Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in October 2017. I’ve decided to add some content summaries so that you have good incentive to give some of the podcasts a listen if they tickle your fancy.
PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST
- Episode 360 – All About Optics With InterOptic (Sponsored) A show that got a lot of positive feedback from listeners. We covered the benefits & tradeoffs of using third party optics in switching equipment. InterOptic is an optics vendor.
- Episode 361 – The Future Of Networking With Brighten Godfrey Brighten is a PhD who founded Veriflow, a startup making a strong showing in mathematical verification of network intent.
- Episode 362 – Advanced Network Programmability With Cisco (Sponsored) Cisco’s service provider business unit sponsored this show to have a technical discussion about YANG and IOS-XR service level APIs.
- Episode 363 – How Networking Has Changed In 2017 Greg Ferro and I have a chinwag about what we think are the most interesting networking trends for this year. Topics include intent based networking, SD-WAN, and the marked rise of visibility and analytics platforms.
PRIORITY QUEUE PODCAST
- Episode 133 – Analytics & Automation Use Cases With Nokia Deepfield (Sponsored) Deepfield is about inferring critical network performance attributes that enable network operators to better utilize their infrastructure. Deepfield discusses how several actual customers leverage them, a good way to put some user meat on the product bones.
DATANAUTS PODCAST
- Episode 104 – Migrating Exchange To Office 365 A practical episode talking through how to plan and execute an on-premises to SaaS mail migration in a Microsoft environment. Our guest, Theresa Miller, has completed several of these migrations and shares her extensive wisdom. I was lucky enough to meet her at a Tech Field Day event over the summer, where we concocted the idea for this episode.
- Episode 105 – Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain One of the technically heaviest episodes of the year, because frankly, blockchain concepts and applications are a little hard to get your mind around. A couple of brainboxes from the Grid+ project share their knowledge.
- Episode 106 – Controlling AWS Costs Corey Quinn, author of the brilliant and snarky Last Week In AWS newsletter talks us through costly mistakes many organizations make when migrating to AWS, and how to mitigate them. This episode is on track to be one of the most popular Datanauts shows of the year.
- Episode 107 – Found On The Internet Series 3 Chris Wahl and I riff on blog posts and news stories we found interesting. We cover real-world enterprise container adoption, network topologies ideal for distributed storage, more PowerShell dark magic, the IT blame culture, and more. Oh, and Chris makes fun of me.
Briefings In Brief Podcast
- If you’ve not heard of Packet Pushers’ Briefings In Brief which we launched last month, each episode is a 5 minute or less summary of vendor briefings and news. In the month since takeoff, we’re seeing around 6K downloads a show, which we view as a successful launch.
- Episode 5 – PathSolutions Demo Impressions I caught a demo of the PathSolutions network troubleshooting tool, and share my thoughts.
- Episode 7 – Kentik Network Peering & Capacity Planning This was a demo of how deep network analytics helps a network operator understand how to improve their BGP peering. I talk through it.
- Episode 9 – Pluribus Insight Analytics Platform I give my thoughts on Pluribus, largely a NOS vendor, and their analytics package.
PacketPushers.net
- I wrote a detailed four part series on the Aruba 8400, covering the launch of this highly modern take on a switch chassis aimed at the campus.
- Things Network Engineers Hate This article got a lot of acknowledgement from fellow networkers who felt I got it about right. Unfortunately. The piece was inspired by a friend of mine working for a vendor who wanted my take on this issue.
ETHANCBANKS.COM
- Think Of Your Audience A piece for technical writers caught up in impressing peers instead of considering readers trying to understand hard things.
NEWSLETTERS
- Human Infrastructure Magazine 67 – Why Ten Years Of Uptime Is Bad The title says it all. Hey, I have my opinions.
- Human Infrastructure Magazine 68 – The Art Of Procrastination This was a departure from my normal writing style. This piece is more like a short story than a typical tech blog.
PARTING THOUGHTS
- I feel like I got my groove back a bit this month. I was more productive than I’ve been in a while. I even got in lots of hiking.
- I’ve been working on a couple of projects. One is a QoS Fundamentals webinar I’ll be running with Ivan Pepelnjak in a week or so. I’m going to cram as much as I can into about 2 hours. I’ve been building slides and refreshing my memory on estorica since writing a QoS chapter for the Computer Problems & Solutions book I co-authored with Russ White.
- Speaking of the book, there’s a rough cuts edition out on Safari, I’ve been told. I don’t have a Safari subscription, but a few folks have tweeted that it’s there.
- In November, I’m going to be the facilitator for a private devops workshop. I’ll kick off the day with a short deck highlighting what the industry means for devops to be vs. how companies are choosing to interpret devops because it’s trendy. There is a great divide there, and companies without the proper product set won’t be able to make a lot of sense of what devops is and why they should be using it. Going to be an interesting day.
- I wrote an RFP for a web developer firm to build a premium membership site for Packet Pushers. We haven’t been happy with CopyBlogger’s Rainmaker platform at all. Rainmaker was supposed to be the membership platform, but as we’ve started to leverage it, it’s just been painful. Confining, non-intuitive, and not flexible enough for the sorts of things we want to deliver. Because we believe membership is important to the growth of our business, we need a customized platform we can do that growing with over the next several years.