NANOG 90: Pondering Abstractions

         tech      Tech · OpenConfig · YANG

I had the pleasure of giving the keynote presentation at NANOG90 - sharing some thoughts and lessons that we have learnt in the 10 years since we started the OpenConfig project. This was a really enjoyable presentation to put together and give. It balanced being able to look back at what we’ve learnt, and also think about some important lessons that I wanted to share with the networking community.

Lessons from Career Coaching

         personal      work

In the autumn of 2022, I got an opportunity to attend an external leadership course. One of the things that it involved was some coaching sessions. I didn’t really think that talking to someone about work was something that I needed (and honestly probably didn’t understand what a coach did…), but engaged with it anyway. Cue the start of 2023 — Google went through some big changes, and unfortunately, my health took another downturn.

Published IETF RFCs

         tech      Tech · IETF

Over the years I have published a number of RFCs in the IETF. They are listed below. As primary author: RFC7684 - OSPFv2 Prefix/Link Attribute Advertisement RFC7777 - Advertising Node Administrative Tags in OSPF RFC7855 - Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Problem Statement and Requirements RFC8355 - Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Networks RFC8370 - Techniques to Improve the Scalability of RSVP-TE Deployments RFC8402 - Segment Routing Architecture RFC8660 - Segment Routing with the MPLS Data Plane RFC8662 - Entropy Label for Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Tunnels RFC8665 - OSPF Extensions for Segment Routing As contributor:

SailGP San Francisco

         personal      Photography

SailGP’s event on the San Francisco Bay, May 2023

Reimagining Network Devices

         tech      OpenConfig · Tech · YANG

Some reflections on the development of Software-Defined Networking, and how it has impacted the ongoing re-imagining of network devices that OpenConfig, and associated projects has driven. Almost 10 years ago, there was a shift in the IP networking industry. The move towards SDN, and its adoption by hyperscalers as a means to break apart traditional network architectures had set the scene for disruption. The question of “how are we using SDN?

Big Pine Lakes

         personal      Photography

We spent a few days in the High Sierra, off the grid, hiking the Big Pine Lakes trails. Highly recommended. I uploaded a gallery of some photography from that trip, including a few taken as we passed through Yosemite. The gallery can be found here. Lake 1: Big Pine Lakes Trail, High Sierra, CA.

NANOG 86: Emulating Network Topologies in k8s

         tech      Tech · OpenConfig · YANG · k8s

Marcus Hines and I spoke at NANOG86 on some of the work that we’ve been doing related to emulating network topologies in Kubernetes, and how this relates to improving network testability. The slides can be found here and there is a video on YouTube.

Photo gallery

         personal      Photography

A while ago, I removed my instagram account. Since then I have been wanting to find a way to share a photography portfolio. I’ve been taking more photos over the last few years, currently using a Canon R5 mirrorless, mainly with the RF 28-70 f/2 lense, but sometimes with the 100-500mm (again, sometimes with the 2x multiplier), 16mm f/1.8 prime, and 50mm f/1.8 prime. I decided to use the rather excellent Expose to give a scroll-through experience rather than the usual “select a thumbnail”.

Brain Fog

         personal      health

I originally posted this as a comment on hackernews in response to a post about this article in The Atlantic. I have briefly shared thoughts in a few contexts about the chronic health conditions that I experience, and wanted to share something here as it was very interesting to me to see brain fog, especially that which has developed post-infectiously, discussed in this forum. I have looked for a community in tech that suffers from chronic health issues, especially outside of my direct company, and not really found one.

Radio silence

         personal      Photography

For more regular updates, you can generally find me on instagram, or Héloïse on instagram. Héloïse on Mt. Tam at Sunrise - October 2021 Edit [2022-09-17]: Since April 2022, I no longer have a personal Instagram account. I make some posts on twitter.