About Me

Who am I, and why should you hire me?

Summary

I am an experienced network engineer and architect, and over the course of my career have worked with, on, or for most of the major Internet backbones and content providers in some capacity, as well as several large enterprises. If you've ever used a cell phone or the Internet, you've used something I've taught, designed, supported, or built1.

I specialize in large-scale IP/MPLS SP and enterprise networking, but hey, bits are bits. I enjoy a near-vertical learning curve in a challenging environment, and have as of late been interested in cloud networking, network security, and network automation. I excel at documenting the undocumented, seeing the big picture, and leading from the front.

Particulars

You can always read my resume so I won't go into that here. Some of the things I've done in my career of which I'm particularly proud:

  • wrote a seminal paper on a then-novel router architecture
  • taught MPLS and router architectures to thousands of people
  • co-authored a Cisco Press book on MPLS-TE
  • helped design, deploy, and troubleshoot the initial MPLS LDP and TE rollout for a Very Large Internet Network
  • turned twenty years of other peoples' tribal knowledge of a different Very Large Internet Network into maybe sixty pages of documentation
  • lead a team which redesigned two large flat L2-only ISIS networks to L1L2
  • wrote a few IETF RFCs, learning my way around the IETF in the process
  • wrote a fair bit of Python code over the years to analyze networks I was working on. This includes a bunch of Pandas, lots of text munging, and implementing IGP SPF, TE CSPF, and a simplified BGP decision process from scratch. I'm not going to claim it's production quality code, but it helped a lot of people make their networks better.
  • in about a year, went from novice to decently strong with Palo Alto firewalls and with Ansible

Along the way I've made some good friends, lost about a hundred pounds using this ONE WEIRD TRICK, learned a lot of stuff, and hopefully made people's lives easier. That's what I do. I take hard things and make them easier. Not easy, but easier.

If you have any questions, ask!


1 Not alone, of course. The Internet has thousands of people who've played a significant part in its development, and this particularly true of those of us who've been around a while. I'm just this guy, you know?