I mentioned in some earlier blog that things always seem to come in waves. One year I’ll make multiple trips to Japan. Another year, jobs will pop up that require repeated trips to China or the UK or Korea or Australia. Nice work, if you have good strategies for keeping your sanity on those endless overseas flights.
By the same token, technology-specific jobs seem to keep bunching up on me. Last year almost every consulting job I did concerned IPv6. Over the past few months, it’s been MPLS.
But also over the last few months, I’ve been engaged by numerous customers to teach technology classes. Some have been short seminars on business or technical directions, but most have been multiple-day technology seminars on things like OSPF and IS-IS, BGP, MPLS, and Class of Service. While I’ve never wanted to be a full-time network instructor (can’t take the repetition and daily grind), I love teaching a few times a month.
The classes that are a special blast are the go-to-the-whiteboard, lecture-and-discussion, no-PowerPoint-allowed, technical deep-dives that develop from fundamental to advanced concepts.
And not vendor specific. Too many classes spend too much time just showing you how to enter commands for a particular system. I adamantly believe that if you understand the technology or protocol, and know what you want to accomplish, you can do it with any vendor’s equipment by just reading the manuals.
Part of the reward for me, as it is for many teachers, is the joy of watching someone “get it.” Usually what they “get,” with eyes lighting up, is the answer to a “why” question: Why pseudonodes are necessary in link state networks. Why a full IBGP mesh is required. Why, as I wrote about recently, Route Distinguishers and Route Targets have the same formats but perform different functions.
There’s also an aspect of teaching that’s distinctly beneficial to me as a network architect. Explaining technologies and protocols to others helps me understand them better myself. Often I have to go back and remind myself why something is the way it is. More often – I don’t think I’ve ever taught a class where this didn’t happen at least once – someone asks a question that I’ve not heard before, and either makes me think if an old topic in a new way or makes me hit the references to find the right answer.
For every class I teach, I learn something new myself.
So if you really want to enhance your own knowledge, and gain some personal satisfaction of helping others along the way, try teaching a class!
And of course if your own company or group is looking for some good technical seminars, drop me a line and let’s talk!
Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit
The Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force will be holding its first Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit in Denver on April 9th. We’re lining up a good group of speakers and a very informative agenda; if you’re in the Colorado-Wyoming-New Mexico region and want to know more about IPv6, I hope to see you there!
You can get more information, and sign up, at:
