Connection Restored

I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to recently.

Goodbye, DigitalOcean!

After nearly five years working at DigitalOcean, I made the difficult decision to part ways with the company. In my time there, I was fortunate to work with an amazing team, and witness the truly amazing evolution of a startup company from niche player to major cloud provider. Most of all, I’m thankful to DigitalOcean for the opportunity my role provided in extending from traditional network engineering into development and automation. I’ll miss working with my DO team, but I’m excited to see where the future will take them.

Hello, Network to Code!

Just last month, I started at Network to Code, a small consulting company which specializes in network automation solutions and training. NTC was founded just a few years ago by Jason Edelman, but has quickly cemented its position as a leader in the network automation space. My new position affords me exposure to many different environments and challenges, and has reinvigorated a sense of discovery in me that I didn’t realize had been waning. I’m honored to be working among so many talented engineers at NTC, and I’m very excited for our future!

NetBox is growing out of control

Three years ago, NetBox was released as an open source project, following around 18 months of internal development at DigitalOcean. To be honest, I didn’t expect it to grow all that much: There were already plenty of established players in the IPAM/DCIM space. But I was taken aback at how quickly NetBox was being adopted. These past few years have introduced a barrage of new features and functionality, and there’s no sign of development slowing down any time soon.

My recent move from DigitalOcean to Network to Code has afforded me a better position from which to develop NetBox: Rather than being constrained to a single deployment, I now have exposure to various customer implementations, which lends a much richer context around how NetBox is being deployed in different use cases. I also have the pleasure to be working alongside a fellow NetBox maintainer and all-around brilliant guy, John Anderson.

It’s clear at this point, however, that we need more hands on deck to sustain NetBox’s current trajectory. I’d like to bring at least two more maintainers on board, but first we need to establish a semiformal schedule for meetings to take place. Look for more news on that front.

Rebooting the site

I’ve gotten to work revitalizing packetlife.net recently, so you might notice some changes. For starters, I’ve refreshed the ancient code base to bring it up to date with the release of Django and its related packages. I’d love to open source the code in the future, though I still have a good amount of cleanup left to do. (There’s been no shortage of facepalming as I review the old code, much of which was written back when I was first learning Python.)

I hope to get back to posting blog articles at a more regular cadence, with a shift in focus from general networking to network automation. I might also write on topics like professional development and personal finance occasionally. Maybe a little bit of home improvement (I've been working on finishing my basement). We’ll see how it goes.