Interview With Stefan Fouant on His Juniper Networks Learning Journey

Coming up

0:00 I had a boss that he he said to me you know I don't understand how you can call yourself an  Engineer I literally went home crying that day but it pushed me and it motivated me and I just 

0:09 started reading as many books as I could so here I am I'm replaying those guys my early career you 

0:15 call yourself an Engineer and I'm literally saying that to myself it took me four times to pass that  data center uh exam it was very very tough. What I was really interested in I was always interested 

0:25 in was the communications aspect you know I was dialing BBS's in 1998 that were in Paris using uh 

0:33 hacked PBX's and things of that nature so but it definitely gave me sort of a leg up on learning 

0:39 computers, learning programming skills you know sometimes the failure is what teaches us the most 

0:45 lessons so um I could have taken the exam many years before maybe I might have failed it um 

0:51 but then I would have been able to you know know exactly what's on the exam turn around and knock 

0:56 it out a few months later. If you fail it's not like you have to go and do another of University.  If you fail today you take what you've learned you go and fix those bad areas like you said and then 

1:04 next month you going and do it again. Hey everyone it's David Bombal back with a very special guest 

Intro

1:10 Stefan welcome. Good morning how are you? I'm doing well Stefan great to have you on the show  I was doing a bit of research you know looking a bit about you on LinkedIn and I was 

1:20 amazed man how many JNCIEs do you have? Right now I've got five which is pretty cool and uh one of 

JNCIE

1:27 the things that is kind of unique about that is right now there's actually only four expert level 

1:33 certifications offered uh there used to be a fifth one the JNCIE Cloud and and that one was recently 

1:38 decommissioned so I'm kind of in a little bit of a unique position of being one of the few 

1:44 people in the world that have five JNCIEs right now. I mean the word I would have used is that's  insane I mean the amount of work to do that that's hard hard work so I mean perhaps you can tell us a 

1:54 bit about your story and your journey and you know I know you run your own business these  days but perhaps you can tell us about that and you know tell us about how you went from Zero to 

2:03 to Hero um where you are at the moment. Definitely studying for JNCIE and and I have a number of 

2:09 other certifications as well but that that that took literally years of my life to to accomplish 

2:15 uh I mean I think it's kind of like equivalent to maybe somebody studying for a bar exam. That says  you've been here since 6:30 I thought I jump start the bar exam work. Something along those lines but 

Back Story

2:24 uh I basically where do where should I begin you want me to start at the very beginning? Yeah I 

2:30 mean give us inspiration because I mean I saw you'd got NT4 years and years ago and then you 

2:35 were Novell before that tell us a little bit about the journey. Yeah so um yeah that I'll talk a 

2:40 little bit about my story and how I got into IT and I definitely took a more non-traditional 

2:45 path um which um I was working as an electrician out out of high school but I had always been 

2:54 really good with computers I ran bulletin board systems um in the late 80s early 90s when I was 

2:59 a teenager out of the home uh much to my parents chagrin because these were mostly like freaking 

3:04 hacking type related bulletin board systems that I was running back then uh but it definitely gave 

3:11 me sort of a leg up on learning computers learning programming skills um you know and then like what 

3:18 I was really interested in I was always interested in was the communications aspect you know I was 

3:23 dialing BBS's uh in 1998 that were in Paris using uh hack PBXs and things of that nature so I always 

3:32 knew I liked that field I loved communications and and networking in general um but out of high 

3:38 school I was doing a little bit of school I was doing some some College but I was also working as 

3:43 an electrician um as an electrician's apprentice and I remember one day just I was working really 

3:49 you know hard manual labor running cable through ceilings and I just said you know  why am I doing this like I I could be you know I'm really into computers, this was around 94, 

4:00 95 and you know the whole thing was just really starting to to pick up so I just decided to go to 

4:08 a computer school um and I did some college but I basically took a non-traditional path where I 

4:15 I once I started making money in the industry I was like I don't really need to finish and and 

4:20 get the college degree I just started pursuing some certifications I got my CNE 3 and then CNE 

4:26 4 so my first introduction to networking was with Novell basically as soon as I got my CNE 

4:31 at that point in time Microsoft really came into the scene and it was almost like I just spent a 

4:37 year and a half studying for all this Novell stuff and it was almost out of date by the time I got it 

4:42 because everybody was asking for NT Certifications so I started pursuing my MCSE and got a number of 

4:49 different Microsoft certifications and that was really cool I was doing server side you know uh 

4:55 active directory Microsoft Exchange you know SQL Server that kind kind of stuff but in the back of 

5:01 my mind I always really really loved networking and you know Cisco was out there and I would go 

5:06 to on a job sites and I'd see like a Cisco router and I'd be like wow that is just the coolest thing  that is what I really want to be doing uh but it was it was hard to break in you know to go 

5:16 from the server side uh and then you know to make that transition over to the networking  side was pretty tough I basically started reading like Cisco press books back then you 

5:25 know and just learning as much about networking as I could naturally I already had some TCP/IP  background um and then you know during my studies of MCSE and also CNE I had some some networking 

5:37 background but I really needed to learn like the routing piece and I just started learning that by  reading Cisco press books and basically being a sponge to anything that I could get my hands on 

5:46 and I was lucky um not everybody has this this uh you know good fortune but I managed to talk 

5:53 to a guy who gave me um really my first job in the networking industry it was at a a really 

5:59 little company maybe you guys might have heard of is called UUNET uh back in the day but this 

6:05 guy um his name is aamad he you know took me under his wing and and gave me my very first 

6:10 networking job and I will forever be um indebted and thankful to him for taking uh a chance on me 

6:16 but it was rough I mean it was rough because I got into this uh industry and the networking side and 

6:21 I was pretty green and I'm working at UUNET which at the time AS701 was the largest Service Provider 

6:29 in the world they were the backbone you know now and now they they are part of Verizon that 

6:35 that as so AS701 AS702 and AS703 were originally UUNET and I'm jumping in with some pretty sharp 

6:44 talented people people that had PHDs, people that had Master master's degrees, people that had been 

6:50 working in networking for some time you know maybe they had been working with X.25 or Frame Relay and 

6:56 you know I'm jumping in learning ATM on the fly and MPLS and those types of things but it was 

7:02 basically sucking it through a fire hose as far as like learning and trying to keep up uh with these 

7:08 folks. I mean I love what you've said because I mean I've written down a few notes but like let's  start with that one you know when we when you start out like with networking or any new tech 

7:16 it just seems so overwhelming so I mean you've walked this road so can you whenever we like when  we talk can you always like picture to someone perhaps who's who's either young and I get some 

7:26 push back on my Channel about that I don't want to just look at someone who's young but someone  who's transitioning because a lot of people who watch this are perhaps like electricians or bus 

