May 28, 2025 • 43 mins
What does it take to write the books that build the backbone of the networking industry? In this energetic conversation with Jason Gooley, Technical Evangelist at Cisco and author of numerous certification guides, we dive into the fascinating world of technical education and the art of making complex networking concepts accessible to learners.
Jason shares his remarkable journey from networking novice who once believed the myth that "CCIEs make more than the president" to becoming the author selected to take over the iconic CCNA certification guides from Wendell Odom after his 23-year, 10-edition legacy. The responsibility is enormous—with Cisco's Network Academy having certified 17 million professionals and aiming for another 25 million in the next decade, Jason's words will shape countless careers.
We explore the delicate balance required when creating technical content: providing enough depth for certification success without overwhelming readers, adding engaging storytelling without sacrificing accuracy, and addressing varied audience backgrounds without assuming too much or too little prior knowledge. As Jason beautifully puts it, "When I write, it feels like I'm talking... like I'm explaining it to a specific person." This approach transforms what could be dry technical manuals—"paper cuts to the eyes"—into relatable learning experiences.
For anyone working in technology, the episode offers valuable insights on continuous learning in a rapidly evolving field. Jason describes technology as "a train... the second you step on, you're moving with it." The key is simply starting somewhere: "Don't be afraid to get on the train. Just do 'hello world.' Get a Raspberry Pi. Use Alexa to turn off your lights."
Whether you're pursuing certifications, teaching others, or creating educational content, this episode provides practical wisdom on making technical knowledge accessible, relevant, and engaging. Subscribe now for more conversations that bridge the gap between complex technology and human understanding.
Connect with the Guest:
@Jason_Gooley on X
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgooley/
Purchase Chris and Tim's new book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Fortnightly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Tim (00:13):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Cables to
Clouds podcast.
I'm your host this week, tim,and with me, of course, is my
co-host, chris at BGP Main onBlueSky.
I am carpe-dmbpn on Blue Skyand we have a guest with us who
I am not sure whether or not heis on Blue Sky Jason Blue Sky.
Jason (00:34):
I am not Blue Sky, unfortunately.
I probably should join Blue Sky, but I've got so many to deal
with now I just kind of ignoreit.
Tim (00:40):
That's fair and so, yeah, so we have brought a longtime
friend of ours and finally havebeen able to get him on the show
to record with us, jason Gooley, a man who probably doesn't
need a huge amount ofintroduction to most of the
people that listen, but for thefive or six of them that may not
.
Why don't you go ahead andintroduce yourself, jason?
Jason (01:05):
Oh my gosh, when do I even begin?
I'm about five foot seven andcompletely bald.
So I'm Jason Gooley.
I have been at Cisco for alittle over 11 years now.
I went from an SE field SE torunning as a technical
evangelist for all worldwideenterprise networking, for all
of EN, for Cisco and softwaresales because it's worldwide
(01:26):
enterprise networking andsoftware sales I always forget
and software sales, so I said ifyou can get through that title
on the slide.
I'm like presenting or somethinglike that.
If you can get throughtechnical evangelist, worldwide
enterprise networking andsoftware sales, cisco Systems
Incorporated, you'll be able toget through the next half hour
or whatever it is we're going totalk about.
You'll be in great shape.
(01:50):
So I did that for a long timefor about seven years and then I
just recently, in November,took a role back on the same
kind of like the same team forthe same manager who originally
hired me at Cisco in 2013.
And so I'm still a technicalevangelist, still doing that
conversation with customers,presenting, doing all that stuff
.
Cisco live, all that kind ofstays the same, but instead of
just focusing on en and doing itfor the whole world, I'm doing
(02:13):
it for the states of illinoisand wisconsin, for, specifically
, our, our commercial team anduh, which makes it I mean
there's a there's a lot of uhstress off to some degree, right
, because I was travelingconstantly.
I was constantly traveling,which is great and fun, but then
after a while, you're like Ineed you to go somewhere.
They tell you this on aThursday, I need you to be in
(02:33):
New York on Monday or something,and you're like I got two kids.
I can't just be like bye andthen for a week.
It's like you need to give wasjust funny that I had such a
blast on that role and going allover the world and talking to
customers everywhere and I'velearned so much from from just
engaging with people.
It was.
It was the best.
It was a really great role.
It was fantastic and but when Icame back here and I went to to
(02:55):
this team, I have probably thebest leader I've ever had, you
know, I mean just the nicest guy, and it's not just because he
made the decision to hire meoriginally, but he made the
decision to hire me originally,but he made that decision twice
and brought me back yet again.
So clearly he's definitely agood guy.
So I've been doing that.
So my new role is similar innature, but I'm also taking on
(03:18):
all architectures now, so it'snot just EN.
So I'm learning about a lot ofAI, a lot of cool stuff with AI
security, things likeHyperShield and AI defense and
all these other new cool thingsthat got announced at Cisco Live
in Europe.
Really a lot of fun and what'sawesome is I get to go in and
have the conversations withcustomers about, you know, what
do you want to do or what do youlike.
(03:40):
Here's the art of the possibleright.
Here's the art of all thethings that we can do.
We can combine ai andcollaboration and all these
things and obviously securityand segmentation and all of this
.
It just naturally comestogether.
So it's really nice to go backto being a call it a generalist
talking about all thesedifferent uh technologies, but I
(04:00):
think it's just, it's been agreat, a great change for me,
and then uh and then ultimately,outside of that, you know, I
think, a lot of it between thatand outside of Cisco.
I write a lot of books andvideos for Cisco Press.
Pearson O'Reilly do a lot oftraining.
I just did a live EN corelesson.
The crash course for Pearsonjust ended yesterday.
Tim (04:20):
Wait a live, what?
Sorry, it's the EN core 350-400.
Jason (04:24):
Oh, okay, got it, but it's the crash course.
So it's a three day crash course, three, four hour days versus
the week long you know, it'skind of like get you going, but
it's very it's like theory alittle bit, but then it's we go
right into the command line oneverything and then, and then I
do programmability and all thesetechnologies and topics are
coming right out of the EN Corebook.
So it's like this is whatyou're going to see.
(04:45):
So it's for the folks who haveread the book but want a little
bit more and haven't gone forthe full-on deep boot camp or
they're not necessarily goingdirectly for their CCIE, because
you know, I mean, the EN Coreis pretty much the new CCIE,
written at this point.
Yeah, that's right, and so it'sbroad, there is some depth to it
.
No-transcript, internal networksupport, kind of technologist,
(05:37):
and it's very, it's very likethis is where you would start
your career really, and I'mtalking about things like this
as a processor, this is memory,this is a motherboard, this is
how, how it connects.
And I'm ripping apart computerson camera, which I had to go
through all this hassle to getthis microphone boom thing that
could attach to a dslr cameraand all this other stuff so you
could show it, right you show it, because you can't hold that.
(05:59):
I mean it just doesn't workright.
But unfortunately you should beable to do your, show you
something.
Yeah, I gotta stay far enoughback to be like and this, you
know, is uh, is where you plugin the sata drive, you know at
least now you'll have theequipment to do some unboxing
videos on uh youtube that's agood point.
Tim (06:19):
Yeah, for the youtube.
Jason (06:20):
Maybe become a youtube okay, hey, somebody send me
something so I can unbox it.
I don't even care what it is,as long as it doesn't tick or go
boom, you know, or?
Tim (06:31):
glitter bomb, yeah Right.
Jason (06:34):
But it was funny because going that's where I started my
career was computer.
Desktop support helped us builda computer, my A plus
certification.
All of this is where I got intotechnology and what was cool
was that to see the outline ofthe blueprint and to make a
course for it and to justliterally be able to be like
alright, this is so awesomebecause it's all from literal,
(06:56):
just things that I've done.
Like the whole course isbasically just stories of things
that I've gone through and ofcourse, you covered the
technology right.
But why is this important?
You know, I remember at ahospital that had an issue they
had two switches, whatever itdidn't fail over.
You lost your config.
There's all of these thingsthat come up that that kind of
leads you into this direction.
So working on that course nowand it's just, it's been a lot
(07:19):
of fun with the CCNA stuff too.
Tim (07:25):
I gotta, I gotta ask.
Ask because I didn't hear.
But I had heard about this certand it's not necessarily.
Well, I mean, the agenda thatwe're going to talk about is
basically a cert stuff ingeneral, but, like I know, I
kind of have to veer a littlebit.
This was a CC.
You said IST.
Is that right?
Jason (07:36):
CCST, so Cisco Certified Support Technician and then
there's cybersecurity,networking and now IT support.
So that's what's confusing.
CCST, Cisco Certified Support,Technician IT support.
It's like a.
Tim (07:50):
Oh, these are like specializations for this ST bit.
They're like three differentflavors of this ST bit.
It's an actual certification.
Jason (07:57):
Each one of those is a certification, so it's not like
a specialization on the CCMP asmuch as it is.
Tim (08:04):
Well, I guess it kind of is it's a flavor, it's a flavor.
Jason (08:07):
It's a flavor, right, because it's CCST and there's
three different ones.
But and I think they justrecently announced that they're
renaming the cyber ops to justcyber security, I believe, or
something I think it's justCisco certified cyber security
versus whatever it was Ciscocertified cyber ops, ccna cyber
ops or whatever.
Yeah, I don't know a lot ofthings about that, but you can
(08:29):
see how there can be a littlebit of confusion in some of that
, but it's been a lot of funthough.
Just looking at some of thoseolder or I wouldn't even say
older technologies, just it'sjust it's very relevant new
stuff, just not something Ifocused on in a long time not
something I focused on in a longtime, so it's super cool, yeah,
no kidding, I think didn't,russ White?
do one of the other books?
(08:49):
I think, yeah, he did.
I think he did the networkingone.
Yeah, okay, he wrote thenetworking book, that's right,
I'm doing the official videocourse.
I don't even actually I don'teven know if there's a proposal
in or who would be the authorfor the IT support book, but now
, with the CCNA, this is theother thing, as you may be aware
, that I'm working on is thatthere's been a lot of splash
about me taking over for Wendell, for the CCNA and everything,
and then it's been an excitingand crazy journey to think that
(09:14):
the gentleman who started me offI'm reading these books I'm
going to be taking over andwriting for whoever is starting
their career, right, yeah,passing of the torch I mean
we're talking about so ifthere's anybody listening that
doesn't know this, uh, we'retalking about wendell odom, who
is basically like an og in thenetworking space.
Tim (09:34):
I mean, he wrote most of the ccna level books that I
almost everybody uses to getbootstrapped like learn the ccna
stuff.
I know I did.
Um, yeah, no, that that'sreally cool.
I was actually lucky enough tomeet Wendell in June last year
at Cisco Live.
And it was interesting actually, because I was walking around
(09:55):
handing out copies of my book toeverybody who would take one.
Usually I'd have to pointfinger guns at them to make them
take it.
Jason (10:03):
I'm sorry I have to pay you to take my book but uh,
wendell was really cool.
Tim (10:08):
Uh, I don't know, we were talking in the cisco store and
we were talking about somethingand I was like, oh, man here
like you know, wendell, you didso much to help me get started
I'd love to to just give you acopy of my, of my book.
And he, he was very gracious,he took a flip through, he said
this is awesome, dude.
And I ended up talking to somepeople from Cisco Press about it
and stuff.
And then they were like, okay,wendell, the Cisco Press people
(10:29):
were like, okay, wendell, it'stime to take a picture with your
new CCNA book.
Jason (10:33):
And he was like, oh, and then he was like hey, come on
over here, man.
Good I'm good.
Tim (10:41):
Wendell.
Wendell's such a class act dude.
He's the best, he is the bestdude, like straight up.
Jason (10:45):
He is.
He is so when he littlebackground.
He's done 10 editions for 23years.
Tim (10:52):
I know that's insane.
Jason (10:54):
And probably I mean, unless you went down that other
path that we were talking about,right, almost a lot of the
people that went ccna used hisbooks.
I mean there's no way to notacknowledge that, right.
Oh for sure.
It's so impactful and soincredibly huge what he's done
for the entire community and mepersonally and everybody I know
(11:16):
who's gone for their ccna, Iremember once in a while you
find a couple folks will get acertification and use alternate
methods of study other than thec Press book and everything.
Tim (11:25):
Yeah.
Jason (11:26):
By and large man, almost every CCNA out there, this guy.
In addition, they pull a lot ofthat content from the books and
stuff for the Network Academy.
Tim (11:37):
Yeah, for Netacad yeah.
Jason (11:38):
Everybody is going to get Network Academy.
I mean, just from a statistic.
This is kind of one of thethings that is still what makes
my mind want to blow up.
Right Is I'm sitting at ourglobal sales meeting just this
past year or the one before that, right, and they had said they
were wanting to expand NetworkAcademy and one of the
statistics that they had saidwas the Network Academy has been
(11:58):
around for 25 years.
It was the 25 year anniversaryof Network Academy.
I mean, they said they havecertified 17 million people,
holy shit, 17 million.
Well, through that, yeah,obviously through netiquette,
right yeah, and then this is thepart that blew my head off
right.
It said we expect to certifyanother 25 million in the next
(12:21):
10 years that's crazy.
Just to go from 17 years to getor, I'm sorry, 25 years to get
17 million.
They want to do 25 million morein 10 years.
Tim (12:33):
Yeah, so like 8 million more within 10 years.
Jason (12:36):
So I'm sitting there listening to this, and this was
shortly after the Cisco Livethat they came to me.
Cisco Press came to me andasked me if I would be
interested in taking over theCCNA, which blew my mind again
Right, so this was like a justlike a couple months later,
cause, like we have Cisco livetypically in June and in our
global sales meetings usuallyabout the end of August.
So, like two months later, afterI found out that I'm going to
(12:58):
be doing this, I hear this.
Well then I started thinkingabout well, they use wait a
minute, they use all the contentto feed the Network Academy.
Tim (13:06):
Yeah dude.
Jason (13:06):
And then he said 10 years and I'm like they're going to
be using my stuff to feed 25million students and even if you
cut that down to just afraction, 1 million students.
Tim (13:18):
Oh yeah.
Jason (13:20):
It's just so and that, to me, makes it just.
It makes my heart glow, makesme nervous at the same time, but
it just all of those thingsmakes me just smile because I
was the kid who's never going tomake it anyway, and all the
people we can help doing this.
Oh my gosh dude.
Tim (13:35):
Yeah, I mean it's a hard thing to think about just
because of the scale of it,right, and that's that's the
case for think I mean the ccnais ubiquitous, pretty much like
people that want to learnnetworking.
I mean you know you have peopleout there will say like, oh
well, you know ccna is too much,just do like network plus or
whatever.
But the truth is like from a awhole, a total package training
(13:59):
curriculum of of networking.
It's hard.
I don't, I don't know no othervendor I'm aware of puts out the
total package training.
Jason (14:07):
And it's also interesting to see the way that people I
was going to say it's soughtafter and the way that people go
after certain certifications is.
It's an interesting thingbecause, like I said, I started
off I got my A pluscertification.
I went and I got my CNA, novell411B For anybody out there who
(14:29):
has less hair than me who knowswhat I just said, you know and I
went down that path, did someMicrosoft certifications.
I kind of just kept down thatpath.
But when I heard about Cisco Ididn't know what it was.
And.
I've been on a million podcaststalking about this.
My best friend calls me up andhe said there's, dude, there's
(14:50):
this thing, it's called ciscoand they have three
certifications and the one isthe cisco certified network
associate and if you go get that, you'll make over a quarter of
a million dollars a year.
Now, mind you, I think I was 16years old, because I got
certified and start goingthrough all that when I was 17.
16 years old, he tells me this.
I'm like, oh my gosh, that'sincredible.
And then he says well, no, no,dude, you don't understand.
There's a CCNP, which is CiscoCertified Network Professional,
(15:13):
and if you get that you makelike $375,000 a year.
And I'm like, wow, what youknow?
And I'm like, and he goes dude,but there's one called the CCIE
, the Cisco CertifiedInter-Network Expert.
There's less than 500 of themin the entire world and if you
get that certification you willmake more than the president.
(15:35):
That is exactly what he said.
Tim (15:41):
I think you were already over the president when you got
to NP level.
Jason (15:45):
I'm over here like I'm going to go get my ccie and go
work at cisco one day and andthis I just said this it just
like something I just said Ihadn't even seen, experienced,
touched or knew what the heckcisco was.
Tim (15:58):
Dude, I'm in my mind I was like I wanted to be more than
the president you know, I waslike that's where I was with it
and.
Jason (16:04):
And I figured I was already doing Novell networking
and I really saw that I lovednetworking and an NT Windows NT
3.1, 3.1.1.4.
Yeah, yeah yeah, right, I'm old.
And then I realized that thatwas something that I was like
dude, I think I want to get intothis.
And I started, believe it ornot, looking at these books and
stuff.
And there was also a routersimulator.
(16:25):
It might have been Boson, butit was either Boson or there was
something eSIM or router.
I think it might have beenBoson.
There was a virtual simulatorfor routers and stuff back then.
Tim (16:36):
Like NetSim.
I think there was one calledNetSim, it might have been
NetSim.
Jason (16:40):
Basically it's like software you double-click it and
it's like you're on routers, sobut you know, basically it's
like software.
Tim (16:43):
You double click it and it's like you're on routers.
But like packet tracer.
Jason (16:44):
Yes, it was like package pre packet tracer, yeah, exactly
.
So I was using that and justgoing and stuff and I just I
fell in love with it.
And I remember, you know, justgoing through all these
different books and things andtrying to figure out what it was
, and convincing my dad to buyme a CCNA study kit off of eBay.
Study kit off of eBay andyou're talking like 97.
(17:08):
Oh, yeah, that's money.
So it was like 5,500 bucks, ifI remember right, and it was all
it was.
Well, all it was now right,back then it was big deal Two
2501 routers right, a 1924switch.
They had an AdTrans CSU DSUexternal mux.
You had all the V35 cables andthe modems and all the stuff
that came with it and your60-pin serial and your AUI
adapter to go your 10 meg andall this and that was it.
(17:30):
I think it was running iOS 10,dude, that was all it was.
They didn't give you labs, theyjust sold you this kit of gear
and you're like, okay.
Tim (17:39):
Go figure out what to do with it Right.
Jason (17:42):
So like you're trying to build stuff and it to do with it
Right.
So like I haven't, like you'reyou're trying to build stuff and
it was kind of cool, right,because you're you're looking at
what you've studied from a bookperspective.
And I'm a I'm a bad learnerfrom from reading.
I am very much a visual ortouchy guy, you know.
So I'm like I was sitting there, I was like, well, you know,
I've got to start getting somehands-on experience with this.
So I started copying.
There's no copy paste.
(18:02):
I'm like typing in what I'mreading and doing in the book in
here and trying to make stuffwork, right.
And then that was when youstarted like that's what I think
when my hair loss started,originally, because that'll do
it.
All of a sudden you're, you're,you're plugging stuff in and
you're not sure that it's somestupid encapsulation thing on a
V35 or some.
It's some oddball twisted thing.
(18:25):
It's not in the CCNA book,right.
It's more of a transport issueor a clocking or a timing or a
signaling thing or somethinglike that.
That was just like you neverknew what was going on and why
it wouldn't work.
But then every once in a whileyou can duplicate an exact thing
from the book, like oh, I cando two routers back-to-back
(18:45):
using this one cable crossovercable with the AUI adapters, and
do RIP, right.
Tim (18:52):
Yeah, so, yeah.
So I think what we should talkabout is I mean, you've written
God, how many books do you havenow?
Is it your name, before Is it?
Jason (19:04):
eight.
I was going to say we haven'treached ten yet it's like eight
or it's eight and then.
But it's so weird because itsprawls out the way that when
you get published it, you getthis isbn number that tells you
what your library, I had to buymine.
But yep, I know it's thecoolest feeling in the world,
and one day I'll actually makeit to dc.
I've never been there to looklibrary congress yeah, I wrote I
(19:25):
think it'd be cool, uh, butwhen they bundle things like the
en core and an rc together,that's a third isbn or isb yeah,
that's, yeah, that's right.
So now technically with myvideo courses, have isbns and
all this.
Tim (19:37):
I have like 19 publications or something, but there's
really only like eight bookslike physical books, yeah five
or six, I don't know, somethinglike that so so chris and I just
finished and and a third author, steve, who's a friend of the
podcast.
He's been on.
We haven't had him on in awhile.
Actually we need to have him onagain.
Um, we just finished a uh, abook, a certification book for,
(20:01):
for publishing.
Uh, for aws, the advancednetworking specialty, and what I
wanted to talk about a littlebit was and you're perfect guy
to talk about it it's kind oflike how do you feel differently
about cause I've got, I've gotone book which is like the
hybrid cloud handbook, which isnot a certification book, it's
like a teaching networkengineers how to work in the
cloud book, but then we havethis cert book and so like how
(20:24):
do you feel differently aboutwriting a book that's not
specifically certification-basedversus one that's meant to pass
a?
Jason (20:31):
certification.
It's a totally differentopinion.
Yeah, it's a differentexpectation for the reader too.
Tim (20:38):
Yeah, for sure.
Jason (20:40):
I think that's the one thing I noticed.
Here's the best two examples ofspecifically that right.
The first book I ever did wasProgramming and Automating Cisco
Networks right, and that bookbecame the unofficial
certification guide for the see.
If I remember this one again,it's like my title right, cisco
Certified Enterprise NetworkingProgrammability Specialist or oh
(21:04):
, yeah, yeah, yeah, empre orwhatever, it was specialist exam
yeah, npre or npre or somethingright, but it was focused on
enterprise networking in it apicem and stuff like that.
That was the book for that exam.
I that's how I got therelationship with devnet and the
godfather thing, and all thatwas because writing that book
(21:27):
and partnering with Susie Weeand the DevNet team and going
all over and really getting theword out about DevNet and
programmability and using theexamples from that for training
became this whole thing right.
It was unofficial, so when wefirst wrote it we weren't
thinking that you were going topass an exam right, it was just.
Tim (21:47):
It was just data or info, just like you mentioned, you're
teaching the cloud thing.
Jason (21:51):
I'm like.
You're like, how do you make apeanut butter?
It was like one really coolexample from the book was was
like deconstructing a peanutbutter jelly sandwich.
This is bread like.
This is peanut butter, this isjelly.
Cool, a computer's like great,I don't care.
Now you have to say take peanutbutter, apply.
You know like you have to buildit right automatic props right
to get it to work.
It's a totally different and Ilearned a lot from that book
(22:12):
because when I I I did not knowa lot of network programmability
and engine, I didn't know it atall.
When, when I first gotapproached to write that book
from from ryan there and ciscopress and one of the things that
that had said was I have tolearn a lot of this to write it
and so I wrote the way that Ilearned.
So I cut out all the middle, allthe junk in the middle, just to
(22:35):
get right to the point, andeverybody said they liked that
concept.
So then when I went to anotherexample Software Defined WAN,
the SD-WAN book right that wewrote that one is specifically
for EN SD-WAN implementationexam.
So we wrote it to that thing.
Yeah to a blueprint, basically,but it does not say official
(22:56):
certification guide on it.
Tim (22:57):
Yeah, I was going to say I actually don't think it said
cert guide on it.
Jason (23:00):
It does, and it was just one of those things that just I
think it was just like a missreally, Because it is.
We had that blueprint to writeit to, so we wrote it to
specifically that blueprint.
Tim (23:12):
So you would ask the test and end some right.
Yeah, I remember talking toDustin about this.
Jason (23:16):
Dustin.
Tim (23:16):
Schumann, one of the authors.
Yeah, we just happen to both be.
We know him as a good friend ofours and yeah, I remember that
there was a lot of back andforth at the time about is this
going to be a certificationguide or is this going to be a
kind of like the one you'retalking about?
Is this going to be more of aninstructional usable usability,
if you will guide?
Jason (23:34):
Well then, here's, here's , so here's how that all sussed
out.
So I gave him over lead authorfor the second edition for that
book because I have to focus onCCNA.
I just don, just don't.
Yeah, I had to get, I had togive up ENCORE and and DevNet
Associate and and all of theseother things because, like,
(23:55):
there's just no way, like I, itwas insane that I wrote those
four that one year.
I that's.
It was like I was dyingliterally mentally, physically,
trying to get that stuff donebecause I didn't want to let
anybody down.
So Dustin was the obvious,obvious, logical choice, right,
yeah?
I kicked it over to him and hegot some amazing new authors who
I know very well and they'regreat, and they wrote a second
edition.
Again, it did not come out asan OCG, although it is written
(24:15):
again to pass the ENspecialization exam right.
So it is very much a mixture ofwhat we were talking about,
because now it is a with theintent you're going to pass.
But we want you to pick thisbook up and you just know, and
you can go implement it right,so that became a hybrid version.
And then the reason I'm bringingthis up is when you start
talking about now being on likethe, the en core.
(24:36):
Um, I was on the cci, ccd, uh,evolving technology study guide,
which was just an ebook thathad like three chapters.
That was an official studyguide, but that section of the
exam is dead and gone.
So they, that's a way.
So ccna and ccnp, it's adifferent feel and I'm sure you
get this.
But you, you're going throughand in the same sense, you're
(24:57):
like I've got to be able to tryto figure out how to technically
explain this so you can followalong and give you the steps oh
yeah, 100 at the same time.
I've been in sales for a verylong time now, but I'm an
engineer.
You know what I mean.
But what I've learned in a lotof that meeting with freaking
thousands and thousands ofcustomers they don't care unless
you make it relevant to them ofwhy you're trying to do
(25:20):
something.
So when I write these books now, I'm trying to put in there,
like if you're doing spanningtree versus layer three routing,
this is the reason why youwould look at that from a design
perspective.
I'm not trying to recreateZig's book for CCDE or anything.
I'm just trying to say, heylook, dude, this is why you want
to do this and this is why youwant to take through it.
And here's where I think itwill help you if you do these
(25:40):
steps.
But also look at these thingsas an option or whatever I tried
to give the rounded out.
pick it up, I could go implementit.
Pick it up, I can go pass anexam.
Pick it up, I can teach it tosomebody else.
Tim (25:51):
What's interesting, Something you said I don't want
to lose.
It is this idea of you know,because we're engineers, we need
to understand, like, why we'dwant to do it, and I feel like a
lot of times with certificationexams you don't have to explain
that, right, Because it's animplied like.
Jason (26:08):
obviously the answer you want is you want to pass the
damn exam right, but like Forwhatever that financial or-.
Tim (26:12):
Whatever the thing is right , Whatever the reason is the
carrot.
But yeah.
So like when we did this pactbook for the AWS ANS, we set out
to give more information thanyou needed to pass the exam.
We went beyond it to like it isa cert exam and so, but what we
found actually and this is kindof funny we set out to be like
(26:34):
not only is this going to helpyou pass the exam, but like, if
you're doing this work, this isall the stuff you would want to
know and actually had to pullactually were instructed
actually to kind of pull back onthat a little bit, because you
know the goal of the book itselfis still to pass the exam.
So you can't give them too muchor they'll think they have to
memorize like everything in thebook to pass the exam right,
paralyzing right.
Jason (26:55):
So I mean our books.
These books are not.
Some of these books are notthin right?
Um, and, and going back to yourpoint, I think that you know
when you're, when you're talkingabout writing a book or
education or something, you youhave to put yourself into the
learner's mindset and and it'shard sometimes for us and I'm
going to explain exactly whywe've been doing it for so- long
(27:17):
, oh God.
Tim (27:17):
That's the hardest part, dude, the hardest part of
writing these books.
Jason (27:21):
They're like I, you know, key point.
I'm on right I'm teaching theENCORE class yesterday, the live
lesson one for Pearson.
Right, I'm on there teaching aclass.
I did two things that were justlike.
I was like I couldn't figureout why this one thing wasn't
working.
I'm like why is this notworking?
Why is this not working?
I'm like this doesn't makesense.
(27:50):
I've used this same CML lab amillion and a half times for
this class and why isn't itworking?
So in secure crt, you know, youhave the session manager where
you have all your routers andstuff, right.
Well, with cml there'ssomething called a breakout tool
and I don't know if you'refamiliar with that.
But what the breakout tool doesis it says you can map all the
nodes in your topology to areverse telnet line so you can
actually just use uh telnet fromyour computer, ssh, your
computer, or like a client orsomething like security.
Well, I had two labs, one's afour-router topology, one's a
six-router topology, and theyboth have routers, one through
(28:12):
six, whatever.
So I'm working on teachingEIGRP, ospf and BGP all in one
day, which is not easy.
I'm going through all this.
Everything's working flawless.
I'm thinking everything isgreat.
I get to BGP and nothing isworking.
None of the neighbors arecoming up, interfaces are up.
I'm like what's going on?
I can't ping the, I can't pingthe other hop.
(28:33):
I'm like, yeah, I don't reallyknow what's going on here yet
and we had like 14 minutes leftof class and I'm like I'm not
going to burn this 14 minutes toto figure it out.
I go.
What I'll do is let's talk examstrategy for the next 15
minutes.
Well, I'll figure this outright after this, and then the
next day, which was yesterday,we'll come back first thing in
the morning and we'll talk aboutBGP.
(28:54):
We'll do BGP and then we'lldump it into programmability,
automation and all this stuff.
Right, and it was perfect.
It went great.
I clicked the wrong set ofrouters.
It was pointing to a differentbreakout port number that was in
a different lab.
So when you get to those centerlat center routers.
They got the wrong ip addresses.
So when I paste theconfiguration in, nothing works.
The interfaces aren't even.
I mean everything's all jackedup, it's all maps wrong and
(29:16):
everything yeah right.
And then and then the other onethat was that was obvious to me,
that I didn't realize was showrun pipe, se blah right.
I'm looking at a section ofsomething from the configuration
running config, right.
Well, you can't assume that alot of the folks on the other
end of my training class knowwhat all these little two-letter
things mean and I'm doing likeshow run pipe, se face pipe uh
(29:37):
uh, you know mpls, pipe router,pipe this, pipe that, and it's
this long string of just throwup because I've been doing it
for so long.
Yeah, it doesn't mean anythingto the learners.
You literally sometimes have toreally reel yourself back to be
like, oh my gosh, I'm assumingthat you all know how to do all
these shortcuts andunderstanding what route maps
are and all this Like as I wasteaching about, like BGP, weight
(30:01):
and local preference, and whenyou paste a config in, yes, you
have your route map.
To set your route maps was notin the course, the crash course
piece, because that you know.
So I had to play route mapsright.
So there's things that you justhave to think about and it's
tough, it's it's worse inwriting.
It's worse in writing becauseyou know if you forget something
(30:22):
like oh yeah, and then youremember later on, you might
have misreferenced in a, in aparagraph, like in the beginning
of the chapter, and you thoughtof something and you added it,
but the two don't.
You didn't connect the two.
Tim (30:33):
Actually yeah, so I wanted to ask.
I didn't get a chance to askyou this while we were writing
the book, chris, but now you gotwhat you had just said has me
curious.
This is your first book.
Did you run into that a lot?
Cause I has me curious, this isyour first book.
Did you run into that a lot?
Because I know I, when I firststarted writing, I would, I was,
I was a bull in a china shopwith with that stuff, like with
just getting, yeah, puttingstuff in and then adding extra
(30:54):
stuff.
I'm going to go back and likechange stuff and having it all
line up.
That was hard for sure.
Jason (30:58):
Yeah I think it was like the thing is unique with our
exam guide that we were puttingout is also it was it was cloud
focused, it was an AWSnetworking exam, right.
So there's one thing that I andI don't know if Tim you've
noticed this in particularly inthe AWS community type thing a
lot of people when they have togo for this cert, they complain
(31:21):
about how hard it is to learnnetworking because typically a
lot of people are getting intocloud.
You know, maybe they're takingthe cloud practitioner
certifications and learning youknow other things that are much
easier to digest, but thenetworking stuff was just seemed
like such a hurdle for people.
So when I built this, like itwas so hard, like to not boil
(31:41):
the ocean type thing, which Iknow is really difficult, but
like I'm I'm a person that needsso much context to learn stuff
properly, like I need to knowevery factor that goes into
things, um.
So I worked really hard onmaking these chapters for
network fundamentals, um, builtin there, and then it just like
grew and grew and it got so long.
