About this time last year, I wrote this post.  It’s time to revisit again and plan for 2016. 

 

How did I do?

In 2015, I planned to work on skills in four major areas; python, data science, virtualization, and then just keep up on networking.  In general, I think I did good in all areas, with the breakaway really being in the python area. I made a concerted effort this to year to seek out project after project that would allow me to explore different aspects of python, and force me to grow in as many areas as possible. Attending Interop sessions led by such trailblazers as Jason Edelman, Jeremy Schulman, and Matt Oswalt definitely gave me ideas and inspiration to explore new areas, push boundaries, and have really helped me to grow as a coder/developer not to mention really helped me to cement some opinions on the future of networking in general.

I did manage to get through a bunch of the R courses in Cousera and they were great. I’d love to say that I’m going to return and finish the specialization  (I’m two courses shorts) but if I”m honest, I’m probably going to move towards the Data Science aspects of Python and get into Anaconda and Pandas more in 2016. Nothing like combining two growth areas into one to really push the growth. 

 

More so this year that others, having great conversations over beers, Moscow Mules, and many a sugery umbrella drink helped me expand my knowledge and firm up some of the thoughts I’ve been having for the last couple of years. No need to name drop, but you all know who you are and I’d like to say thanks for all of the conversations and laughs. As much as I love the tech, it’s the people that always help to drive me forward. 

If I’m keeping score, I think that 2015 was a good year. 

 

Plans Plans Plans

Now comes time to publicly declare what I want to accomplish in 2016. This is always the scary part as I know I’m now publicly accountable for any grandiose designs I throw into the ether. 🙂 

 

Practice to Application:

 

I’ve got a bit of a lab at home. If things go as planned, at the end of the year, I will be able to factory reset *almost* the entire lab and have it come back from the dead in a completely automated fashion. The plan here is to use a combination of python, jinja2, IMC, Ansible, and whatever other pieces I need to duck tape together to make this work by the end of the year.  Just because I like to make my life harder than it has to be, I’m planning on building out the topology using vendor independent methodologies, meaning that I want to be able to place a Cisco, HP, or Juniper box into any position in my lab access/distribution/core/dmz/wan/etc… and use a YAML file to dynamically build the required configurations on demand.  

 

Yeah… I know….   But it’s good to set goals right?

 

OpenSwitch

OpenSwitch is also another area which I will definitely be exploring during 2016.  The project is still very new and definitely has some places, mostly in the documentation area, where there’s room to make a difference. I’ve been really lucky to be able to work at a place where I have direct access to some of the projects core developers and I’m hoping I can share the fruits of that access in more blogs posts, pull requests to enhance the documentation, as well as some interoperability testing with some of the usual-suspect network kit that I already have in my lab. Right now, I’m thinking OSPF, BGP, Spanning-Tree as an unambitious start, and moving from there to using the declarative interface and REST interfaces to see how I can incorporate it into project one.

 

 

Thoughts on 2015

2015 was a good year. As an industry, I think we’ve made some great gains in general. The whole “Is SDN really a thing?” conversations seem to be over and we’ve moved on to “ I don’t care what you call it, what does it do for me?” conversations  are starting to really get interesting.  The projects with value are starting to separate themselves from the science fair exhibits and it looks like parts of the networking profession are finally past the out-right denial and have reached the bargaining stage ( “ Can someone else write the scripts for me? Please? ) 

I’ve been able to make forward momentum in all the areas I wanted to and I’m generally where I thought I was going to be at the start of the year.

 

Looking forward to 2016!

 

@netmanchris