7:35 drivers or work in McDonald's and they're trying to get into networking or like get into IT so  always phrase it that way. So do you have imposter syndrome is a big problem a lot of people face 

7:45 like I could never learn this it's overwhelming so what's your advice because I mean you've went from  like I'm working with a PhD I'm not good enough to like five JNCIE. To to kind of describe the path 

7:57 and why I ended up pursuing so many certifications now at the end of the day I just want to say I 

8:02 don't necessarily think certifications are the bar that illustrate whether or not you actually 

8:08 know a technology. I know plenty of people that are certification on paper only uh but they don't 

8:14 really have the skills to back it up so I'm not necessarily advocating just taking certifications 

8:19 for certification sake but in my case it's um it's a it's a way to have like a structured learning 

8:27 path as I'm learning the material I can go and take a certification and sort of test my knowledge 

8:32 um and it's just a way to reinforce um you know what I what I've learned. Now the reason I pursued 

8:38 so many you know we talked about CNE, there was MCSE, there's CISSP, there's Juniper Cert, 

8:44 I have Cisco Cert, I have a whole bunch VMware you name it. I I think that that whole imposter 

8:50 syndrome that I face on my early days at uh UUNET and I mean there were days that I just wanted to 

8:57 go home and cry. I would ask I would ask you know you know I'm working on on maybe testing ATM or 

9:03 something and I'd go to one of my colleagues and ask them hey what do these little symbols mean you  know and it turns out it's like the symbols for you know microsecond or nanosecond and and they're 

9:12 literally like saying to me I'm not I'm not even kidding saying; you call yourself an engineer? How 

9:17 how can you how can you call yourself an engineer you don't you don't know these things or like the  Lambda symbol I started doing a lot of work with uh with uh DWDM in those days and you know first 

9:28 time I'm seeing some of these symbols like Lambda so yeah people were basically making you know 

9:34 treating me like a red-headed stepchild in that workplace making me feel pretty bad I I literally 

9:40 I had a I had a boss that he he said to me you know I don't understand how you can call yourself  an engineer um and I I literally went home crying that day but it pushed me and it motivated me um 

9:51 and I just started reading as many books as I could so uh got my hand on as many Cisco press 

9:57 books as I could you know I was working with protocols so I mean I'm getting a book on ISIS,  I'm getting a book on BGP, I'm getting a book on OSPF. I'm literally reading the RFC's um I just 

10:09 made it a goal of mine to prove these people wrong um and you know within it's it's kind of funny 

10:16 because the same people that you know then there were times where I would be asking for help and 

10:21 and they just kind of just didn't want to deal with me so I realized I I had to kind of like  pull myself up by my own bootstraps um but the funny thing is you know I I immersed myself in it 

10:33 and about a year later the same people that were laughing at me saying how do you call yourself an 

10:38 engineer uh that didn't really want anything to do all of a sudden they're coming and they're asking  me questions or hey do you can I borrow that book? Uh hey do you know how this work in ISIS and yep 

10:51 so they're wanting to work on projects with me and things like that. So it was a really a sense 

10:57 of vindication I think um but yeah in my case I I the Imposter Syndrome has very much been a part 

11:05 of my desire to not not not necessarily prove to other people but prove to myself um and I mean I 

11:13 still I think we all suffer from that to a certain extent uh you know I've got five JNCIE but there 

11:18 are so many times that I'm working with people and I just think man this guy is just so brilliant um 

11:24 I I'm constantly learning from other people. I love that I mean it's like that the kind of 

11:29 people you always want to work with I think are people who are humble who know the more you know  the more you realize there's more to know and you can't know everything so I mean you the kind of 

11:38 guy that you want in your team not someone who's arrogant who thinks they know everything but you  got to tell us the the JNCIE what have you what are they in because I would assume it's routing 

11:47 and switching but then perhaps some others as well right? Yeah so it's it's actually a little  bit different than um than like maybe like the Cisco track so the there's five or there's four 

11:57 now there was a fifth I'll talk about that one but there's Service Provider okay so SP JNCIE SP, 

12:05 there's ENT which is Enterprise uh, there's SEC which is security and then there's DC 

12:12 which is Data Center and there used to be a Dash Cloud which was more around their Cloud products 

12:18 contrail and those types of things. um So you know there's a little bit of overlap right you're  you're you're learning you're doing routing and switching in many of these tracks but the focus 

12:29 is a little bit different it's like is this applicable to like a Data Center environment,  where you might be doing like VXLAN, you're doing EVPN versus say you know an Enterprise 

12:39 where you're probably doing more like Spanning Tree, you're doing VLANs, you're doing um you know 

12:45 VoIP and Telephony and those types of things. So it's just kind of the focus area is a little bit  different depending on the track. I love it I mean one of the things I I love about certs is I always 

12:55 like to say, you don't know what you don't know. The certs help you do things that are out of your 

13:01 comfort zone I think if it's like if you're just in one environment you might get a bit like stale  because you're just used to working on certain protocols and now you're forced to learn a whole 

13:08 bunch of other stuff right? It was so much fun for me going through these journeys um of you 

13:14 know um you know the first one that I took took about two years. The Service Provider Track that 

13:19 at the time it was called um it was the JNCIE-M, that's what what what is called is now the Service 

13:26 Provider and this was based on their M series their flagship product um which eventually this  evolved to the Service Provider Track but that one took me several years and in fact uh here's just a 

13:36 little bit of advice for some of your viewers um I had been working with Juno since 1998 and I didn't 

13:44 actually pursue my first JNCIE until about 2007, so that was like nine years or something like that 

13:52 had gone by um before I decided to actually pursue my first JNCIE and the reason for that 

13:58 that because I felt like I needed to learn more about networking I just felt like I wasn't ready 

14:05 um you know so it's like I'm reading one more book on this protocol I'm learning and basically I went 

14:11 in and took the test and I passed on my first try and I realized I would had been ready way I mean 

14:18 I I way overdid it. So my advice to anybody that may be interested in pursuing like one of these 

14:25 expert level certifications is if you've got maybe a couple of years of experience under your belt 

14:30 you're probably more than ready to just do like a focus preparation and study the actual materials 

14:36 that are going to be on the exam but you know my advice is you don't need to wait nine years like  I did um so I then I just started knocking them out at that point because I was like hey man this 

14:45 is way easier than I thought it would. I think I mean it's tough hey because I mean some people who  study for these these like expert level certs they fail and it's going to be a long hard journey and 

14:54 I mean they would just say you're a genius that's why it's easy for you right? I don't I I think I  just just had but at that at that point I had had so much stick time working on the CLI with Junos 

15:04 that you know 9 years it was like secondhand nature for me and of course I was working at 