(32:01):
And you know we're going, we'retalking with the publisher and
they're like, hey, man, you needto trim this down, there's too
much in here, and they broke itup, didn't they.
I know they did.
They did, they broke it up andeven put that stuff in the
appendix for kind of the thereasons you're talking about now
.
You don't want to scare, youknow, the reader.
I don't want people to openthis up and think like, oh my
god, if I have to learn thismuch like it's, it's not worth
it.
But at the same time, you know,I don't know how do you deal
(32:24):
with that Guli?
Like, how do you focus on notboiling the ocean and making
sure to stay within your realmof the certification as well?
I think I'm going to answer thatwith two pronged, because one
of the things that you had saidwas that you know, like we're
talking about having to teachfundamentals Cloud first person,
the fundamentals of networkingwould be, would be difficult.
(32:47):
This is literally five, fiveyears ago.
Automation the folks who knowsoftware development, learning,
the network, fundamentals isvery that's so true.
Tim (32:56):
It's a great point, it's the same thing.
Jason (32:57):
And then now your cloud on-prem right, you're, we're
talking, so these things.
It's like it's such a weirdscenario because you cannot just
, like you said, you're writinga book about a cloud
certification, you might notknow what an ether channel is,
which might be something that'slike necessary in that
environment.
Right, for just redundancy,resiliency, whatever it is Right
.
Going back to the question nowthat you asked me is how do you
(33:17):
know where that slider is andwhen do you have to actually
stop?
What I've noticed is and thisis just based on asking a lot of
the folks who read my I talk toa lot of people who read my
books.
(33:47):
I try really, really hard to askas much and have folks message
me on LinkedIn and X and all ownanalytics right is that the
majority of the people that Italk to would much rather know
the relevance, a story andenough to get them to whatever
that goal for officialcertification guy would be
enough to pass that section onthe exam.
That's a very hard thing to dobecause you know you want the.
You almost have to rip aparteverything.
You're trying to get them tonote or to pass to succeed on
(34:10):
right, because then that's theonly way to.
You're gonna know the level ofdepth.
So for me, one of the thingsthat seems to come naturally,
and I don't even know how, andit comes out when I'm talking.
And it comes out when I'mwriting, because when I write,
for some reason, it feels likeI'm talking, if that makes any
sense to anybody, if you're anauthor or if you've written
anything, you know.
(34:31):
It feels like in my mind whenI'm writing, I'm explaining it
to Chris, like specifically,like I am actually writing, like
I'm writing to some specificperson, like I'm writing to a
person.
Tim (34:43):
It's communication.
You're communicating Rightperson.
Jason (34:48):
Like I'm writing it's communication, you're
communicating right, but at thesame time the the mindset there
is also that you know when Iwhen I do that, writing it in
more of a conversational flowthan a technical manual that is
absolutely dry and you want totake the paper and just double
paper cut to the eyes becauseyou can't take the dryness of
that book right.
So I try to inject a littlehumor, I try to inject funny
(35:10):
things and I think that'sbasically it.
Once I get to a section andthis is something my wife helped
me with my wife is a preschoolteacher but she's got her
master's in early childhood andall this other good stuff I was
getting severe writer's block.
I'd stare at this thing.
Like I put the title into thesection of the paragraph that I
was going to do.
Maybe I'll get a sentence and Iwould stare at it.
But I knew what I wanted to say.
(35:30):
I couldn't formulate it down topaper and she said go in there
and throw up everything that youhave in your mind.
For sure, with no punctuations,don't worry about a period,
don't worry about a comma, don'tworry about capital letters,
and just type what's in yourmind.
And I said, okay, so I juststarted going, and then I
realized that like very fast,like this goes really fast, like
(35:51):
all of a sudden, you know,because you also have to try to
keep the page count to areasonable level, just like
we're talking about here, right,Per like we're talking about
here right Per chapter.
You don't want a 50 pagechapter and a 20 page chapter,
right?
So you got to kind of do thattoo, and you can continue if you
need to, but, you know,continue in another chapter.
(36:12):
But so in that whole process ofbreaking that stuff down and
kind of splitting it all up, youknow, it kind of came to me
that the way that I write isvery much like the way I present
and I try.
I try to do it Like I'm showing, like I'm showing you or I'm
telling you a story aboutwhatever it is.
I don't know why, I don't evenknow how to explain that, but
when you read the books it comesthrough a lot more than the.
The super um, I don't want todry, is the only word I could
(36:35):
think of where they're really Iget it.
Tim (36:37):
Very wordy, very technical, like like you're reading Like
reading an O'Reilly book orsomething, or an RFC.
Jason (36:45):
Reading an RFC.
Tim (36:46):
Or an RFC yeah even better.
Jason (36:48):
I'd tell you RFC, yeah, RFC, because you're just reading
it and you're just like it'sjust factual statements, one
after the other, basically.
And you're just like.
That's not exciting.
I want to know how to have funwith this too.
It would be cool to turn mylights off and on or open my
garage door or something that'slow hanging fruit that I can use
, and that's the other thingwhen you're this is a great
(37:12):
point to Chris too, right.
And the other thing I noticedis that when you're giving
examples and you're teachingthings, you have to inject
something that is relevant tothem, or fun, or something that
they have access to somethingthat is relevant to them, or fun
, or something that they haveaccess to.
So one of the things that I talkabout in all these things is,
in simplicity, is you get torepurpose your skill set.
If you're an auto mechanic andyou have to troubleshoot and you
(37:33):
have the thing that plugs inand you're troubleshooting,
trying to figure out what'sgoing on, and even if you don't
have a diagnostic tool in yourold school troubleshooting, I'm
not getting enough, or I'm notgetting enough flu or fuel or
you know whatever, it is rightthat mindset can be applied to
tech.
Similarly to you know.
You know the folks who arelearning software development.
(37:53):
You can take softwaredevelopment and there's a very
good bridge into some of thetechnology side of it.
Right, there's all of thesedifferent things, but there's a
way to bring them in so yourskillset can be applied to
another thing.
And the reason I bring that upso many people are moving into
IT.
I'm not gonna say jumping intoIT or diving into IT, but
(38:14):
there's a lot of folks switchinginto IT.
And I'm not trying to talkabout oversaturation or anything
like that, because I thinkanytime anybody says
oversaturation you know talkabout oversaturation or anything
like that, because I thinkanytime anybody says
oversaturation, they're losingtheir minds.
Because we need a lot moreCCIEs, a lot more automation
experts.
We need a lot more every person.
You know there's a company inevery corner of this world.
Tim (38:34):
It says the guy selling the books.
Jason (38:39):
Buy the books.
Buy the book 60, 60.
K in 60 days.
Buy the books.
Buy the book, right no 60 60k in60 days you heard it here or
your money back for the book,otherwise, otherwise I don't
want you to sue.
I don't want you to sue me.
If in 60 days you're not making60k, I'll give you the 12 cents
(39:00):
back that I got right yeah,remit remit your um uh, royalty,
there you go.
The cost of the go will costfrom zero to your shipping, like
I don't know, from zero to morethan that's the thing you know.
It's like that's the other thing.
It's so funny that you justmentioned that and we're
laughing, but at the same time,when you're building a
certification book, you got tobe careful what you promise oh,
(39:24):
yeah, yeah, for sure it's soweird because I always feel like
it's like all the police showswe're like you can't promise
we're gonna find their kids.
You can't promise, right, thatthey're gonna survive or
whatever.
So I'm like you can't promisebecause I don't control it you
can't control it.
But even at the same timesomebody gets sick and they go
take an exam, they have a badexperience right.
There's a million differentvariations of what can happen as
(39:47):
to you passing that exam rightall we can do is say we have
aligned this with the blueprint.
The best is best as humanlypossible at least humanly
meaning anything I've written.
I'm doing it the best I can do,right, I other people are
definitely probably better atthese, some of these things and
that you're on, but so from thebest of my ability right, I have
to try to make sure that I giveyou enough but not scare you
(40:08):
away, and I think that was myother niche was with the
programmability books and allthese videos.
I'm really, really, reallyblessed that I'm good at getting
people started and excitedabout it, like, yeah, and then
from there there's a millionexperts out there who know the
stuff better than me.
Damn that experts, even mybuddy stewart clark, we all know
, we all know, yeah, stewart, Iknow my brother's friend.
(40:28):
Oh yeah, big good friend great,love him and you know.
But that's the thing it's likethere's there's always somewhere
else you can go to get more,and I think that's the thing is
that almost slides into thatmental health thing, right,
because it's like there's alwaysanother place to go and get
more.
Tim (40:46):
Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about the treadmill.
Jason (40:48):
Technology is a train.
Call it AI right.
Ai is the new train.
Technology is a train.
Tim (40:53):
Treadmill yeah.
Jason (40:54):
This is moving so fast.
I just don't know that I couldget on this train.
Get on this train.
It was programmed five yearsago.
Tim (41:02):
Well-documented, I call it the treadmill, but it's the same
thing.
You just can never get off thedamn thing.
Jason (41:07):
The second you step on that train.
You are now moving with thetechnology.
What are you doing while you'removing?
Well, you're looking out thewindow at the people standing
there, and then what you do isyou start learning, you take
your AWS certification, you dothis and now you're moving ahead
in cars, and then you get tothe front and you're John
Capobianco.
You know what I mean.
Tim (41:24):
He's the conductor.
Jason (41:26):
Actually that would be hilarious, but think about what
he's done in AI already right Inour networking realm, right.
Tim (41:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we just had him on.
Actually, it hasn't come outyet, but we just had him on a
couple of weeks ago, I know, Iwas chatting with him.
Jason (41:39):
So I am super excited at the fact that we have a way to
explain and teach people.
Don't be afraid to get on thetrain.
Programmability was just start.
Just do hello me.
Just get a raspberry pi.
Yeah, just do anything usealexa to turn off your lights or
something.
Just start right and guess what.
Five years ago before that, socall it 10 years ago.
What was?
(42:00):
it was iot, yeah oh, for a shortperiod of time I remember the
iot craze for a little bit andit's actually starting to come
back now that we're getting intolike everything's connected
right, but it's just one ofthose things where it's like, in
order to talk about iot, youhave to go talk to somebody in
the business who cares about ityeah, for sure most of the it,
people don't care.
Same thing with programmabilityautomation.
(42:20):
Same thing with you know yeah,yeah, anyway.
Tim (42:23):
No, this is great.
You go down that path for anhour.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Uh.
Unfortunately, I think we'rejust about out of time, so we'll
go ahead and wrap up here.
Uh, where can people uh findyou online, jason?
Jason (42:33):
yeah, uh, at jason underscore ghoulie on all social
platforms.
Or, uh, if you want to find meon metal dev ops, metal dev
opscom or MetalDevOps on YouTubeand all social platforms as
well.
Tim (42:46):
Awesome, and we'll get that in the show notes as well.
Thanks for finally being ableto come on the pod.
