The use of tools has accelerated human evolution and made us what we are today. Networking is no different, and yet there aren’t that many tool builders among the networking engineers… or maybe all you need is a nudge and some hints on how to get started.

John Herbert has started writing network automation tools more than 20 years ago and was willing to share his experiences in Episode 3 of Software Gone Wild in which we initially discussed his journey from simple Perl script to a distributed configuration analysis tool (the F-script, but quickly diverged into all sorts of topics including:

• Support for numerous unique snowflakes (aka customer networks);
• The dismal NETCONF implementations we have to deal with today;
• The need for NETCONF fingerprinting because no two vendors manage to read the NETCONF standards the same way;
• Multi-platform considerations;
• The challenges of doing everything on your own (including supporting your code indefinitely).

Enjoy the podcast, explore the other Software Gone Wild episodes, and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes.