Unintended Features
Unintended Features
Thoughts on thinking and life as a network engineer
About the Book
This book contains some new material, and some old. The foundation is a set of blog posts published on Lost in Transit and ‘net Work, edited and extended, so some of these essays will seem familiar if you read either these two blogs. Beyond these, however, there is new material that hasn’t been published before in the same area. Some of this material has been developed from presentations, and some from completely new areas of thought.
About the Authors
Reader Testimonials
Nicholas Russo
Network Consulting Engineer CCIEx2 #42518
Simply outstanding advice from two of the finest engineers I know. The book covers some critical gaps in the network industry and provides non-technical advice on thinking, relationships, analysis, and basically everything else an engineer should care about. I was this book’s first customer and also the first to finish it; I couldn’t put it down! Some of these stories are things you will never hear anywhere else, especially adapted to the networking community.
Table of Contents
-
- Introduction
-
Career
- How to be Successful in IT
- New Ways of Thinking
- How to Build a (People) Network
- Staying Updated in the Networking Industry
- Hold the Line: SDN Isn’t Always on Time
-
Section 2: Culture
- General Howe’s Dog
- Take Them Seriously
- Saving the Web, Saving Community
- False Dichotomy
- Data Can’t Lie?
- Percentage Driven: Should IP Telephony Die?
- Skipping the Hype Cycle
- Good Enough
- Micromanaging Networks Considered Harmful
- Network Scale is More than Size
- Out with the Old: Make Removing Old Technology Part of Your Culture
- Should Technology Mirror Business?
- The Pie Problem: Growth and Ratios
- The Problem with Peanuts
- The Right Tool for the Job
- The Tinker and the Geek
- No Cape, No Wand
- Overvaluing Experience
-
Section 3: Education
- The Degree or the Certification
- Interviewing the CCIE Program Manager
- Certifications: the Good and the Bad
- An Apple a Day
- Why You Need to Learn to Code
-
Section 4: Life Skills
- Assuming the worst is not the best assumption
- Controlling Information Inflow
- Cultivate questions
- Fear itself: Thinking through change and turmoil
- In Theory…
- It’s About Time
- Jack of All Trades
- Jim, I’m an Engineer, not a…
- Multitasking, Microtasking, and Macrotasking
- On being different
- On Losing
- Own the Problem
- Personal Integrity
- Rule 11 is your friend
- The Odd Hours Solution
- The Silo of Focus
- Waste Not a Moment
- Why You Should Blog
-
Section 5: Thinking Skills
- Engineering Sense
- Intellectual Virtue and the Engineer
- Leaky Abstractions
- Liskov Substitution and Modularity in Network Design
- Talk to the Dummy
- The Facts, While Interesting, are Irrelevant
- Half Split Troubleshooting
- Getting Inside the Loop
- Engineer Versus Complexity
- The Design Mindset
- About the Authors
- Notes
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