We've been, you know, not, ofcourse, no one knows about this,
but we've tried like three orfour times already to record, so
we finally were able to make itall line up.
Yes, and it wasn't all my fault.
Okay, it was not all.
Jason (43:04):
It was not all Jason's fault, I was busy for you, I
just you know.
I want to make sure that I Icare about you guys.
No, no, no.
Tim (43:09):
Three way.
Jason (43:10):
fault for sure, yep.
Tim (43:11):
And we were, and we were very happy to finally make it
all line up, and soon.
And so to everyone else, thanksfor watching or listening, or
actually I don't know.
I think pretty sure you canonly be watching or listening.
I'm not sure of a third way toconsume this at this point Some
type of wavelength.
Yeah, if you're using an AIchatbot to summarize this
(43:33):
episode for you, then thank youfor listening.
I hope that makes it in thesummary and we'll see you again
on another episode of the CableScout podcast.
Take care, thank you.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Cables to
Clouds podcast.
I'm your host this week, tim,and with me, of course, is my
co-host, chris at BGP Main onBlueSky.
I am carpe-dmbpn on Blue Skyand we have a guest with us who
I am not sure whether or not heis on Blue Sky Jason Blue Sky.
Jason (00:34):
I am not Blue Sky, unfortunately.
I probably should join Blue Sky, but I've got so many to deal
with now I just kind of ignoreit.
Tim (00:40):
That's fair and so, yeah, so we have brought a longtime
friend of ours and finally havebeen able to get him on the show
to record with us, jason Gooley, a man who probably doesn't
need a huge amount ofintroduction to most of the
people that listen, but for thefive or six of them that may not
.
Why don't you go ahead andintroduce yourself, jason?
Jason (01:05):
Oh my gosh, when do I even begin?
I'm about five foot seven andcompletely bald.
So I'm Jason Gooley.
I have been at Cisco for alittle over 11 years now.
I went from an SE field SE torunning as a technical
evangelist for all worldwideenterprise networking, for all
of EN, for Cisco and softwaresales because it's worldwide
(01:26):
enterprise networking andsoftware sales I always forget
and software sales, so I said ifyou can get through that title
on the slide.
I'm like presenting or somethinglike that.
If you can get throughtechnical evangelist, worldwide
enterprise networking andsoftware sales, cisco Systems
Incorporated, you'll be able toget through the next half hour
or whatever it is we're going totalk about.
You'll be in great shape.
(01:50):
So I did that for a long timefor about seven years and then I
just recently, in November,took a role back on the same
kind of like the same team forthe same manager who originally
hired me at Cisco in 2013.
And so I'm still a technicalevangelist, still doing that
conversation with customers,presenting, doing all that stuff
.
Cisco live, all that kind ofstays the same, but instead of
just focusing on en and doing itfor the whole world, I'm doing
(02:13):
it for the states of illinoisand wisconsin, for, specifically
, our, our commercial team anduh, which makes it I mean
there's a there's a lot of uhstress off to some degree, right
, because I was travelingconstantly.
I was constantly traveling,which is great and fun, but then
after a while, you're like Ineed you to go somewhere.
They tell you this on aThursday, I need you to be in
(02:33):
New York on Monday or something,and you're like I got two kids.
I can't just be like bye andthen for a week.
It's like you need to give wasjust funny that I had such a
blast on that role and going allover the world and talking to
customers everywhere and I'velearned so much from from just
engaging with people.
It was.
It was the best.
It was a really great role.
It was fantastic and but when Icame back here and I went to to
(02:55):
this team, I have probably thebest leader I've ever had, you
know, I mean just the nicest guy, and it's not just because he
made the decision to hire meoriginally, but he made the
decision to hire me originally,but he made that decision twice
and brought me back yet again.
So clearly he's definitely agood guy.
So I've been doing that.
So my new role is similar innature, but I'm also taking on
(03:18):
all architectures now, so it'snot just EN.
So I'm learning about a lot ofAI, a lot of cool stuff with AI
security, things likeHyperShield and AI defense and
all these other new cool thingsthat got announced at Cisco Live
in Europe.
Really a lot of fun and what'sawesome is I get to go in and
have the conversations withcustomers about, you know, what
do you want to do or what do youlike.
(03:40):
Here's the art of the possibleright.
Here's the art of all thethings that we can do.
We can combine ai andcollaboration and all these
things and obviously securityand segmentation and all of this
.
It just naturally comestogether.
So it's really nice to go backto being a call it a generalist
talking about all thesedifferent uh technologies, but I
(04:00):
think it's just, it's been agreat, a great change for me,
and then uh and then ultimately,outside of that, you know, I
think, a lot of it between thatand outside of Cisco.
I write a lot of books andvideos for Cisco Press.
Pearson O'Reilly do a lot oftraining.
I just did a live EN corelesson.
The crash course for Pearsonjust ended yesterday.
Tim (04:20):
Wait a live, what?
Sorry, it's the EN core 350-400.
Jason (04:24):
Oh, okay, got it, but it's the crash course.
So it's a three day crash course, three, four hour days versus
the week long you know, it'skind of like get you going, but
it's very it's like theory alittle bit, but then it's we go
right into the command line oneverything and then, and then I
do programmability and all thesetechnologies and topics are
coming right out of the EN Corebook.
So it's like this is whatyou're going to see.
(04:45):
So it's for the folks who haveread the book but want a little
bit more and haven't gone forthe full-on deep boot camp or
they're not necessarily goingdirectly for their CCIE, because
you know, I mean, the EN Coreis pretty much the new CCIE,
written at this point.
Yeah, that's right, and so it'sbroad, there is some depth to it
.
No-transcript, internal networksupport, kind of technologist,
(05:37):
and it's very, it's very likethis is where you would start
your career really, and I'mtalking about things like this
as a processor, this is memory,this is a motherboard, this is
how, how it connects.
And I'm ripping apart computerson camera, which I had to go
through all this hassle to getthis microphone boom thing that
could attach to a dslr cameraand all this other stuff so you
could show it, right you show it, because you can't hold that.
(05:59):
I mean it just doesn't workright.
But unfortunately you should beable to do your, show you
something.
Yeah, I gotta stay far enoughback to be like and this, you
know, is uh, is where you plugin the sata drive, you know at
least now you'll have theequipment to do some unboxing
videos on uh youtube that's agood point.
Tim (06:19):
Yeah, for the youtube.
Jason (06:20):
Maybe become a youtube okay, hey, somebody send me
something so I can unbox it.
I don't even care what it is,as long as it doesn't tick or go
boom, you know, or?
Tim (06:31):
glitter bomb, yeah Right.
Jason (06:34):
But it was funny because going that's where I started my
career was computer.
Desktop support helped us builda computer, my A plus
certification.
All of this is where I got intotechnology and what was cool
was that to see the outline ofthe blueprint and to make a
course for it and to justliterally be able to be like
alright, this is so awesomebecause it's all from literal,
(06:56):
just things that I've done.
Like the whole course isbasically just stories of things
that I've gone through and ofcourse, you covered the
technology right.
But why is this important?
You know, I remember at ahospital that had an issue they
had two switches, whatever itdidn't fail over.
You lost your config.
There's all of these thingsthat come up that that kind of
leads you into this direction.
So working on that course nowand it's just, it's been a lot
(07:19):
of fun with the CCNA stuff too.
Tim (07:25):
I gotta, I gotta ask.
Ask because I didn't hear.
But I had heard about this certand it's not necessarily.
Well, I mean, the agenda thatwe're going to talk about is
basically a cert stuff ingeneral, but, like I know, I
kind of have to veer a littlebit.
This was a CC.
You said IST.
Is that right?
Jason (07:36):
CCST, so Cisco Certified Support Technician and then
there's cybersecurity,networking and now IT support.
So that's what's confusing.
CCST, Cisco Certified Support,Technician IT support.
It's like a.
Tim (07:50):
Oh, these are like specializations for this ST bit.
They're like three differentflavors of this ST bit.
It's an actual certification.
Jason (07:57):
Each one of those is a certification, so it's not like
a specialization on the CCMP asmuch as it is.
Tim (08:04):
Well, I guess it kind of is it's a flavor, it's a flavor.
Jason (08:07):
It's a flavor, right, because it's CCST and there's
three different ones.
But and I think they justrecently announced that they're
renaming the cyber ops to justcyber security, I believe, or
something I think it's justCisco certified cyber security
versus whatever it was Ciscocertified cyber ops, ccna cyber
ops or whatever.
Yeah, I don't know a lot ofthings about that, but you can
(08:29):
see how there can be a littlebit of confusion in some of that
, but it's been a lot of funthough.
Just looking at some of thoseolder or I wouldn't even say
older technologies, just it'sjust it's very relevant new
stuff, just not something Ifocused on in a long time not
something I focused on in a longtime, so it's super cool, yeah,
no kidding, I think didn't,russ White?
do one of the other books?
(08:49):
I think, yeah, he did.
I think he did the networkingone.
Yeah, okay, he wrote thenetworking book, that's right,
I'm doing the official videocourse.
I don't even actually I don'teven know if there's a proposal
in or who would be the authorfor the IT support book, but now
, with the CCNA, this is theother thing, as you may be aware
, that I'm working on is thatthere's been a lot of splash
about me taking over for Wendell, for the CCNA and everything,
and then it's been an excitingand crazy journey to think that
(09:14):
the gentleman who started me offI'm reading these books I'm
going to be taking over andwriting for whoever is starting
their career, right, yeah,passing of the torch I mean
we're talking about so ifthere's anybody listening that
doesn't know this, uh, we'retalking about wendell odom, who
is basically like an og in thenetworking space.
Tim (09:34):
I mean, he wrote most of the ccna level books that I
almost everybody uses to getbootstrapped like learn the ccna
stuff.
I know I did.
Um, yeah, no, that that'sreally cool.
I was actually lucky enough tomeet Wendell in June last year
at Cisco Live.
And it was interesting actually, because I was walking around
(09:55):
handing out copies of my book toeverybody who would take one.
Usually I'd have to pointfinger guns at them to make them
take it.
Jason (10:03):
I'm sorry I have to pay you to take my book but uh,
wendell was really cool.
Tim (10:08):
Uh, I don't know, we were talking in the cisco store and
we were talking about somethingand I was like, oh, man here
like you know, wendell, you didso much to help me get started
I'd love to to just give you acopy of my, of my book.
And he, he was very gracious,he took a flip through, he said
this is awesome, dude.
And I ended up talking to somepeople from Cisco Press about it
and stuff.
And then they were like, okay,wendell, the Cisco Press people
(10:29):
were like, okay, wendell, it'stime to take a picture with your
new CCNA book.
Jason (10:33):
And he was like, oh, and then he was like hey, come on
over here, man.
Good I'm good.
Tim (10:41):
Wendell.
Wendell's such a class act dude.
He's the best, he is the bestdude, like straight up.
Jason (10:45):
He is.
He is so when he littlebackground.
He's done 10 editions for 23years.
