Category: Worth Reading

TL&DR: If you’re about to miss a deadline, be honest about it, and tell everyone well in advance.

I wish some of the project managers I had the “privilege” of working with would use 1% of that advice.

How to Miss a Deadline

This article is totally unrelated to networking, and describes how medical researchers misuse machine learning hype to publish two-column snake oil. Any correlation with AI/ML in networking is purely coincidental.

Machine Learning Deserves Better Than This

Stumbled upon a must-read article: Is Your Consultant a Parasite?

For an even more snarky take on the subject, enjoy the Ten basic rules for dealing with strategy consultants by Simon Wardley.

Scott Berkun published another interesting article: The Lost Designer. As always, replace designer with networking engineer and enjoy.

In the Neuroscience of Busyness article, Cal Newport describes an interesting phenomenon: when solving problems, we tend to add components instead of removing them.

If that doesn’t describe a typical network (or protocol) design, I don’t know what does. At least now we have a scientific basis to justify our behavior ;)

I remember having an interesting discussion about Linux VRFs (as opposed to namespaces) with Dinesh Dutt years ago, but it looks like I never turned it into a blog post.

Now I won’t have to 😉 – Jon Langemak published an excellent Working with Linux VRFs deep dive.

If you ever get a feeling the grass is greener on the other (startup) side, read My Secret Startup Past by Amy Hoy, and if you think about starting your business, read all the other stuff she wrote. I wish I knew of her when I was starting ipSpace.net a decade ago.

During my interview with David Bombal I made a recommendation I find crucial for anyone serious about blogging:

Make sure you own your content.

There’s a simple reason for that rule: if you want to write quality content, you’ll have to invest a lot of time into it.

I know the title sounds like a buzzword-bingo-winning clickbait, but it’s true. Adrian Giacometti decided to merge the topics of two ipSpace.net online courses and automated deployment of AWS security rules using Terraform within GitLab CI pipeline, with Slack messages serving as manual checks and approvals.

Not only did he do a great job mastering- and gluing together so many diverse bits and pieces, he also documented the solution and published the source code:

Scott Berkun wrote another great article that’s equally applicable to the traditional notion of design (his specialty) and the network design. Read it, replace design with network design, and use its lessons. Here’s just a sample:

• Convincing people is a social process
• Aim for small wins, not conversions of belief systems
• Allies matter more than ideas
• Design maturity grows one step at a time.