15:10 UUNET in a Service Provider r Environment so I was working with MPLS, I was working with traffic

15:15 engineering, I was working with class of service multicast all those types of things on pretty much

15:20 a regular basis. So if you are in an environment where you're getting you're not just studying for

15:26 it on your free time but you're actually doing this in your day-to-day job then you're going 

15:31 to be better positioned to to pass an exam like that so I mean I feel bad because I know there's

15:38 there's a lot of people that it takes them two three four times to pass um but I think at that  point I just had had like ample experience behind me. I think what you've highlighted there is like

Experience

15:48 experience is is a huge enabler I mean someone who hasn't had experience and perhaps just reads the  books it could be a lot harder a harder journey right? Absolutely yeah I mean so I will talk a

15:57 little bit about some of the materials out there for anybody that's interested in maybe pursuing  some of the Juniper Certifications, there's some really excellent free training options out there

16:07 for people um one of the things that that doesn't include is actually access to devices that you can

16:13 log into and you know that's really critical for um you know hey anybody can break into 

16:18 the industry maybe with the the associate level I think you can go and just read that material and

16:24 pursue the exam and you'll have the baseline knowledge without actually having touch the device to to be fine with passing the exam but if you want to really move up the stack to those 

16:35 higher level certifications you know there there's there's no amount of just training you're going  to have to have some physical hands-on access to devices and spend some some stick time um you know

16:48 working with the CLI. Stefan just before we go any further I wanted to get a bit of input about 

ShortestPathFirst

16:53 your business be and like your social media because hopefully people can you know connect  to you on Twitter and other places but perhaps you can just tell us about like your socials and 

17:01 and your business and what you get up to these days? Yeah sure thanks David so um I am the CTO 

17:06 of a company called ShortestPathFirst, I actually start it's based on algorithm so so the way it got 

17:14 got it started is actually I had been blogging for years under the moniker ShortestPathFirst

17:19 um just because I have a passion for routing protocols and algorithms and things of that  nature um and then uh you know I've been blogging under that um domain name for many years and then 

17:29 when I decided that I wanted to start my own business it kind of dawned upon me that I  already have all this um SEO um there's all this search engine uh optimization that would happen 

17:39 as a result of all these blog articles that I had already written out there so I just named  my company after my blog uh ShortestPathFirst and yeah that's pretty much what we do is we focus on 

17:49 um you know routing, switching, security tends to focus a lot on Juniper but we do Palo Alto, 

17:56 Arista, Fortinet, VMware primarily just consulting, reselling traditional value 

18:04 added reseller type operation um our website is www.spfirst.net or if you are so inclined 

18:12 and you want to type the whole thing out you can go to shortestpathfirst.net and we have YouTube, 

18:17 we've got Facebook, we've got LinkedIn, we've got Twitter um I think it's not  that hard to search on these things but yeah if you just Google ShortestPathFirst

18:25 first all one word no spaces you'll basically be able to find all of those things. So we've got 

18:30 some lightboard videos on YouTube and some other cool interviews not quite as cool as the one that  David has with his channel here but uh something to aspire to. I appreciate it for everyone who's 

18:40 watching I've put those links below go and show the love Stefan they can contact you on Twitter  perhaps with questions just for everyone watching please don't like overrun them with thousands 

18:48 of questions but is what's the best way to like interact with you is it LinkedIn, Twitter where's  a good place? Yeah Twitter's a great place I'm pretty active on Twitter so I would definitely be 

18:57 happy to respond there, LinkedIn is fine too I'm I'm very much open in terms of my networking so um 

19:04 if we're not connected on LinkedIn I'm very happy to make your acquaintance and uh would be happy  to make that connection so yeah. Let me ask you some hard questions because this is the questions 

Free Juniper Training

19:12 I get from the audience so like the first thing is I don't have money I'm perhaps not based in  the US I'm based somewhere else but I think you you've already alluded to that the training from 

19:20 Juniper is free right? There's so many good um options right here but yeah if you go to Juniper 

19:26 website and just go to training you'll see all this good stuff right here now I realize we're 

19:32 talking mostly about Juniper you know for other vendors there's similar options and things but 

19:37 yeah for Juniper there's this link right here Free Training I was actually blown away by this today 

19:43 pretty much all the Associate Level curriculum for you know all the different tracks you've got Cloud 

19:50 security, Mists there's a design associate so they've got a tremendous amount of free stuff here 

19:55 that's available to you. All you basically you need to do is just click the link and subscribe 

20:01 $0 and it has so many good stuff here's one for example for somebody who might have like a CCNA 

20:10 and they are wanting to learn Junos they can subscribe to this one and it has a whole bunch 

20:16 of modules basically giving somebody who already has sort of that Cisco background the knowledge of 

20:22 how do I transition over to Juniper and then after going through these modules they are even offering 

20:29 you discounted vouchers so you just take like a practice uh or what they call a voucher assessment 

20:35 test and if you get 70% or higher they give you 75% off so you can basically get a certification 

20:42 at the Associate Level for just $50 and a little bit of your time that's the long-winded answer to 

20:48 your question on you know how does somebody that maybe is sort of limited in funds you know pursue 

20:54 some of these certifications and I will just point out that if you get the JNCIE in a particular 

20:59 track then they have the specialist level and they have similar free training at the specialist 

21:04 level and they have similar free training at the professional level as well so as you get 

21:10 these certifications they're they're providing a lot of options, now let me just state that these 

21:16 um this free curriculum that they're offering here this is basically like the slideware only and it 

21:21 it's like the student guide um the one thing you don't have is you don't have access to devices so 

21:27 you you know if you want to practice and learn these skills um in real time like you're going 

21:32 to still need to you know maybe hack up a lab or something like that to get get some of this stuff 

21:38 up and running but this at least gives you the the courseware and the fact that a lot of it's  being offered for free is just pretty cool. Yeah I mean it's like we we've been both been in the game 

21:47 a long time I mean I remember years ago having to spend like thousands or people were spending  thousands of dollars a week for training like this and it's it's fantastic that Juniper offering this 

21:56 for free I mean it takes takes away that whole excuse right I love what your story was like these  guys are like saying bad things about me I'm not I'm not happy in my place or the position I'm in 

22:06 but I'm going to study now I'm going to buy books why not, the owners is now on the person who's  watching to go and get this material because it's free and then all like you said all they all they 

22:16 need to do is spend the time and then like $50 for Associate I mean that's amazing I love that. Yeah 

22:21 I mean at the end of the day it's really you know people are going to have to put in some modicum 

22:27 amount of investment into their future but it doesn't necessarily have to be a lot you know 

22:33 and there's lots of options out there for somebody that wants to maybe spin up a Juniper device and 

22:39 actually get some Hands-On they don't have to go out and buy a physical device you can even 