Tim (10:52):
I know that's insane.
Jason (10:54):
And probably I mean, unless you went down that other
path that we were talking about,right, almost a lot of the
people that went ccna used hisbooks.
I mean there's no way to notacknowledge that, right.
Oh for sure.
It's so impactful and soincredibly huge what he's done
for the entire community and mepersonally and everybody I know
(11:16):
who's gone for their ccna, Iremember once in a while you
find a couple folks will get acertification and use alternate
methods of study other than thec Press book and everything.
Tim (11:25):
Yeah.
Jason (11:26):
By and large man, almost every CCNA out there, this guy.
In addition, they pull a lot ofthat content from the books and
stuff for the Network Academy.
Tim (11:37):
Yeah, for Netacad yeah.
Jason (11:38):
Everybody is going to get Network Academy.
I mean, just from a statistic.
This is kind of one of thethings that is still what makes
my mind want to blow up.
Right Is I'm sitting at ourglobal sales meeting just this
past year or the one before that, right, and they had said they
were wanting to expand NetworkAcademy and one of the
statistics that they had saidwas the Network Academy has been
(11:58):
around for 25 years.
It was the 25 year anniversaryof Network Academy.
I mean, they said they havecertified 17 million people,
holy shit, 17 million.
Well, through that, yeah,obviously through netiquette,
right yeah, and then this is thepart that blew my head off
right.
It said we expect to certifyanother 25 million in the next
(12:21):
10 years that's crazy.
Just to go from 17 years to getor, I'm sorry, 25 years to get
17 million.
They want to do 25 million morein 10 years.
Tim (12:33):
Yeah, so like 8 million more within 10 years.
Jason (12:36):
So I'm sitting there listening to this, and this was
shortly after the Cisco Livethat they came to me.
Cisco Press came to me andasked me if I would be
interested in taking over theCCNA, which blew my mind again
Right, so this was like a justlike a couple months later,
cause, like we have Cisco livetypically in June and in our
global sales meetings usuallyabout the end of August.
So, like two months later, afterI found out that I'm going to
(12:58):
be doing this, I hear this.
Well then I started thinkingabout well, they use wait a
minute, they use all the contentto feed the Network Academy.
Tim (13:06):
Yeah dude.
Jason (13:06):
And then he said 10 years and I'm like they're going to
be using my stuff to feed 25million students and even if you
cut that down to just afraction, 1 million students.
Tim (13:18):
Oh yeah.
Jason (13:20):
It's just so and that, to me, makes it just.
It makes my heart glow, makesme nervous at the same time, but
it just all of those thingsmakes me just smile because I
was the kid who's never going tomake it anyway, and all the
people we can help doing this.
Oh my gosh dude.
Tim (13:35):
Yeah, I mean it's a hard thing to think about just
because of the scale of it,right, and that's that's the
case for think I mean the ccnais ubiquitous, pretty much like
people that want to learnnetworking.
I mean you know you have peopleout there will say like, oh
well, you know ccna is too much,just do like network plus or
whatever.
But the truth is like from a awhole, a total package training
(13:59):
curriculum of of networking.
It's hard.
I don't, I don't know no othervendor I'm aware of puts out the
total package training.
Jason (14:07):
And it's also interesting to see the way that people I
was going to say it's soughtafter and the way that people go
after certain certifications is.
It's an interesting thingbecause, like I said, I started
off I got my A pluscertification.
I went and I got my CNA, novell411B For anybody out there who
(14:29):
has less hair than me who knowswhat I just said, you know and I
went down that path, did someMicrosoft certifications.
I kind of just kept down thatpath.
But when I heard about Cisco Ididn't know what it was.
And.
I've been on a million podcaststalking about this.
My best friend calls me up andhe said there's, dude, there's
(14:50):
this thing, it's called ciscoand they have three
certifications and the one isthe cisco certified network
associate and if you go get that, you'll make over a quarter of
a million dollars a year.
Now, mind you, I think I was 16years old, because I got
certified and start goingthrough all that when I was 17.
16 years old, he tells me this.
I'm like, oh my gosh, that'sincredible.
And then he says well, no, no,dude, you don't understand.
There's a CCNP, which is CiscoCertified Network Professional,
(15:13):
and if you get that you makelike $375,000 a year.
And I'm like, wow, what youknow?
And I'm like, and he goes dude,but there's one called the CCIE
, the Cisco CertifiedInter-Network Expert.
There's less than 500 of themin the entire world and if you
get that certification you willmake more than the president.
(15:35):
That is exactly what he said.
Tim (15:41):
I think you were already over the president when you got
to NP level.
Jason (15:45):
I'm over here like I'm going to go get my ccie and go
work at cisco one day and andthis I just said this it just
like something I just said Ihadn't even seen, experienced,
touched or knew what the heckcisco was.
Tim (15:58):
Dude, I'm in my mind I was like I wanted to be more than
the president you know, I waslike that's where I was with it
and.
Jason (16:04):
And I figured I was already doing Novell networking
and I really saw that I lovednetworking and an NT Windows NT
3.1, 3.1.1.4.
Yeah, yeah yeah, right, I'm old.
And then I realized that thatwas something that I was like
dude, I think I want to get intothis.
And I started, believe it ornot, looking at these books and
stuff.
And there was also a routersimulator.
(16:25):
It might have been Boson, butit was either Boson or there was
something eSIM or router.
I think it might have beenBoson.
There was a virtual simulatorfor routers and stuff back then.
Tim (16:36):
Like NetSim.
I think there was one calledNetSim, it might have been
NetSim.
Jason (16:40):
Basically it's like software you double-click it and
it's like you're on routers, sobut you know, basically it's
like software.
Tim (16:43):
You double click it and it's like you're on routers.
But like packet tracer.
Jason (16:44):
Yes, it was like package pre packet tracer, yeah, exactly
.
So I was using that and justgoing and stuff and I just I
fell in love with it.
And I remember, you know, justgoing through all these
different books and things andtrying to figure out what it was
, and convincing my dad to buyme a CCNA study kit off of eBay.
Study kit off of eBay andyou're talking like 97.
(17:08):
Oh, yeah, that's money.
So it was like 5,500 bucks, ifI remember right, and it was all
it was.
Well, all it was now right,back then it was big deal Two
2501 routers right, a 1924switch.
They had an AdTrans CSU DSUexternal mux.
You had all the V35 cables andthe modems and all the stuff
that came with it and your60-pin serial and your AUI
adapter to go your 10 meg andall this and that was it.
(17:30):
I think it was running iOS 10,dude, that was all it was.
They didn't give you labs, theyjust sold you this kit of gear
and you're like, okay.
Tim (17:39):
Go figure out what to do with it Right.
Jason (17:42):
So like you're trying to build stuff and it to do with it
Right.
So like I haven't, like you'reyou're trying to build stuff and
it was kind of cool, right,because you're you're looking at
what you've studied from a bookperspective.
And I'm a I'm a bad learnerfrom from reading.
I am very much a visual ortouchy guy, you know.
So I'm like I was sitting there, I was like, well, you know,
I've got to start getting somehands-on experience with this.
So I started copying.
There's no copy paste.
(18:02):
I'm like typing in what I'mreading and doing in the book in
here and trying to make stuffwork, right.
And then that was when youstarted like that's what I think
when my hair loss started,originally, because that'll do
it.
All of a sudden you're, you're,you're plugging stuff in and
you're not sure that it's somestupid encapsulation thing on a
V35 or some.
It's some oddball twisted thing.
(18:25):
It's not in the CCNA book,right.
It's more of a transport issueor a clocking or a timing or a
signaling thing or somethinglike that.
That was just like you neverknew what was going on and why
it wouldn't work.
But then every once in a whileyou can duplicate an exact thing
from the book, like oh, I cando two routers back-to-back
(18:45):
using this one cable crossovercable with the AUI adapters, and
do RIP, right.
Tim (18:52):
Yeah, so, yeah.
So I think what we should talkabout is I mean, you've written
God, how many books do you havenow?
Is it your name, before Is it?
Jason (19:04):
eight.
I was going to say we haven'treached ten yet it's like eight
or it's eight and then.
But it's so weird because itsprawls out the way that when
you get published it, you getthis isbn number that tells you
what your library, I had to buymine.
But yep, I know it's thecoolest feeling in the world,
and one day I'll actually makeit to dc.
I've never been there to looklibrary congress yeah, I wrote I
(19:25):
think it'd be cool, uh, butwhen they bundle things like the
en core and an rc together,that's a third isbn or isb yeah,
that's, yeah, that's right.
So now technically with myvideo courses, have isbns and
all this.
Tim (19:37):
I have like 19 publications or something, but there's
really only like eight bookslike physical books, yeah five
or six, I don't know, somethinglike that so so chris and I just
finished and and a third author, steve, who's a friend of the
podcast.
He's been on.
We haven't had him on in awhile.
Actually we need to have him onagain.
Um, we just finished a uh, abook, a certification book for,
(20:01):
for publishing.
Uh, for aws, the advancednetworking specialty, and what I
wanted to talk about a littlebit was and you're perfect guy
to talk about it it's kind oflike how do you feel differently
about cause I've got, I've gotone book which is like the
hybrid cloud handbook, which isnot a certification book, it's
like a teaching networkengineers how to work in the
cloud book, but then we havethis cert book and so like how
(20:24):
do you feel differently aboutwriting a book that's not
specifically certification-basedversus one that's meant to pass
a?
Jason (20:31):
certification.
It's a totally differentopinion.
Yeah, it's a differentexpectation for the reader too.
Tim (20:38):
Yeah, for sure.
Jason (20:40):
I think that's the one thing I noticed.
Here's the best two examples ofspecifically that right.
The first book I ever did wasProgramming and Automating Cisco
Networks right, and that bookbecame the unofficial
certification guide for the see.
If I remember this one again,it's like my title right, cisco
Certified Enterprise NetworkingProgrammability Specialist or oh
(21:04):
, yeah, yeah, yeah, empre orwhatever, it was specialist exam
yeah, npre or npre or somethingright, but it was focused on
enterprise networking in it apicem and stuff like that.
That was the book for that exam.
I that's how I got therelationship with devnet and the
godfather thing, and all thatwas because writing that book
(21:27):
and partnering with Susie Weeand the DevNet team and going
all over and really getting theword out about DevNet and
programmability and using theexamples from that for training
became this whole thing right.
It was unofficial, so when wefirst wrote it we weren't
thinking that you were going topass an exam right, it was just.
Tim (21:47):
It was just data or info, just like you mentioned, you're
teaching the cloud thing.
Jason (21:51):
I'm like.
You're like, how do you make apeanut butter?
It was like one really coolexample from the book was was
like deconstructing a peanutbutter jelly sandwich.
This is bread like.
This is peanut butter, this isjelly.
Cool, a computer's like great,I don't care.
Now you have to say take peanutbutter, apply.
You know like you have to buildit right automatic props right
to get it to work.
