[150792] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Programmers with network engineering skills
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Justin M. Streiner)
Sun Mar 4 11:10:16 2012
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2012 11:09:15 -0500 (EST)
From: "Justin M. Streiner" <streiner@cluebyfour.org>
To: Jared Newell <jnewell@equinix.com>
In-Reply-To: <22089644C8B3E843B2CA338CFEA9E4DF010ABF0FB1@sv2exmb01.us.win.equinix.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, Jared Newell wrote:
> I think the difference is that network engineers typically find
> themselves wanting to learn some form of programming to automate routine
> tasks while doing their job as a network engineer. They've actually
> managed to be interested in programming while pursuing a career in
> networking out of necessity.
That pretty much the path that I took. I found a lot of value in
automating tasks, which eventually grew into a configuration backup system
that was used company-wide. I could have deployed one of several
configuration management systems, but I wanted to build one from the
ground up. While the code I wrote wasn't exactly pretty, it worked. No
doubt there was a lot of room to do it better, and one of my long-term
goals was to re-write the whole thing in a language that was better suited
to the task at hand, I ended up moving on to a new gig before that came
to pass.
I still have the code (previous employer was OK with that), and I still
tinker with it from time to time. It taught me a lot more about some of
the nuts-and-bolts aspects of both coding and SNMP that I ever would have
encountered, had I not written that system.
I think I would also add to the wish list for "the perfect candidate" is
some database experience. Sometimes data is much easier to work with in
the SQL world than 'live'.
jms
