Cisco Live 2019 – A Whirlwind of Networking Goodness

Cisco Live 2019 came and went in a whirlwind of fantastic meetups, excellent sessions, and genuinely nerdy networking conversations.

Cisco Live session content was top notch. Jasper Bongertz’s Wireshark talk blew the audience away with useful packet capture and troubleshooting tips, and Denise Fishburne’s Network Detective presentation captivated the audience with methodical troubleshooting processes and issue isolation techniques. Both sessions are a must watch for network engineers. Seriously, you will thank me (send coffee) and more importantly you should definitely thank them for giving so much to the community!

Tech Field Day captured a ton of great content this year as well. I especially recommend this NetBeez presentation highlighting the exciting ways their monitoring solution is fighting the good fight by helping to prove it’s not the network. Their new integration with Cat9K switches is also covered and definitely worth checking out.

This year also featured the distribution of Amy’s Army of Angry Routers. Angry routers were given, angry routers were received, and a new site header came to be.

Cisco Live 2019 was also especially memorable in the recognition that this very blog received! As Cisco 2018 IT Blog Award winner for Most Entertaining, yours truly had her big screen moment! I couldn’t be more thankful for each of you who took the time to vote! Thanks for reading along, laughing along, and sharing along with my adventures, snark, and bits of wisdom. You all rock, and obviously have the best taste.

And finally, my favorite part of every Cisco Live wrap up, the photo gallery! So many long time friends, so many new friends. The networking community is genuinely the best and you all make it that way.

Published 06/23/2019

2016 Cisco Live, US – Geeks for life.

Putting together a wrap up post on Cisco Live US always makes me smile, and 2016 is no exception. As many of you know, this CLUS marked 5 years since Tom and a small group of engineers first bonded over networking nerdiness and an addiction to 140 characters.

We’ve followed and helped each other through upgrades, outages, career changes, certifications, and a plethora of engineering challenges. We’ve commiserated with the suck that sometimes is our jobs, we’ve championed the hard-fought successes of our peers, and as a bonus, we’ve managed to provide an ever flowing stream of hilarious commentary along the way.

I’m thrilled to be part of a networking community that just keeps growing larger, and I’m continually impressed with the engineering talent this group represents. I’m also pleased to have been part of Tech Field Day at CLUS as well, which continues to do an amazing job bringing great content and engineers together.

Just check out this awesomeness. Could there be anything better? No, no there could not.

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The Sparkly Side of Cisco Live 2014

In case you were living under a rock in the networking world, Cisco Live 2014 happened last week and in a big way. Thousands of geeks took over San Francisco and it’s safe to say a good time was had by all!

A few things made my week in particular quite excellent, one of those being the Cisco Champion(s) Program. The Champion events were excellent opportunities to get to know fellow engineers and have a good time laughing it up with friends. A special thanks to my fellow ginger and partner in plotting world domination, Amy Lewis (@commsninja), who definitely leveled up her already extraordinary unicorn wrangling skills. Her own talk was also fantastic and you should check it out here.

Tech Field Day also organized some great events, including round table discussions for us blogger/social media types. These pictures don’t do justice to the staggering amount of brain power gathered around the table, but you can check out the videos here.

I’d be remiss not to give an extra special thanks to these two guys, Tom (@networkingnerd) and Stephen (@sfoskett) for all the work they do to build community in networking.

This Cisco Live was also the week of fabulous tweeps bringing me all sorts of fun and shiny presents. From a Batgirl t-shirt from Jeff (@fryguy_pa) to actual sparkly bats from Tom (@networkingnerd) and Denise (@denisefishburne), I love that this group laughs and jokes together. A sparkly PVDM from Erik (@ucgod) and a tiara (also from @denisefishburne) rounded off the gifts. The opportunity to dub Pete Lumbis (@tacCCDE) as the king of TAC, complete with a tiara and a sword, certainly made my week.

Last but not least, the awesome events organized by @ciscolive @kathleenmudge @rbakker and the rest of the Cisco Social Media team, allowed for some quality time with awesome engineers. These are just a few pics below. From the looks of it, by the end of the week dignity had clearly taken a vacation, not that there was much of it to start with in this crowd.