22:44 go onto AWS Marketplace and you can just turn up um like a trial license of VSRX and VSRX is 

22:53 Juniper's firewall device but you can convert that into packet mode and in which case it operates 

22:59 just like a traditional Juniper router and you can run MPLS, you can run BGP, OSPF, you can run all 

23:07 those things so there's lots of options and that's like a way people can get hands-on with the with 

23:12 the equipment without actually having access to physical devices. Do you run Labs on your computer 

Free Labs

23:17 like using GNS3 or Eve-ng or something like that? uh yeah so I used to do it all in VMware um I have 

23:24 had some pretty extensive lab setups when I was doing a lot of my JNCIE um you know earlier on 

23:30 I was doing it in like right on my MacBook, VMware Fusion on on Mac um but I also have 

23:35 an ESXI server so I have a lot of stuff running in in VMware but it's it's kind of the way that 

23:41 you stitch VMs in those environments like if you want to build big Labs with say like you know 10, 

23:46 12 routers doing it in VMware is a little bit it's not very intuitive you've got to go to the V 

23:53 switch and interconnect everything so yeah these days I'm tending to play around more with like  like GNS3 which is kind of like a network modeling simulation tool I'm sure most of your viewers are 

24:04 probably familiar with that but it's very similar to to Eve or Eve-ng or GNS3 those are the two that 

24:09 I that I spend most of my time with yeah yeah. I mean i' I did it a while ago I mean to to to  spin up a Junos device in GNS3 and then connect it to like multiple devices and I mean devices from 

24:20 many vendors it's so easy and Eve-ng does the same the question is like training is free you  can download this stuff for free, you can run it on Eve-ng or GNS3 so you got no excuse about not 

24:30 labbing so you can lab it up. The exams are not not expensive so I think it it comes down to like  what are you going to do about it like you have to put the effort in sorry go on. So uh Juniper 

24:39 also has this um Elevate Community which is you know basically it used to be called J-Net forums 

24:46 but it's uh it's just a forum where people can share information, ask questions and there is a 

24:52 whole training and certification thing right here where there's all kinds of questions where people  are hey I'm going through for this certification anybody have any advice so there's a lot of really 

25:02 really good discussion on the Elevate Community under the training and certification uh community 

25:08 so that's an excellent resource for anybody that might be you know preparing for these exams as  well. You say it's like forums right so you can ask questions and then people help you yeah it's 

25:17 a it's a forum or discussion board you can see there's lots of different uh topics and things 

25:22 like that so if somebody wants to learn just about switching there's a whole section of of elevate  Community which is just focused on Switching and you can see it's just place where people 

25:33 can come and ask questions and there's lots of really really sharp people that are answering 

25:38 questions all day but yeah there's an excellent resource in the Elevate Community for training  and certification so anybody that's interested in pursuing this and they're like where do I start 

25:48 you know how do I get access to you know what what would it look like if I had to build a lab for 

25:53 this there's a just excellent resource right there I mean. I love it again the barriers have been 

25:58 removed a lot right um and there's one thing that you mentioned like when we spoke offline about  time I'm I'm assuming it's like that you waited what was it seven years, nine years was it that 

Time management

26:07 you waited you you wasted too much time right? yeah I wasted a lot of time and see funny how it 

26:13 is yeah so I was working with junos for nine years when I finally decided to go and take my uh exam 

26:20 and I was in my late 20s at this time early 30s I mean I had had all the Time in the World to do 

26:26 these things but for some reason I I put it off it wasn't until I had my daughter um which you would 

26:33 think like now I actually have a lot less time on my hands exactly and that somehow like motivated 

26:38 me to finally go and pursue the JNCIE say okay you know I've been putting this off for too long  but it's funny how things like that can kind of give you the kick or the motivation to take the 

26:48 next step towards something in your career um and I think I was just at a point where I was like  okay I had done a number of other certifications I had been pushing this expert level went off for 

26:59 many years I just I don't think I had enough uh I didn't I didn't believe in myself you know enough 

27:05 that I could do it and I I was scared to go and take it and maybe fail you know um you know what 

27:12 I what I've learned like I said is don't don't do what I did you know you don't need to wait  nine years um and you know sometimes the failure is what teaches us the most lesson so um I could 

27:23 have taken the exam many years before maybe I might have failed it um but then I would have  been able to you know know exactly what's on the exam turn around and knock it out a few months 

27:33 later so I wish I had you know maybe done that but you know just my story is that for whatever reason 

27:39 I just didn't didn't think that I was ready and I just kept I have to read one more book I have to and I think I overdid it I think I overdid it I mean I literally read thousands upon thousands of 

27:49 pages worth of material I one time I put all the material together that I studied for that first 

27:55 JNCIE and it was about about three or four foot tall stack of books that I had read uh I think I 

28:02 like I think I overdid it. It's funny it's like there's a lot of like common stories between the  two of us I got married in the July and then the following year in January I passed my CCIE 

28:13 and my poor wife you know she had to put up with me studying for my CCIE um but I I love what you 

28:19 said you know there's no shame in failing and I always like to say with certs right if you fail 

28:25 it's not like you have to go and do another year of University I mean if you fail today you take what you've learned you go and fix those bad areas like you said and then next month you going to do 

28:33 it again if you can. Let me tell you a story on the on the failure so I had for the most part I

Story Time

28:40 I've passed almost you know the very first exam I ever took which was like my Novell Administration 

28:47 exam for NetWare 3.12 I failed that one, that was the very first certification I ever after that I 

28:54 never failed any other exams until oh wow I never failed another exam until I got to doing my fourth 

29:03 JNCIE uh with which was the JNCIE Data Center and I failed that one three times and I will tell you 

29:12 right now that I was starting to question whether I actually was worth my salt as an it I mean so 

29:21 here I am I'm replaying those guys those guys from my you know my early career you call yourself an 

29:27 engineer and I'm literally saying that to myself I started to question you know my whole world 

29:33 turned upside down took me it took me I had to it took me four times to pass that data center 

29:38 uh exam it was very very tough. I'm glad you said that though because it's like we said earlier you 

29:44 know everyone will think that you're just a genius because you're just like knocking these things out  but it's it's encouraging to hear that you failed it four times because that's an encouragement for 

Put in the work

29:52 everyone else. There's a lot of people that you know oh Stefan you're a genius no I anybody I will 

29:58 tell you right now any viewer on this show can do what I did anybody you just need to put the time 

30:07 and the effort into it that's that's all that it takes it's not about most of the stuff is yeah you 

30:13 have to have you have to be intelligent you know to to to grasp these concepts but anybody can do 

30:20 it if you just put the time and effort into it. But I love the it's been it's been proven over  and over again that intelligence isn't the solution it's hard work and putting the time 

