Retrospective and Goals

The year 2011 is almost over.  It's been a very interesting year for me.  This year was my first foray into blogging about my professional life.  I have found the connections made through this blog to be very rewarding.  Thank you for the encouragement, especially @etherealmind and @ecbanks who have allowed me to broaden my audience through some posts on @packetpushers.  Hopefully some of you have even found something I have written this year useful.

I also made my first appearance behind the podium as a speaker at a technology conference.  After years being on the receiving end, it was good to give some knowledge back.  Thank you to Josh Hall and company at Tech Feast for giving me the opportunity.  One lesson I learned is that it's not as hard to fill up a 90 minute presentation slot as I thought it would be.  The other thing I learned is not to volunteer to do four 90 minute presentations back to back.  My wife laughed quite hard at me when I came home and complained about my voice being gone and my feet being tired (she's a teacher).

So now it's time for the goals for next year in no particular order:

• Take and pass the ROUTE exam
• Take and pass the TSHOOT exam
• Take and pass the ARCH exam
• Earn the CCNP R&S and CCDP certifications
• Keep my office more organized
• Learn Italian (someday I will go back and this time I'll be able to talk to my relatives)
• Take the time to learn more and understand this OpenFlow stuff that the PacketPushers keep jabbering about
• Figure out how to grow and maintain grass in my back yard without making my dogs use hover boards

As you can tell, there might be a few blog posts that will double as me organizing my study notes.  My current job is mostly L2 so the routing stuff is a bit rusty.

CCDA 640-864 Official Certification Guide 4th Edition

A couple of months ago I had the privilege to read an advance e-book version of this new certification guide for the Cisco Certified Design Associate written by Anthony Bruno and Steve Jordan.  Cisco Press is bundling this e-book with a new test engine.  Unlike previous certification guides, this new test engine is not from Boson.  The test engine was very user friendly and the test material was well designed.


The book itself is very well laid out.  Although it is thick with theory about network design to meet the needs of those studying for the CCDA exam, it also has many real world examples.  These examples make the theory easier to understand and internalize.


As with most of the Cisco Press certification guides, there are plenty of questions within the chapters to help the reader self assess their progress.  My favorite feature is the memory table appendix.  These are a great way to prepare for the test.  My goal when I prepare for a test is to use the memory tables until I can accurately fill them in without the book and even produce them without the empty tables.  It's a great feeling to start an exam with a "cheat sheet" of sorts from the memory tables you can write down on your white board.

Network Egress Filtering

Today I volunteered to give a quick presentation on the importance of egress filtering to a wonderful group of education IT folks. Below is the slide deck that I used for the presentation for anyone that might find it interesting.