One of my readers sent me a simple question: “Do you plan to have a Python for Networking Engineers webinar?”

Short answer: no immediate plans.

Here are just a few reasons:

• There are several good Python for Networking Engineers offerings out there, from Kirk Byers’ online course to Urs Baumann’s week-long classroom training.
• While it doesn’t hurt to have some baseline programming knowledge, I don’t really believe in programming being mandatory for networking engineers. I would always prefer to get the job done by a specialist who has programming experience comparable to my networking experience.
• The pragmatic one: I have too many other things in the pipeline.

His next question:

Do you think there is a need for python for network automation, or the Ansible will resolve this issue, without being involved directly with a programming language?

You can get a lot of things done with Ansible or other tools. However, these tools (including Ansible) are not general-purpose programming languages, and at least Ansible sucks at data munging and manipulation.

There will always be need for more sophisticated glue, and a programming language (Python, for example) will always be needed to provide it. However, as explained above, I don't necessarily believe in writing that code myself. Well, I would probably do it as a proof-of-concept, but would try to get a programmer fluent in Python to (re)do before the code gets anywhere near a real-life project.