Following me migrating my website to github pages a couple of weeks ago, it became pretty apparent that my Blog was barren and largely empty. So I decided to resurrect it and pledge to add content more frequently.

This week BT sent me on some Cisco sponsored SD-WAN training in Manchester. The venue Cisco chose for the event was the home of Manchester United Football club - Old Trafford. As a Liverpool fan, the venue is a place that doesn’t allure me in the way it would united fans, but it was a welcome change from some of the uniform BT buildings I have been in training at recently :)

All in all I have been working within the same team within BT for about 12 years now. In certain situations this would be a sign of either

• A lack of motivation to progress your career
• A real enjoyment and motivation for the current role

In the role that I am in currently it’s not really that simple if I’m honest. This is probably just me trying to defend my position but I have to say I fully believe this statement. You see when you work for a highly technical team in the field of Network Engineering, by necessity the role will be somewhat ever changing due to improvements in technologies. For instance, when I started in the role in 2004 WAN technologies were all about TDM based leased lines or frame relay networks, etc. Whereas today’s WAN technologies can very from using Ethernet delivered MPLS type networks, IP VPN, VxLAN and many more. I guess what I’m saying is that over the passing of time in the role, my learnings have been vast. To that end I haven’t really felt at any time that I was staying stagnant or trapped. The role has seen a progression from junior engineer to subject matter expert/lead engineer.

Well it’s over a month since #CLEUR in Berlin. This was my first time ever attending the event and I have to admit, the sheer scale of the event took me by surprise. It really is colossal! We were told at the Keynote on the Tuesday morning that there are 12k attendees here. The venue is the Messe Buildings in Berlin.

Monday morning we arrived into the Tegel airport at around 10:30 local time (I travelled with Paddy Kelly from our design team) and as neither of us were due for our first session until 2pm, we decided to head for our hotel to get checked in. We had a quick bite to eat and headed up on the S Bahn to the conference. Our hotel was the Hampton by Hilton – which worked out really well and was a great location for getting to either town, conference or airport.