Rather than simply try one of the ROUTE, SWITCH or TSHOOT exams again, I thought I would advance my learning by taking on the ARCH 300-320

George Ryan - A New Tech Apprenticeship for Ireland - FIT

Following the customary introductions and “Code Of Conduct” was read out by [“Donal (@irldexter)”] (https://twitter.com/irldexter) the first talk this evening was from George Ryan. George is COO of “FIT”. This lightning talk had the sole purpose to make us all aware of the organisation and indeed the fact that they are operating a pay and learn Technical Apprenticeship programme and skills partnership.

• I needed to road-test my employer’s “Agile Connect” SD-WAN product which is based on Nokia Nuage Network’s VNS SD-WAN offering and had to carve off a new VLAN to plug the NSG-E into.

and

• I wanted to ensure my HOMELAN was completely v6-ified once again following several months using Google Wifi without my hosts having native v6.

Connecting my NSG

There are a couple of us in BT Ireland that have been given the task of road-testing the NSGs and indeed our service wrap for this technology which has a product name of “Agile Connect”. The intention is that we have active familiarity with the technology when we are doing customer engagement and can demonstrate our orchestration and reporting portal with ease and comfort.

With my change of role since 2016, attending the meetings are sadly not a core responsibility of mine for $day_job but that said, who in their right mind that has any involvement in the networking community ignores the meetings (amirite)? At any chance I get during the week, I either remotely participate in the live meeting or failing that, check back on the presentation archives after the fact. A couple of key and to me seminal presentations were;

vim some-super-interesting-file.md
:wq
git add some-super-interesting-file.md
git commit -m "some commit message"
git push origin whatever-branch

It’s pretty simple and straightforward and outside of needing to do the odd git pull in my project directory from time to time because I’ve done some updates either directly on github.com or on another machine, it’s been pretty flawless.

So any time the meetings are held and I can work it into my working schedule without having a clash with other customer meetings etc I make it my business to attend. It’s also a really good way to stay embedded with what’s relevant in terms of technologies in use by Service Providers / Peers in the industry.

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 :)

• 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.

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.