Darrel Clute

Ramblings from yet another IT Professional

28 June, 2013

Revitalizing Passions

By Darrel Clute · Read time: 4 min.

So today marked the end of Cisco Live 2013.  It was great to again be in person for this event which provides so much for those in the computer networking industry.  I attended last year as well and had the privilege to be able to meet and speak with many great people I interact with on Twitter.  I was also greatly privileged to participate in a Packet Pushers Podcast.  It was a great experience just as attending Cisco Networkers was in 2004.  This year was great again, with even more invigorating conversations with many that I interact with on Twitter, and even some new people that I was able to meet at the event for the first time.  I additionally was privileged to be able to record with the Packet Pushers again this morning in conjunction with the crew from Tech Field Day.  This time it was a more intimate setting with fewer people but the same basic flow as the last episode I was on.

At this point you are probably wondering why I titled my blog in the way that I did.  Well my last post was back in 2010.  I haven't had the ability to post additional content here as I intend, in fact I have roughly 15 posts in draft state some of which are just a title.  There are numerous reasons for this although I won't get into that here as the why is not necessarily germane to the intentions of this post.  But what is germane is what is going to be revitalized.

First of all will be this blog.  I am going to be restructuring some things so that this blog is where my technical and industry related posts will land.  I will be migrating the personal posts that I have made to this site to a personal blog.  I will attempt to post to this particular blog at least once a month, with the goal of working up to at least once a week over the next three to six months.  As far as the content on this site, it will hopefully be mostly technical in nature although I do intend to speak about industry related topics which may not be as technically in depth.  It won't all be networking, as I am heavily involved in Linux system administration and engineering as well, and working on getting back into programming.  I will also likely be posting on study progress and many of the technical posts will likely directly stem from my studies.

That brings me to the second thing that I will be working on, and that is certification and more focused study.  Most of my certifications have lapsed due to varying circumstances around the times that they were expiring.  I will be working on rectifying that but haven't worked out what the plan for that will be yet.  I am working on determining what that will be and I am hoping that one of the next two posts will be regarding what the plan is going to be.

The final thing that I am going to be revitalizing, I kind of have been for the past several months.  Although I have never been heavily passionate about this particular subject in general, I have always been as it pertains to making my job easier.  With the upcoming general availability release of Cisco's OnePK SDK and the eventual release ofOpen Network Foundations Configuration Management Working Group I have a completely new enthusiasm for programming than I have in the past.  I have been doing some development at work with regard to some automations pertaining to our disaster recovery plans, but with the upcoming changes that will be provided by Cisco ONE APIs there are many improvements that can be made operationally not only for our organization but all network organizations that are willing to embrace where the future is leading.  I suspect that there will be numerous posts regarding this coming in the near future.

That is it for now.  Participating in the community of network engineers on Twitter and spending time talking with these individuals in person the past two years at Cisco Live has not only rekindled my desire to work on these things outlined here but also now the impetus to move forward and begin developing plans to actually make it happen.  I will be doing my best to remain loyal to the plan that I have at a high level outlined here to make a greater contribution to the community which I interact with and consume many great things from.  As soon as the Packet Pushers episode we recorded this morning is posted I'll link to it from this site as well.

About the Author

Darrel Clute

I am an IT Infrastructure Architect, with a focus on bridging business needs together with data center usage. I bring a cross functional focus on Network, Security, Virtulization, and UNIX Systems Engineering, trying to bridge the gaps between the disciplines. I am a strong proponent of automation and orchestration, with a focus on using the same toolsets across disciplines. I also advocate for Open Source software use in the enterprise as well as for by individuals.