30:29 in like you you put the time in you put in the work obviously you have to have a certain  aptitude for the stuff but what's that saying in the gym the weights don't lift themselves right, 

30:39 it's like you have to put the work in right? You have to be disciplined and it's like you know a  lot maybe this might be too much information but one of the things that I normally do when 

30:48 I'm pursuing a certification is I kind of set a goal in mind like here's when I would like to  sit for the exam um and then I sort of quantify all right, here's all the material that I need 

30:58 to get through between now and then let's say it's two books that I have to read between you 

31:03 know now and three months from now and and those two books are about 2,000 pages well I'll do the 

31:08 math here's how many pages I need to read per day if I want to hit my target and you got to 

31:15 stick to that and if you miss a day let's say it's 17 pages a day I need to read 17 pages a day if I 

31:21 miss a day well I have to read 34 pages the next day and you have to show that level of discipline 

31:28 or else you'll just uh it's it's difficult but you know people that are disciplined tend to 

31:35 accomplish their goals uh a little bit easier or you know when you miss a deadline you just have to 

31:42 be willing to like kind of recalibrate all right I'm gonna have to do 34 pages today or if I miss 

31:47 three days in a row I'm doing you know 52 pages or something 54 pages. And that's definitely not 

31:53 too much information you should actually give us more so if you got any because a lot of people  are like like okay how do give give me study tips give me like advice because you've you've been on 

32:01 this journey you got five of these man it's insane uh what other tips have you learned along the way?  This isn't necessarily a tip but we were talking a little bit about you're talking about money 

32:10 and people you know the the issues with spending money and let me talk a little bit about that for 

32:15 just a minute because this is a lesson that I've really learned over the years. You might be in a  in a job where you're you're making decent money you've got you know, you're in IT but perhaps you 

32:26 want to elevate your career to the next level and you want to pursue some certifications or  you want to pursue some some training there are just unfortunately a lot of employers out there 

32:36 that don't make that investment in their employees um kudos to the ones that do but I've seen that 

32:42 there's plenty that don't or um maybe you want to let's say I'm doing Service Provider type work 

32:50 but I want to start learning more about security so my employer may not necessarily want to you 

32:56 know approve that training for me because it's not really directly in my scope of work right, so you 

33:03 know for those that are already maybe already making some money you're in the industry and  you want to maybe upskill, you want to elevate your career, you want to learn some new skills 

33:12 I will tell you right now if your employer isn't willing to invest in you you should be willing to  invest in you, it's the best investment you can make is spending your own money that has never 

33:20 stopped me when I wanted to pursue something you know sometimes it's a difficult pill to swallow 

33:26 because these trainings are not cheap you know it might be three, $4,000 $5,000 for a one week 

33:31 um but it's always in my case um paid back in dividends so that's that's a bit of advice for 

33:40 people is just be willing to invest in yourself. Number two I would say is um if you are interested 

33:48 in pursuing one of these certifications especially the higher level one of the best ways that you can  motivate yourself is to go and actually sign up and pay for for the the expert level exam get it 

33:59 on the calendar because now you're kind of on the hook right it's like all right I know I'm  scheduled to take this in three months so I've really got to get my ducks in a row because you 

34:09 know granted you could reschedule the exam if you wanted to but just having that date on a calendar 

34:15 just it's visualizing it and seeing it like okay I've got to make some tangible progress because 

34:21 I've got a date in mind, so goal setting that's really important sort of just looking at the the 

34:26 mountain you know you some, when you look at these books right some of them they're like you know  this thick and and it just seems like it's going to be a real uh difficult or like a Herculean task 

34:38 to get through a book of this nature but guess what I've done I've done like 30 books of this  size in my career it's just if you just doing 15, 20 pages a day you'd be amazed at how quickly 

34:50 you're you know you're knocking a 100 pages out uh every five days and you know before you know  it a a 1500 page book is finished. So having that discipline, having a structure, setting goals, 

35:02 um investing in yourself using things like the Elevate Community to reach out to other people 

35:07 who have already passed these exams and getting some some type of an idea from them that that's 

35:13 probably one of the best things you can do is networking with with folks similar like-minded  folks that are pursuing the same track or have already done that so you can kind of learn from 

35:22 their experience yeah I mean there's so many uh good lessons but yeah I think for me the one that 

35:29 is really resonates the most is invest in yourself and I don't think enough people do that I think a 

35:35 lot of people want to blame their employers oh well I want to do this training but my employer  won't pay for it. Well you know what invest in yourself, invest in yourself. So then the the 

Certificates

35:45 flip question on that or the other side of that question is in your experience when you got these  Certs did it change your life did it open doors? Absolutely. There's no point getting the SD 

35:55 for nothing right sorry go on. Yeah no absolutely um it changed my life in a lot of different ways 

36:01 um I'll talk about the finality of that which is now I have my own business which is wonderful and 

36:07 amazing and it's great that I don't have to report to other people the immediate impact of getting 

36:13 some of these expert level certifications was that I was invited to the table with really smart 

36:19 people that I respected and all of a sudden they respected me more and felt like I had something 

36:25 to offer as well so it was getting me invited to tables that previously I wasn't really um privy to 

36:32 or I wasn't invited to, so getting the ability to work on um more interesting projects, more 

36:40 challenging projects that really um pushed me to you know elevate my knowledge and uh yeah so those 

36:48 are the types of things but not only that but the career options really started to open up as well 

36:55 so you know all of a sudden I'm getting lots of emails from prospective employers and it's giving 

37:01 you leverage if you're happy maybe in the job that you're at right now but you're recognizing  that you can make more money at least you have a little bit of leverage um you know you're bringing 

37:10 something to the table you have um credentials to back it up um so it definitely helped me to 

37:16 move up in terms of pay scale um give me better um career options job um you know opportunities 

37:25 and then ultimately I think for me where this has really um the the the finality of all this sort of 

Keep learning

37:32 journey is that now I'm in business for myself and I've been in business for four years and I haven't  had to report to anybody else for the last four years and that takes its own sort of discipline 

37:41 uh but it's it's really nice to um be the maker of my own destiny and um you know I think after 

37:50 four years I can effectively say yeah I can do it on my own and I don't think I 

37:56 think a big part of that is the fact that I have these certifications. The certifications sort of 

38:02 helped me open a lot of doors, it enabled me to write a couple of books, do a lot of speaking 

38:08 opportunities those types of things and really sort of establish um you know my reputation in 

38:14 the industry and that then facilitated me starting my own business so I don't think that any of that 

38:21 stuff would have been possible maybe had I not started that Journey um many many moons 

38:27 ago. I mean I love what you said though I mean encouragement for everyone is like it's you're not  going to get this in one day Rome wasn't built in a day and you didn't get five JNCIE in like a week 