It's a totally different and Ilearned a lot from that book
(22:12):
because when I I I did not knowa lot of network programmability
and engine, I didn't know it atall.
When, when I first gotapproached to write that book
from from ryan there and ciscopress and one of the things that
that had said was I have tolearn a lot of this to write it
and so I wrote the way that Ilearned.
So I cut out all the middle, allthe junk in the middle, just to
(22:35):
get right to the point, andeverybody said they liked that
concept.
So then when I went to anotherexample Software Defined WAN,
the SD-WAN book right that wewrote that one is specifically
for EN SD-WAN implementationexam.
So we wrote it to that thing.
Yeah to a blueprint, basically,but it does not say official
(22:56):
certification guide on it.
Tim (22:57):
Yeah, I was going to say I actually don't think it said
cert guide on it.
Jason (23:00):
It does, and it was just one of those things that just I
think it was just like a missreally, Because it is.
We had that blueprint to writeit to, so we wrote it to
specifically that blueprint.
Tim (23:12):
So you would ask the test and end some right.
Yeah, I remember talking toDustin about this.
Jason (23:16):
Dustin.
Tim (23:16):
Schumann, one of the authors.
Yeah, we just happen to both be.
We know him as a good friend ofours and yeah, I remember that
there was a lot of back andforth at the time about is this
going to be a certificationguide or is this going to be a
kind of like the one you'retalking about?
Is this going to be more of aninstructional usable usability,
if you will guide?
Jason (23:34):
Well then, here's, here's , so here's how that all sussed
out.
So I gave him over lead authorfor the second edition for that
book because I have to focus onCCNA.
I just don, just don't.
Yeah, I had to get, I had togive up ENCORE and and DevNet
Associate and and all of theseother things because, like,
(23:55):
there's just no way, like I, itwas insane that I wrote those
four that one year.
I that's.
It was like I was dyingliterally mentally, physically,
trying to get that stuff donebecause I didn't want to let
anybody down.
So Dustin was the obvious,obvious, logical choice, right,
yeah?
I kicked it over to him and hegot some amazing new authors who
I know very well and they'regreat, and they wrote a second
edition.
Again, it did not come out asan OCG, although it is written
(24:15):
again to pass the ENspecialization exam right.
So it is very much a mixture ofwhat we were talking about,
because now it is a with theintent you're going to pass.
But we want you to pick thisbook up and you just know, and
you can go implement it right,so that became a hybrid version.
And then the reason I'm bringingthis up is when you start
talking about now being on likethe, the en core.
(24:36):
Um, I was on the cci, ccd, uh,evolving technology study guide,
which was just an ebook thathad like three chapters.
That was an official studyguide, but that section of the
exam is dead and gone.
So they, that's a way.
So ccna and ccnp, it's adifferent feel and I'm sure you
get this.
But you, you're going throughand in the same sense, you're
(24:57):
like I've got to be able to tryto figure out how to technically
explain this so you can followalong and give you the steps oh
yeah, 100 at the same time.
I've been in sales for a verylong time now, but I'm an
engineer.
You know what I mean.
But what I've learned in a lotof that meeting with freaking
thousands and thousands ofcustomers they don't care unless
you make it relevant to them ofwhy you're trying to do
(25:20):
something.
So when I write these books now, I'm trying to put in there,
like if you're doing spanningtree versus layer three routing,
this is the reason why youwould look at that from a design
perspective.
I'm not trying to recreateZig's book for CCDE or anything.
I'm just trying to say, heylook, dude, this is why you want
to do this and this is why youwant to take through it.
And here's where I think itwill help you if you do these
(25:40):
steps.
But also look at these thingsas an option or whatever I tried
to give the rounded out.
pick it up, I could go implementit.
Pick it up, I can go pass anexam.
Pick it up, I can teach it tosomebody else.
Tim (25:51):
What's interesting, Something you said I don't want
to lose.
It is this idea of you know,because we're engineers, we need
to understand, like, why we'dwant to do it, and I feel like a
lot of times with certificationexams you don't have to explain
that, right, Because it's animplied like.
Jason (26:08):
obviously the answer you want is you want to pass the
damn exam right, but like Forwhatever that financial or-.
Tim (26:12):
Whatever the thing is right , Whatever the reason is the
carrot.
But yeah.
So like when we did this pactbook for the AWS ANS, we set out
to give more information thanyou needed to pass the exam.
We went beyond it to like it isa cert exam and so, but what we
found actually and this is kindof funny we set out to be like
(26:34):
not only is this going to helpyou pass the exam, but like, if
you're doing this work, this isall the stuff you would want to
know and actually had to pullactually were instructed
actually to kind of pull back onthat a little bit, because you
know the goal of the book itselfis still to pass the exam.
So you can't give them too muchor they'll think they have to
memorize like everything in thebook to pass the exam right,
paralyzing right.
Jason (26:55):
So I mean our books.
These books are not.
Some of these books are notthin right?
Um, and, and going back to yourpoint, I think that you know
when you're, when you're talkingabout writing a book or
education or something, you youhave to put yourself into the
learner's mindset and and it'shard sometimes for us and I'm
going to explain exactly whywe've been doing it for so- long
(27:17):
, oh God.
Tim (27:17):
That's the hardest part, dude, the hardest part of
writing these books.
Jason (27:21):
They're like I, you know, key point.
I'm on right I'm teaching theENCORE class yesterday, the live
lesson one for Pearson.
Right, I'm on there teaching aclass.
I did two things that were justlike.
I was like I couldn't figureout why this one thing wasn't
working.
I'm like why is this notworking?
Why is this not working?
I'm like this doesn't makesense.
(27:50):
I've used this same CML lab amillion and a half times for
this class and why isn't itworking?
So in secure crt, you know, youhave the session manager where
you have all your routers andstuff, right.
Well, with cml there'ssomething called a breakout tool
and I don't know if you'refamiliar with that.
But what the breakout tool doesis it says you can map all the
nodes in your topology to areverse telnet line so you can
actually just use uh telnet fromyour computer, ssh, your
computer, or like a client orsomething like security.
Well, I had two labs, one's afour-router topology, one's a
six-router topology, and theyboth have routers, one through
(28:12):
six, whatever.
So I'm working on teachingEIGRP, ospf and BGP all in one
day, which is not easy.
I'm going through all this.
Everything's working flawless.
I'm thinking everything isgreat.
I get to BGP and nothing isworking.
None of the neighbors arecoming up, interfaces are up.
I'm like what's going on?
I can't ping the, I can't pingthe other hop.
(28:33):
I'm like, yeah, I don't reallyknow what's going on here yet
and we had like 14 minutes leftof class and I'm like I'm not
going to burn this 14 minutes toto figure it out.
I go.
What I'll do is let's talk examstrategy for the next 15
minutes.
Well, I'll figure this outright after this, and then the
next day, which was yesterday,we'll come back first thing in
the morning and we'll talk aboutBGP.
(28:54):
We'll do BGP and then we'lldump it into programmability,
automation and all this stuff.
Right, and it was perfect.
It went great.
I clicked the wrong set ofrouters.
It was pointing to a differentbreakout port number that was in
a different lab.
So when you get to those centerlat center routers.
They got the wrong ip addresses.
So when I paste theconfiguration in, nothing works.
The interfaces aren't even.
I mean everything's all jackedup, it's all maps wrong and
(29:16):
everything yeah right.
And then and then the other onethat was that was obvious to me,
that I didn't realize was showrun pipe, se blah right.
I'm looking at a section ofsomething from the configuration
running config, right.
Well, you can't assume that alot of the folks on the other
end of my training class knowwhat all these little two-letter
things mean and I'm doing likeshow run pipe, se face pipe uh
(29:37):
uh, you know mpls, pipe router,pipe this, pipe that, and it's
this long string of just throwup because I've been doing it
for so long.
Yeah, it doesn't mean anythingto the learners.
You literally sometimes have toreally reel yourself back to be
like, oh my gosh, I'm assumingthat you all know how to do all
these shortcuts andunderstanding what route maps
are and all this Like as I wasteaching about, like BGP, weight
(30:01):
and local preference, and whenyou paste a config in, yes, you
have your route map.
To set your route maps was notin the course, the crash course
piece, because that you know.
So I had to play route mapsright.
So there's things that you justhave to think about and it's
tough, it's it's worse inwriting.
It's worse in writing becauseyou know if you forget something
(30:22):
like oh yeah, and then youremember later on, you might
have misreferenced in a, in aparagraph, like in the beginning
of the chapter, and you thoughtof something and you added it,
but the two don't.
You didn't connect the two.
Tim (30:33):
Actually yeah, so I wanted to ask.
I didn't get a chance to askyou this while we were writing
the book, chris, but now you gotwhat you had just said has me
curious.
This is your first book.
Did you run into that a lot?
Cause I has me curious, this isyour first book.
Did you run into that a lot?
Because I know I, when I firststarted writing, I would, I was,
I was a bull in a china shopwith with that stuff, like with
just getting, yeah, puttingstuff in and then adding extra
(30:54):
stuff.
I'm going to go back and likechange stuff and having it all
line up.
That was hard for sure.
Jason (30:58):
Yeah I think it was like the thing is unique with our
exam guide that we were puttingout is also it was it was cloud
focused, it was an AWSnetworking exam, right.
So there's one thing that I andI don't know if Tim you've
noticed this in particularly inthe AWS community type thing a
lot of people when they have togo for this cert, they complain
(31:21):
about how hard it is to learnnetworking because typically a
lot of people are getting intocloud.
You know, maybe they're takingthe cloud practitioner
certifications and learning youknow other things that are much
easier to digest, but thenetworking stuff was just seemed
like such a hurdle for people.
So when I built this, like itwas so hard, like to not boil
(31:41):
the ocean type thing, which Iknow is really difficult, but
like I'm I'm a person that needsso much context to learn stuff
properly, like I need to knowevery factor that goes into
things, um.
So I worked really hard onmaking these chapters for
network fundamentals, um, builtin there, and then it just like
grew and grew and it got so long.
(32:01):
And you know we're going, we'retalking with the publisher and
they're like, hey, man, you needto trim this down, there's too
much in here, and they broke itup, didn't they.
I know they did.
They did, they broke it up andeven put that stuff in the
appendix for kind of the thereasons you're talking about now
.
You don't want to scare, youknow, the reader.
I don't want people to openthis up and think like, oh my
god, if I have to learn thismuch like it's, it's not worth
it.
But at the same time, you know,I don't know how do you deal
(32:24):
with that Guli?
Like, how do you focus on notboiling the ocean and making
sure to stay within your realmof the certification as well?
I think I'm going to answer thatwith two pronged, because one
of the things that you had saidwas that you know, like we're
talking about having to teachfundamentals Cloud first person,
the fundamentals of networkingwould be, would be difficult.
(32:47):
This is literally five, fiveyears ago.
Automation the folks who knowsoftware development, learning,
the network, fundamentals isvery that's so true.
