Heading to CHI-NOG 13

Somehow I’ve never made it to CHI-NOG, the Chicago Network Operators Group’s annual gathering. That changes this year. I’ll be at CHI-NOG 13 on May 27-28, 2026 at the Voco Chicago Downtown (350 West Wolf Point Plaza).

For those unfamiliar, CHI-NOG is one of the regional NOGs that consistently draws a strong operator crowd. Vendor-neutral in spirit even when sponsors are footing the bill, and the kind of room where the hallway conversations are often as useful as the talks. The agenda this year is solid, and the workshop lineup is the part that really sold me.

Workshops

Three workshops on the schedule, spread across both days. All hands-on, all worth showing up for. Bring a laptop.

ARIN Deep Dive on RPKI. Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM, led by Brad Gorman from ARIN. Lab-based routing security workshop covering how to implement RPKI inside your organization, walking through ARIN’s services, relying party validators, and the operational practices that keep the whole thing from being a one-off project nobody touches again. RPKI is one of those things I’ve poked at over the years without ever sitting down and doing it properly, so this is exactly the kind of forced focus I need.

Hands-On DNSSEC for Network Operators. Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM, led by Eddy Winstead from Internet Systems Consortium. DNSSEC has been on the “I should really learn this” list for embarrassingly long. The workshop covers DNS diagnostic tools, signature validation, automation in signing, and the chain of trust. Lab-based, which is exactly how I learn this stuff best. Assumes you know DNS fundamentals… which, you know, I’d hope so.

Intent Based Automation: Build an AI Fabric. Thursday, 1:45 PM to 4:15 PM, led by Mohammad Zaman and Amer Fakhar from Nokia. Each participant gets a dedicated lab environment to build a rail-optimized AI fabric for GPU-to-GPU communication, configuring RoCEv2, Priority Flow Control, Explicit Congestion Notification, and the lossless Ethernet that holds the whole thing together. Every Nokia AI/networking conversation I had at NFD40 made me want to spend more time with their gear, so this workshop is the opportunity. The catch: it runs in parallel with the main conference’s Thursday afternoon track sessions. Picking the workshop means giving up Bryton Herdes’ RPKI bypass talk, Rob Martin’s “automation identity crisis,” and most of the other Thursday PM sessions. I’m leaning workshop… but ask me again the morning of.

Vendors I’m Excited to Talk With

Gold sponsors this year: Arista, ARIN, NetCore, Nokia, IMC, and HPE. Silver: ICANN, AWS, DE-CIX. NTT DATA on community sponsorship.

A few I’m particularly looking forward to:

Arista. Coming off NFD40, where their talk on ethernet’s role in AI fabrics was one of the genuinely better presentations of the event, I want more of that conversation. They’ve got two talks on the CHI-NOG agenda. Tyler Conrad on the transition from traditional general-compute to AI networking, and Rob Martin on what he’s calling the “automation identity crisis” (a topic that has felt very real in my own day-to-day). Both look worth sitting in on, and the booth time is where I want to ask the questions that don’t fit inside a thirty-minute talk slot.

Nokia. Same deal. NFD40 made me curious about where Nokia is going with AI-era networking, and now they’re literally running a workshop on it. Convenient. If you’ve followed my NFD40 coverage you’ve already seen me say nice things about their data-driven approach. Looking forward to more of that here.

HPE/Juniper (yes, that’s still weird to say). Colby Barth is presenting on multipath traffic engineering using a DAG-based approach to load balancing. Juniper has historically had the most thoughtful TE story in the industry, and I want to see how that’s evolving inside the new HPE umbrella.

A Few Talks On My List

Beyond the vendor track, a few sessions I’ve already circled:

• Scott Robohn, Integrating AI into NetOps. Scott was a delegate alongside me at NFD40 and is one of the sharper voices in this space. His work at Solutional with Phil Gervasi is the kind of practical AI-for-network-operations conversation the industry actually needs more of.
• Jeff Doyle, The NAF’s Network Automation Framework. Yes, that Jeff Doyle. If you’ve cracked open Routing TCP/IP in the last twenty years, you’ve read his book. Jeff and I go back years, looking forward to chatting with him.
• Nick Buraglio, IPv6: Why Should You Care? Nick is always worth the price of admission, and IPv6 hitting more than 50% of global traffic is the kind of stat that should be on more network engineers’ radar than it is.
• Bryton Herdes, False Immunity: Long Prefixes that Bypass ROV. Cloudflare researcher digging into the edge cases that let networks hijack or blackhole traffic even with RPKI in place. Good follow-up to Wednesday’s RPKI workshop.

People I’m Looking Forward to Seeing

The attendee list is published, which is dangerous, because now I have a list of names I need to track down between sessions. A few in particular:

• Aaron Conaway, my coworker at RedEye. Always good when a coworker shows up at the same event so you have someone to actually compare notes with at the end of the day.
• Vincent Paul Celindro, fellow NFD40 delegate, NANOG board member, JNCIE/CCIE, and one of those people whose Slack messages routinely contain ideas I end up stealing.
• John Osmon, another NFD40 delegate and self-described “Network Gadfly.” Best LinkedIn title in the entire industry. Fight me.
• Deepak Kakadia from NetAI, who’s also presenting later in the day. After the NetAI conversation at NFD40, I’m curious to see where they’ve taken the GNN-vs-LLM story.

If I missed you on this list and you’re going to be there, that’s on me. Find me at the social and we’ll fix it.

See You There

If you’re in or near Chicago and you do networking for a living, you should be at this. Registration is open at 13.chinog.org. Conference proper is Thursday May 28, workshops Wednesday May 27, social event Thursday evening from 5:45 to 7:45 PM.

If you’re going, ping me. Happy to compare notes, grab a coffee, or commiserate about the workshop scheduling conflict.

See you in Chicago.