Automation

You’ve had git in your daily workflow for a few weeks. You’ve got the basics down, until you do one of these… You committed vault_password.txt and pushed it before your second coffee.

Declared bias up front. Jeff Doyle is a friend, but that doesn’t influence what comes next.

Last Tuesday you made changes to a playbook because the on-call engineer needed an ACL pushed in a hurry.

Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.

Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.

Alex Saroyan had about ninety seconds onstage before he made the architectural claim that the rest of the AI-networking conversation has been ducking.

Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud.

I’m Heading to Networking Field Day 40 I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a delegate for Networking Field Day 40, taking place April 8–10, 2026 in Silicon Valley.

Today’s IT landscape if full of software defined marketecture, and lore of a dystopian future full of network engineers that do nothing but write code.

Cisco IOS has plenty of gems contained within, but few are as fun, and as endlessly useful as the Embedded Event Manager, or EEM.

The Cisco IOS archive command is not only very useful in keeping configuration archives, but it can also be used to log commands entered into the router, along with their user name.