Tim (32:56):
It's a great point, it's the same thing.
Jason (32:57):
And then now your cloud on-prem right, you're, we're
talking, so these things.
It's like it's such a weirdscenario because you cannot just
, like you said, you're writinga book about a cloud
certification, you might notknow what an ether channel is,
which might be something that'slike necessary in that
environment.
Right, for just redundancy,resiliency, whatever it is Right
.
Going back to the question nowthat you asked me is how do you
(33:17):
know where that slider is andwhen do you have to actually
stop?
What I've noticed is and thisis just based on asking a lot of
the folks who read my I talk toa lot of people who read my
books.
(33:47):
I try really, really hard to askas much and have folks message
me on LinkedIn and X and all ownanalytics right is that the
majority of the people that Italk to would much rather know
the relevance, a story andenough to get them to whatever
that goal for officialcertification guy would be
enough to pass that section onthe exam.
That's a very hard thing to dobecause you know you want the.
You almost have to rip aparteverything.
You're trying to get them tonote or to pass to succeed on
(34:10):
right, because then that's theonly way to.
You're gonna know the level ofdepth.
So for me, one of the thingsthat seems to come naturally,
and I don't even know how, andit comes out when I'm talking.
And it comes out when I'mwriting, because when I write,
for some reason, it feels likeI'm talking, if that makes any
sense to anybody, if you're anauthor or if you've written
anything, you know.
(34:31):
It feels like in my mind whenI'm writing, I'm explaining it
to Chris, like specifically,like I am actually writing, like
I'm writing to some specificperson, like I'm writing to a
person.
Tim (34:43):
It's communication.
You're communicating Rightperson.
Jason (34:48):
Like I'm writing it's communication, you're
communicating right, but at thesame time the the mindset there
is also that you know when Iwhen I do that, writing it in
more of a conversational flowthan a technical manual that is
absolutely dry and you want totake the paper and just double
paper cut to the eyes becauseyou can't take the dryness of
that book right.
So I try to inject a littlehumor, I try to inject funny
(35:10):
things and I think that'sbasically it.
Once I get to a section andthis is something my wife helped
me with my wife is a preschoolteacher but she's got her
master's in early childhood andall this other good stuff I was
getting severe writer's block.
I'd stare at this thing.
Like I put the title into thesection of the paragraph that I
was going to do.
Maybe I'll get a sentence and Iwould stare at it.
But I knew what I wanted to say.
(35:30):
I couldn't formulate it down topaper and she said go in there
and throw up everything that youhave in your mind.
For sure, with no punctuations,don't worry about a period,
don't worry about a comma, don'tworry about capital letters,
and just type what's in yourmind.
And I said, okay, so I juststarted going, and then I
realized that like very fast,like this goes really fast, like
(35:51):
all of a sudden, you know,because you also have to try to
keep the page count to areasonable level, just like
we're talking about here, right,Per like we're talking about
here right Per chapter.
You don't want a 50 pagechapter and a 20 page chapter,
right?
So you got to kind of do thattoo, and you can continue if you
need to, but, you know,continue in another chapter.
(36:12):
But so in that whole process ofbreaking that stuff down and
kind of splitting it all up, youknow, it kind of came to me
that the way that I write isvery much like the way I present
and I try.
I try to do it Like I'm showing, like I'm showing you or I'm
telling you a story aboutwhatever it is.
I don't know why, I don't evenknow how to explain that, but
when you read the books it comesthrough a lot more than the.
The super um, I don't want todry, is the only word I could
(36:35):
think of where they're really Iget it.
Tim (36:37):
Very wordy, very technical, like like you're reading Like
reading an O'Reilly book orsomething, or an RFC.
Jason (36:45):
Reading an RFC.
Tim (36:46):
Or an RFC yeah even better.
Jason (36:48):
I'd tell you RFC, yeah, RFC, because you're just reading
it and you're just like it'sjust factual statements, one
after the other, basically.
And you're just like.
That's not exciting.
I want to know how to have funwith this too.
It would be cool to turn mylights off and on or open my
garage door or something that'slow hanging fruit that I can use
, and that's the other thingwhen you're this is a great
(37:12):
point to Chris too, right.
And the other thing I noticedis that when you're giving
examples and you're teachingthings, you have to inject
something that is relevant tothem, or fun, or something that
they have access to somethingthat is relevant to them, or fun
, or something that they haveaccess to.
So one of the things that I talkabout in all these things is,
in simplicity, is you get torepurpose your skill set.
If you're an auto mechanic andyou have to troubleshoot and you
(37:33):
have the thing that plugs inand you're troubleshooting,
trying to figure out what'sgoing on, and even if you don't
have a diagnostic tool in yourold school troubleshooting, I'm
not getting enough, or I'm notgetting enough flu or fuel or
you know whatever, it is rightthat mindset can be applied to
tech.
Similarly to you know.
You know the folks who arelearning software development.
(37:53):
You can take softwaredevelopment and there's a very
good bridge into some of thetechnology side of it.
Right, there's all of thesedifferent things, but there's a
way to bring them in so yourskillset can be applied to
another thing.
And the reason I bring that upso many people are moving into
IT.
I'm not gonna say jumping intoIT or diving into IT, but
(38:14):
there's a lot of folks switchinginto IT.
And I'm not trying to talkabout oversaturation or anything
like that, because I thinkanytime anybody says
oversaturation you know talkabout oversaturation or anything
like that, because I thinkanytime anybody says
oversaturation, they're losingtheir minds.
Because we need a lot moreCCIEs, a lot more automation
experts.
We need a lot more every person.
You know there's a company inevery corner of this world.
Tim (38:34):
It says the guy selling the books.
Jason (38:39):
Buy the books.
Buy the book 60, 60.
K in 60 days.
Buy the books.
Buy the book, right no 60 60k in60 days you heard it here or
your money back for the book,otherwise, otherwise I don't
want you to sue.
I don't want you to sue me.
If in 60 days you're not making60k, I'll give you the 12 cents
(39:00):
back that I got right yeah,remit remit your um uh, royalty,
there you go.
The cost of the go will costfrom zero to your shipping, like
I don't know, from zero to morethan that's the thing you know.
It's like that's the other thing.
It's so funny that you justmentioned that and we're
laughing, but at the same time,when you're building a
certification book, you got tobe careful what you promise oh,
(39:24):
yeah, yeah, for sure it's soweird because I always feel like
it's like all the police showswe're like you can't promise
we're gonna find their kids.
You can't promise, right, thatthey're gonna survive or
whatever.
So I'm like you can't promisebecause I don't control it you
can't control it.
But even at the same timesomebody gets sick and they go
take an exam, they have a badexperience right.
There's a million differentvariations of what can happen as
(39:47):
to you passing that exam rightall we can do is say we have
aligned this with the blueprint.
The best is best as humanlypossible at least humanly
meaning anything I've written.
I'm doing it the best I can do,right, I other people are
definitely probably better atthese, some of these things and
that you're on, but so from thebest of my ability right, I have
to try to make sure that I giveyou enough but not scare you
(40:08):
away, and I think that was myother niche was with the
programmability books and allthese videos.
I'm really, really, reallyblessed that I'm good at getting
people started and excitedabout it, like, yeah, and then
from there there's a millionexperts out there who know the
stuff better than me.
Damn that experts, even mybuddy stewart clark, we all know
, we all know, yeah, stewart, Iknow my brother's friend.
(40:28):
Oh yeah, big good friend great,love him and you know.
But that's the thing it's likethere's there's always somewhere
else you can go to get more,and I think that's the thing is
that almost slides into thatmental health thing, right,
because it's like there's alwaysanother place to go and get
more.
Tim (40:46):
Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about the treadmill.
Jason (40:48):
Technology is a train.
Call it AI right.
Ai is the new train.
Technology is a train.
Tim (40:53):
Treadmill yeah.
Jason (40:54):
This is moving so fast.
I just don't know that I couldget on this train.
Get on this train.
It was programmed five yearsago.
Tim (41:02):
Well-documented, I call it the treadmill, but it's the same
thing.
You just can never get off thedamn thing.
Jason (41:07):
The second you step on that train.
You are now moving with thetechnology.
What are you doing while you'removing?
Well, you're looking out thewindow at the people standing
there, and then what you do isyou start learning, you take
your AWS certification, you dothis and now you're moving ahead
in cars, and then you get tothe front and you're John
Capobianco.
You know what I mean.
Tim (41:24):
He's the conductor.
Jason (41:26):
Actually that would be hilarious, but think about what
he's done in AI already right Inour networking realm, right.
Tim (41:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we just had him on.
Actually, it hasn't come outyet, but we just had him on a
couple of weeks ago, I know, Iwas chatting with him.
Jason (41:39):
So I am super excited at the fact that we have a way to
explain and teach people.
Don't be afraid to get on thetrain.
Programmability was just start.
Just do hello me.
Just get a raspberry pi.
Yeah, just do anything usealexa to turn off your lights or
something.
Just start right and guess what.
Five years ago before that, socall it 10 years ago.
What was?
(42:00):
it was iot, yeah oh, for a shortperiod of time I remember the
iot craze for a little bit andit's actually starting to come
back now that we're getting intolike everything's connected
right, but it's just one ofthose things where it's like, in
order to talk about iot, youhave to go talk to somebody in
the business who cares about ityeah, for sure most of the it,
people don't care.
Same thing with programmabilityautomation.
(42:20):
Same thing with you know yeah,yeah, anyway.
Tim (42:23):
No, this is great.
You go down that path for anhour.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Uh.
Unfortunately, I think we'rejust about out of time, so we'll
go ahead and wrap up here.
Uh, where can people uh findyou online, jason?
Jason (42:33):
yeah, uh, at jason underscore ghoulie on all social
platforms.
Or, uh, if you want to find meon metal dev ops, metal dev
opscom or MetalDevOps on YouTubeand all social platforms as
well.
Tim (42:46):
Awesome, and we'll get that in the show notes as well.
Thanks for finally being ableto come on the pod.
We've been, you know, not, ofcourse, no one knows about this,
but we've tried like three orfour times already to record, so
we finally were able to make itall line up.
Yes, and it wasn't all my fault.
Okay, it was not all.
Jason (43:04):
It was not all Jason's fault, I was busy for you, I
just you know.
I want to make sure that I Icare about you guys.
No, no, no.
Tim (43:09):
Three way.
Jason (43:10):
fault for sure, yep.
Tim (43:11):
And we were, and we were very happy to finally make it
all line up, and soon.
And so to everyone else, thanksfor watching or listening, or
actually I don't know.
I think pretty sure you canonly be watching or listening.
I'm not sure of a third way toconsume this at this point Some
type of wavelength.
Yeah, if you're using an AIchatbot to summarize this
(43:33):
episode for you, then thank youfor listening.
I hope that makes it in thesummary and we'll see you again
on another episode of the CableScout podcast.
Take care, thank you.
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