38:37 it's a journey right? Yeah absolutely it's it's something that is a continuous journey, this field 

38:43 you've got to constantly evolve and you've got to constantly learn because the things that I learned  20 years ago some of them are still relevant right but there's so much new stuff there's so much new 

38:54 stuff so you are going to have to be if you want to get into it you have to be a lover of learning 

39:00 I think if you want to be really successful um you have to be somebody that enjoys learning 

39:06 and is you know okay with the fact that um you're going to probably be on a constant evolution yeah 

39:14 I mean it's an encouragement in for new people as well right because if if you're like perhaps you  in another job and you don't like it and you want to get into IT you know what's hot today 

39:23 wasn't hot 10, 20 years ago when when we started um you you can become an expert in in this hot new 

39:30 thing within two years you're well known in that area and I love that story you know was 12 months  where from the point where they were like hating on you to like they're coming to you for advice 

39:40 um so it doesn't take like 20 years to to become successful in in an area if you choose something  that's new. Yeah I mean in this day and age I think things are moving so rapidly like if there's a 

39:51 new technology and you've got an expert in that technology realistically speaking how many years 

39:58 experience did they have? Like you know we're we're talking ChatGPT and stuff that that is pretty 

40:05 new right so if you got an expert out there who's talking about ChatGPT and and you know using ChatGPT

40:10 to you know build some kind of AI engine for your company or something like that realistically 

40:15 speaking how long has that person been an expert in ChatGPT? It's only been out for seven or 

40:22 eight months you know so one of the things that I like to say is that um the expert in the room 

40:29 is the person that's read only one or two pages more than everybody else in the room so that's it. 

40:34 I love that I mean let's talk about AI because a lot of people are worried about AI  like is it even worth becoming a network engineer? Is it worth getting into cyber? Is it worth getting 

AI in networking

40:44 into Tech because AI is going to eat all these jobs? So I do think so, I still think it's worth 

40:50 getting into a uh into networking case in point um one of my customers is a very large Bank um 

40:58 in the US I've been working with them for about two years now on their SDN deployment um you know 

41:04 which is finally just getting launched right now we're just going live with like one of our very 

41:10 first data centers um but I'm telling you right now this this um effort to have a more software 

41:16 defined networking it's all about programmability in this particular Banks Network right it's um if 

41:22 a data center goes down let's say they had a major geographic fire or you know tornado just tore a 

41:28 building down the idea with what we're doing is as long as they have new equipment and they just 

41:34 you know put that uh bring that new equipment up they could replay the scripts and the playbooks 

41:41 and everything and have that data center back up and running within about two hours okay oh wow 

41:47 and you know all the things that we're looking at doing with the um you know using machine learning 

41:53 and AI and software defined principles to be able to make the network behave um and adapt 

42:00 more quickly in real time to network failures and things of that nature but in my experience 

42:06 in on this particular project at least and I think this kind of um goes across the board with some of 

42:11 my other customers that are also doing similar types of things, it's not eliminating jobs, it's 

42:16 creating more jobs. There's so I mean so you know just looking at 

42:22 software defined principles now you need people that have some DevOps type of background so 

42:30 I'm not saying that you might not have to learn new skills you absolutely may have to learn new 

42:37 skills and I think the network engineer of today and especially tomorrow will definitely have to 

42:42 have some programming chops under their belt um not hardcore but you have to understand how to do 

42:48 maybe basic Python scripting or um some form of scripting so that you can yeah Ansible and things 

42:55 of that nature how to run playbooks um you know uh terraform or whatever have you but I I don't 

43:03 suspect I mean we've been talking about Software Define networking for years now and the vision 

43:08 of it eliminating jobs um I don't think we're there yet and I don't think we're going to be  there for a long time and again I think you're even if you all the things that we do 

43:18 today let's say you have a network engineer that logs onto a switch and turns up a VLAN that might 

43:24 disappear like in terms the person logging into the CLI you know and some of those things may 

43:30 be autoprovision from some kind of like a web interface that a customer chooses but who's going 

43:35 to basically troubleshoot when the scripts don't work properly or when um the script you know says 

43:42 it pushed the VLAN out but you know you're still going to need somebody to that understands all  these things and be able to log on to devices and try to really understand it's I don't think it's 

43:51 eliminating jobs I think it's going to in a way it's going to create more. It's interesting what  you what you said there I mean that's exactly the problem what happens when the

43:58 storm comes or there's a fire network you know who's going to solve that  the AI or the script or you? I would rather have you on site than than some some AI right? I'm 

44:09 not saying that that eventually it won't eliminate jobs but let's look at Tesla for example right how 

44:14 long has it taken them to get full self-driving on I mean I have Tesla my FSD is still in beta 

44:22 it's pretty jerky I don't know it's going to take a while for we have this stuff at a point where 

44:28 it's foolproof and I mean we're kind of in the infancy in terms of Software Defined Networking 

44:36 all this kind of stuff I think we've got a long way to go before we're eliminating jobs as a  result of it. I mean that's that's very encouraging and I mean you've I just want to recap you've got 

Where to start

44:45 like Data Center Enterprise, Service Provider Cloud uh and what's the other one I'm missing Security 

44:51 did we say that Security so I shouldn't have missed that one so that was the one I actually  wanted to highlight is um you've touched all these different areas if I was starting today or if I'm 

45:00 trying to transition what would you recommend I look at Security's been very hot recently but you 

45:06 know is it AI is it security what sort of area would you or what advice would you give? Well if 

45:11 we're bringing AI into the mix I will say getting credentials in machine learning and you know data 

45:16 analytics, data science, um AI absolutely hands down I think that's such an emerging fi it's so 

45:24 hot right now and I think um we're just sort of kind of starting at the beginning of this sort 

45:29 of revolution so I mean that that to me is a sort of a no-brainer but in terms of like maybe if 

45:35 we're talking about networking versus cyber now I love networking that's really near and dear to my 

45:40 heart but if I'm quite frank I think I've seen the numbers in terms of cyber um and there's something 

45:47 like over the next 10 years there's going to be a like there are like something like two million un 

45:55 fulfilled cyber security positions over the next 10 years so if somebody's looking for a field 

46:03 where you're almost guaranteed to get a job um you know cyber is a pretty good a pretty good field 

46:09 to choose um and there's it's always evolving as well you know so there's always something new to 

46:15 learn and malicious actors are always evolving in their exploit techniques and things of that  nature so uh that's a that's a great field for also for somebody who loves to learn but my 

46:27 path was I like both, I like both and I don't necessarily think people need to I realize in 

46:34 the real world you're typically going to get a job as like a network engineer or you're going to get 

46:39 a job working on the security side but you know if you enjoy both try to find the position that 

