologies around the region. It ended up being around 40% break/fix and 60% implementation and project work. The job was really fun and fulfilling, and I had the privilege of working for a great boss on an incredible team.

Early on in my time here, I knew that wireless was my weak spot so I picked up a CWNA book and the rest, as they say, is history. Once I got my first taste of WiFi, I found that I enjoyed it immensely. I put myself in situations to absorb as much as I could from our wireless design team, volunteered for any sort of WiFi trouble tickets, and continued pursuing my CWNP and CCNP-W certifications. I subscribed to about every wireless podcast out there, have attended countless webinars, and watched dozens of videos from past conferences. An opportunity recently opened up on our wireless team and I was selected to fill the position.

I’m very excited to see where my career takes me as a wireless professional. I’ll be using this space to chronical the things I’m learning, labbing, discovering, and building on my path to CWNE. So, that is my life and career in a nutshell. I hope some of you find some value in what’s to come!