I have a blog… now what?

“Hello World”

Why

You can find a bit more detail on my about page, but in short, the primary reason for starting this blog is to keep me accountable for continuous learning and development to avoid becoming too comfortable or stagnating again. Secondly, I would like to document any future certification pursuits and hopefully build up a profile in an alternative way to social media.

With an increase in the requirement for programmability and automation, the skills of a network engineer are evolving. There is now an expectation for engineers to have these skills instead of them being more of a nice to have. Cisco overhauled its certifications in 2020 and has now incorporated programmability and automation on all tracks. They have even created a dedicated ‘DevNet’ track for people who have more of a focus on this area.

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard."

— David McCullough

My last why is that “writing is thinking”, and this will have two immediate benefits for me. Firstly, if I’m pursuing a new certification and blog about the topics, it will highlight my weaker areas when trying to recall the information from my head onto paper. In addition, I would like to improve my soft skills, particularly written communication.

Lastly, this blog is built using a static site generator called Hugo, written in Go. Maintaining and updating the site will loosely tie in with broadening my development skills by maintaining a GitHub repository, learning a little Go and possibly other languages or coding and scripting techniques.

In an effort to be more concise, I will leave it there for now. Welcome again, and thank you for reading.