Full Stack Journey 008: Ivan Pepelnjak

Continuing in our series of episodes focusing on particular technologies within the broader journey to being a full stack engineer, episode #8 features Ivan Pepelnjak, well-known author, blogger, podcaster, and speaker. Ivan produces a phenomenal amount of content around networking and adjacent technologies (check it out here), and is active on Twitter as well. Show Notes * While there is value in talking about T-shaped skills, I-shaped skills, and Pi-shaped skills (see this article for a brief explanation of some of these terms, which may be new to you; Pi-shaped skills are like T-shaped but with an additional “leg” or area of expertise), Ivan believes it’s really about being able to communicate with colleagues who are “right and left” of you (adjacent to your current role). * For networking professionals, this means you have to understand how servers and virtualization work, and how storage is different from TCP/IP (for example). * You can’t be an expert in these adjacent areas, but you have to know enough to understand to communicate effectively and grasp their problems/challenges. * Ivan uses a story about learning economics to illustrate that it’s not about being an expert, but knowing enough to understand what others are saying. * As concrete examples: * If you’re a data center networking professional, you’d better understand how VMware’s virtual switch works (because you’ll see it in almost every enterprise data center). * If you’re a server admin, you need to know what ping is, how ARP works, and how to take traces with tcpdump or Wireshark, and how to test to make sure your connections are actually going through. * You won’t learn anything unless you get out of your comfort zone. At the same time, find something reasonably close to what you’re already doing to streamline the learning process. It also has to be hard. * So where should today’s network engineers start when trying to expand their skills? * For data center networking engineers, Ivan recommends learning virtualization and virtual switching. * For WAN engineers, Ivan would suggest working with VPN technologies. * For a campus network engineer, Wi-Fi would be a great start to expanding your knowledge. * Everyone should try to understand how applications work and what’s going on behind a distributed application. * “Mean time to innocence” – how long it takes to prove it’s not the network’s fault. * For data center network engineers, Ivan strongly recommends learning VMware vSphere; or, for a purely Microsoft-centric organizations, Hyper-V. Why? These products are mature, they work as expected, and the documentation is typically complete, comprehensive, and well-organized. * Open source projects may be more difficult for network engineers to learn because documentation may not be as complete or comprehensive, and it may not always work as expected. * Use what your peers are using (when it comes to learning either vSphere or Hyper-V or choosing an automation tool); this helps when you get stuck or need help in your learning efforts. * Should network engineers learn network automation first or virtualization first? Ivan believes network automation skills are veryimpo...