Welcome to my personal blog! My name is David and I live in Germany. I currently work as a network engineer for a managed service provider.
As a first post I thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit about myself and what this site is about. So if you want to know more about me and what I am doing, stay right here with me :)
My career in IT so far
My journey in IT began in 2015 right after I finished school. I always knew that I want to do something in IT. So I started studying computer science. But not just as a normal student at the university. In Germany there is the possibility to study while getting your first experience in professional life. With this dual study program you actually have a contract with an employer - with all the benefits this brings to your early career. After 12 years of school I wanted to get my hands dirty so that was a natural choice for me.
But as it is with most young men my understanding from IT was building PCs, programming websites and mostly gaming. I never thought about all the other things that are part of the broad job landscape when you here someone say “Yeah I work in IT”. This is where my employer came in. I had an amazing team which allowed me to get in touch with all kinds of things. Think databases, first level support, web development, system administration - there was a bit of everything. But where I settled in was the network team. It just clicked. So that is what I’m stayed with until today.
With this job and especially as a student there was a lot of room for experimentation and we did most things by ourselves. Part of this was due to legal reasons, part of this was just the price tag. That’s why we always had to run some of our services by ourselves. Here I discovered another thing I had no idea about: Linux and the Open Source community. Besides my role as one of the network guys I had to maintain a couple of Linux and BSD hosts, most of which ran our network services like DHCP or DNS. But I also setup things like Elasticsearch for Netflow analyzing. There were so many things to do that we nearly lost track a couple of times - a thing most in IT are familiar with I guess. Here I also learned about some tools I would later use on a daily basis like Bash, Python and of course Ansible.
After three years I got my Bachelors degree in computer science. For me personally that was already a big milestone, but only the first.
During my last year of studying my mentor/trainer and later colleague always pushed me towards Cisco certifications. A natural thing for him to do with his shiny CCIE. So here we are in 2019 and after learning for about 9 months I passed my CCNA. With this in hand there was no more stopping me and I already got my eyes on the next goal: getting the CCNP Enterprise. I paused the learning for a short time but picked it up again in 2022. As before my colleague has supported and trained me so much that I reached this goal in February 2023.
Besides that my job was to maintain the network infrastructure. That means that me and my colleagues were responsible for everything that had a Cisco label on it. So there was a bit of everything - traditional LAN Routing and Switching, WiFi, WAN and Data Center. As I already mentioned we did most things by ourselves and were given the time to experiment. So during these years I learned a lot about enterprise routing and switching. Nearly all of our projects began at the whiteboard with a discussion which protocol and option would be the best solution. It was a great time and I am very grateful that I could “grew up” in such an environment. Some time later I was given the task to maintain our Firewalls, which resulted in a Check Point certification. Something I did as part of my job, but has never grown on me that much.
During these times the concepts of automation, especially network automation became more and more relevant. With the Linux experience it was as natural thing for me and I soon began using Ansible for network automation. I also started using Python more heavily as I slowly stepped more and more into the world of modern application development and deployment. I started looking into stuff like Kubernetes and Terraform and I got more and more exited whenever I could get my hands on these tools.
Fast forward to summer 2023. After staying with my employer since I finished studying it was time for me to move on. I started looking for other options which led to me starting my current position. I traded most of the enterprise campus things with data center equivalents, mainly Cisco ACI. As I soon figured out, most of experience with Linux and automation in general was very beneficial, as we have more and more need for automated solutions. That’s why I decided to get my next certification with the DevNet Associate, which I passed in February 2024. Now most of my days are filled with tickets and small automation projects, learning more and more about Python, Ansible and Terraform. On the other side the networking part is always right there and I tend to get lost in this world just as much as before.
What is this site all about?
With this site I want to do two things: First giving back to the Open Source community. I now have a huge heart for Open Source and I just love the idea of it. Why keep such amazing tools and knowledge to yourself? But as it is with most people this tends to be a one sided relationship. So I want to do better and finally be true to the spirit of Open Source. So I plan on contributing my part to this amazing world of modern IT with (hopefully) good explanations of all things I use and discover.
Second, I want to use this as an opportunity to grow. My wife always tells me that I can explain technical stuff very good so why not give it a shot and challenge myself on the way. I see this as some kind of exercise where I cannot longer do things just for myself. I need to document and write about it so that others can understand and learn from it. In my eyes this is an excellent way of getting better myself and help others along the way
For the most part I will write about network automation, as this is what I am dealing with. I have no idea how much I will post and what exact topics come to my mind. But my current plan is to document most things I find interesting and I knew nothing about. There will also be some posts about projects or specific things in a follow along fashion.