46:46 would give you the ability to do both. Because you I mean you're really highly certified in firewall  sorry to interrupt. Yeah I mean I so in addition to the JNCIE Cert, I've got Palo, I've got multiple 

46:57 Palo firewall certifications at the highest level within Palo, I've got my CISSP which is you know 

47:03 it's more like from a sizo type perspective it's not super technical but I've been working with a 

47:09 lot of different security products right and I don't like to limit myself to one particular set 

47:15 of technology and I'm constantly evolving like for example lately I'm really into Wireless. I'm really 

47:21 getting into that so I've been doing a lot of stuff with uh the Mist Wireless that's been really  exciting um especially the AI stuff that that's uh inside Mist but yeah I don't want to pigeon hole 

47:33 myself into one particular technology because it's all so interesting to me like I don't want 

47:39 to just be a guy that's a doing data center switching or I don't want to just do Service  Provider routing I I want to touch it all and um you know I think the people that are going to be 

47:49 really successful in this yeah you have generalists and you have experts but 

Networking vs. cybersecurity

47:55 but I think a lot of experts like to have abroad um you know maybe just go a few inches deep but 

48:06 50 foot wide is pretty cool. But I love what you know it's the whole thing like who do you want on  site if you really want like someone to consult I'd rather have you come and consulting 

48:14 my company because you've got this breadth of knowledge I mean you you you're not only like  wide but you're deep as well in so many areas but I mean like someone who's just a for instance if 

48:23 someone just knows like riding switching or just knows like Wireless they might not understand 

48:28 the security side, with you understand all of it. That was sort so my sort of goal I don't know if I  talked about this earlier but my goal in my career was like what do I have to do to get to, 

48:39 what is somebody that's at like a CTO level what is the level of knowledge that they have and you 

48:45 see that they they're pretty deep but they're also wide um and you know because you can go to I mean 

48:51 a good CTO understands the business aspects, the impacts, they understand the technical impacts 

48:59 um and they should understand a wide variety of topics um they're not just a CTO in routing, you 

49:06 know or CTO in you know, so it's you know it's kind of like if you approach it from where do 

49:13 you where do you want to go like and for me it was hey I want to like apply my career in such a  way that like I would achieve like a CTO level of knowledge at the end of it yeah so I mean that's 

49:24 why I just like I kind can't keep still to one particular thing I just love learning there's so 

49:30 many cool things to learn about all the time. My my fiance works in AI so uh we are always talking 

49:36 about she works actually at Microsoft does a lot of AI stuff and um it's just an exciting time to  be in technology right now and there's I mean it just seems like it hasn't stopped you know since 

49:45 I got into this field it's just been constantly evolving and it's a great field for anybody that's  a that wants to keep continuous evolution and learning. But I love like on the networking side 

49:54 I mean if you if you're someone who wants to do like core or your pure networking I mean that's 

50:00 where you can start but networking is everywhere I I see it a lot I spoken to other people and one of  the problems in cyber is that some guys don't have deep understanding of networking and that can be a 

50:09 problem um so I mean you could touch cyber but be more networking focused it's not like you have to 

50:14 just go with the hot stuff I mean there's there's lots of jobs for Networking Engineers right? Yeah  definitely there's great jobs out there. You didn't complete your degree right? That is 

Certs vs. Degree

50:24 correct. So if I was starting today and I wanted to be a Network Engineer would you recommend certs or 

50:29 degree? So this was sort of the conundrum that I was fa when I started going to school and I 

50:35 was um learning so I did do some college but the curriculum that I was learning was outdated um and 

50:42 it wasn't it was you know they were talking about things that hadn't been used for several years in 

50:48 the real world personally I'm not necessarily advocating this path for everybody but I think 

50:54 it's a lot lot easier if you look at hey I'm going to go to a four-year degree and you're looking at 

51:00 the ROI on um how much you're going to spend for a four-year degree if you are ultimately going to 

51:07 get into networking I think you can achieve a better return on your investment just by going 

51:13 the route of selfstudy maybe get yourself into some highly focused Technical Training um that's 

51:21 maybe six months to nine months versus four years and you'll end up spending a lot less and you'll 

51:27 be able to get right into the industry and you know kind of move your your way up from there 

51:33 now that is not to say that's necessarily the path that everybody should take um uh as I mentioned 

51:39 before when I was working at UUNET I did have the luxury ultimately of working myself into 

51:46 really amazing projects like DWDM and Optical projects we were looking at Lambda switching and 

51:52 all these really cool things and I'm literally working hand in and with people that had PhDs 

51:59 in physics and you know um these types of things I managed to get there through lots and lots of 

52:06 hard work. The four-year degree plus maybe another two years with the Masters might have gotten me 

52:13 in the door a little bit quicker but you're still talking about I would have had to do six years of 

52:20 college education to get to that point just to be invited to the table because most of those guys  had Masters or PhDs but I think in reality just looking in my own story I think I managed to 

52:32 get there in about two or three years so maybe I I think I I might I might have beat the guy that 

52:37 spent six years going to school in terms of ROI so again I'm not I'm not necessarily advocating 

52:42 people just don't go to College you know I think it is that that's that's valuable for certain  people but I think for IT everything's changing so quick half the stuff you learn in college is 

52:51 already outdated by the time you get out you can just get in you can spend a lot less money maybe  just pursuing certifications, self-study, technology training at uh specialized technology schools and 

53:03 uh you're you're pretty much off to the races in a pretty short amount of time. I mean 

53:08 and the crazy thing about the US I find is the debt that people end up with right the college  debt situation in the US is like wow I mean you go and do you can get a Juniper for $50 and compare 

53:19 that against a degree I mean and I'm not saying they're exactly the same but the point is if you  do a few certs it can open doors right? Absolutely would you hire a college graduate or would you 

53:29 hire someone with some some Juniper Certs and I mean I know it's a really nasty question like if you  you've been down this road a bit right? You know be ultimately dependent upon which person I really 

53:38 liked working with better but yeah I would absolutely hire somebody that had no college  degree um and simply had certifications and if I saw that that was a person that was hungry um 

53:49 and had that drive that's the thing that I would really be looking for more is somebody  who's saying hey I'm I really want to get into this industry I want to learn, um I'm going to 

53:59 work hard, those are the types of things that I think would resonate with me more than hey I did 

54:05 a four-year degree in a specialization in this but you know it really depends on the situation but I 

54:10 absolutely would have no hesitation with hiring somebody with without a degree uh just with some 

54:16 technology certifications. I love what you said there because everyone I interview well I should  everyone but a lot of people that interview say very similar things hunger, drive, willingness 

Motivation

54:25 to learn, it's the personality traits that are more important. Those are going to be the people  that are going to show up every day with that you know um passion I think having passion is really 

54:35 important too right hopefully everybody that's watching this you love IT uh or you're very 

54:42 interested in getting into IT but I think that is such a important component um to success is that 

54:49 you love what you do or you're passionate about it if you're just doing it to make money you'll 

54:54 never be passionate about it and you'll never probably really be able to 

55:00 elevate your career to the level that other people may may be able to because they're passionate um 

55:06 when you're passionate about something it just uh it drives you. And I mean and you're not you're not  going to study like you did I mean if you don't like this you're not going to want to study for 

55:13 the next 20 years. Yeah I mean for me it's really exciting I haven't done a certification in a while  um but I I had mentioned I was uh I've been playing around with Juniper Mist a lot lately 

55:24 their Wireless platform so I am actually just started pursuing another certification because 

55:29 I don't have the Mist AI Certs and it's so exciting to like open up the course where you

55:34 start going through it and it's like oh I'm back to learning again. One of the things I think  David you and I have a similar background is we both have been trainers um so that's always 

55:44 been something that I love. I love teaching other people a common threat amongst people that really 

55:49 enjoy teaching is they also enjoy learning so I'm learning this material right now and it's 

55:55 super exciting to be uh back into like a learning mode again. How is Mist AI or how is the Mist stuff

Mist Ai

56:00 different to like traditional Wi-Fi? It's awesome man so uh God I guess I could go on a long time 

56:07 about Mist but I will tell you I have customers that have had Mist deployed now for three years and 

56:15 literally never have to do anything, never have to fix anything, like I had a customer uh an entire 

56:22 County in Pennsylvania one of my customers and they have a pretty large Mist deployment and they 

56:28 just came up to their three-year renewal on their subscriptions and you know I shot them an email 

56:33 and they were like oh wow like we we totally forgot about these renewals like we we don't 

56:39 really ever have to, it's to to them they like almost forgot it's there because it's seamless 

56:46 they I said we kind of talked a little bit about how many issues they've had over the last couple years they've had like two issues in three years and they pretty much self-healed fix themselves 

56:55 but the AI is really really cool um with the Marvis uh which is kind of like you know it 

57:01 says play on the Jarvis that Tony Stark had but yeah the Marvis is the uh the AI engine for mist 

57:08 and it's pretty awesome the way that it just kind of clicks you through um this problem that you're 

57:16 seeing in the network here's the high probability is that it's being caused by this based on our 

57:22 machine learning algorithm and other customers who have had similar types of problems here's 

57:29 like they give you like the percentages like 67% it's because they've got you know like a faulty 

57:34 DHCP or something like that and you know it's kind of walks you through it and then it gives 

57:40 you suggestions on how to fix it um and oftentimes if you just follow their suggestions it f it fixes 

57:46 it um and half the time it just fixes it on its own it's pretty it's pretty darn cool. So talking 

57:53 about AI there's two things that are I was just thinking about is number one, it can make a network 

57:58 engineer's life a lot easier right because it's it's helping you and number two though it is already it might replace some jobs already there but it's um it they you still in control I think 

58:08 the great thing about AI is hopefully you know we won't be configuring VLANs like we did all our lives you know it's those low boring tasks can get given to an AI or to a machine and you

58:18 and I can focus on more important problems right? I totally agree yeah I mean that we might the

58:24 things that we do on a day-to-day basis might change but it hopefully will let us do more interesting things that are uh more strategic in nature you know as opposed to having to deal 

58:36 with all the tactical level um let's focus on big picture business type things to make the business 

58:43 you know work better as opposed to I don't want to do VLANs all day. Exactly. You know it's cool like the 

58:50 first couple of times you know you're like oh this is neat when you're doing your CCNA or something 

58:55 like oh it's cool this is a VLAN but you know I don't want to do that across the network you know 

59:01 at scale. It's fun to learn the the basics and you need to learn like how to use notepad or whatever 

59:06 but I mean at some point you get tired of that stuff and I think the AI wave ChatGPT has 

59:12 just highlighted that it's here you're not going to change the world sorry you're not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle if you like you either ride this wave and you become one 

59:20 of the people that become really successful with it like you and your wife's doing AI at Microsoft or you're going to get left behind right? Have you seen Network GPT yet yeah I actually 

59:31 interviewed John at I I think it's the same thing if we talking about the same thing John he wrote that plugin right yeah sorry go on. It's wicked cool man I mean I think it's more like a 

59:40 proof of concept at this point but the fact that you can you did it like in a month or something it was crazy yeah but using um human friendly language you know and letting me just go in and 

59:53 type hey connect to this system device use this username to connect and then bam it's connected 

59:58 and then say configure me uh I hey you know right now it might be hey configure me a VLAN but in the 

1:00:04 future it'll probably be even more intelligent to literally just say I want to connect this 

1:00:10 PC on this switch to this PC on this switch make it happen and then the the network does it just 

1:00:17 kind of like able to make it all happen behind the scenes I think that's pretty cool but the Network 

1:00:22 GPT plugin when I saw it I was like this is pretty impressive it's you can kind of get a flavor for 

1:00:28 where things are going. That just shows you you know if you if you can like you've done you you've never stopped learning you've learned all these different disciplines if you can jump on 

Outro

1:00:36 the next wave you will be a highly sort of person I mean if I look at the wages that AI Engineers are getting it's insane. Yeah absolutely. Is there anything else you want to share or wrap 

1:00:45 up with um any encouragement or final words to people are watching? I think as a final word 

1:00:52 of encouragement I just say to folks you know believe in yourself, invest in yourself and 

1:00:58 you know never give up hope I mean I think I'm a perfect example of I can do five 

1:01:03 JNCIE and I can do all these other certifications if I can have my own business uh then pretty much 

1:01:09 any everybody here can do it you just got to have a little bit of faith in yourself a little bit of belief and um you know put some hard work and dedication there's nothing that's ever going 

1:01:17 you have all the belief in the world in yourself but you still have to put some hard work and and 

1:01:22 time into these things but if I can do it then pretty much anybody here on this uh this show 

1:01:28 can can do it as well. Perhaps you can just tell us about your socials and your company website 

1:01:33 again uh so um our website is www.spfirst.net or you could go to shortestpathfirst.net either 

1:01:44 one will work my personal @sfouant and then on LinkedIn it's just Stefan Fouant. So for everyone who's 

1:01:51 watching once again I'll put those links below so go and show the love um please don't flood Stefan with a million questions but you know that's what I love about the world today any 

1:01:59 one of us can connect to someone who's got like five JNCIE it's amazing that and that that we can 

1:02:06 do this and Stefan thanks so much you know for sharing with the community and being willing to give back it it means a lot so thanks. My pleasure it's been great speaking with you today thank you.