Network Automation Nerds

Introduction: Why Kobe's untimely death hit me harder than I would have imagined. Even as I grew up as an NBA fan in Southern California, I was never a huge Kobe fan. Don't get me wrong, Kobe is a great player, one of the best, in

Introduction: Use generator to save overhead when reading large text files. This is a quick note to help with reducing the memory overhead when reading large text files. I run into a problem where I need to process large text files between a few hundred MB to a few GB

Introduction: Why motivation alone is not enough, read on to find out what ultimately worked for me. You see it all the time, best-selling books, speakers, TED Talks, all aim to give you the motivation you need to go out and conquer the world. They say that we are only

Introduction: Stand for Justice #BlackLivesMatter. I started writing blogs almost a decade ago in 2011, mainly about technology, but sometimes also about fun little things like shoes and basketball. One thing I like about technology is its binary nature, it either works or it doesn't; a packet needs

Introduction: Quick introduction to eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Data Object Model (DOM), and their usage in Python. The subject of working with XML and DOM comes up quite often in network engineering when we start to work with data structure and automation. Usually, this is in the context of understanding

Introduction: New Course on Packet Pushers Ignition I am happy to announce the latest collaboration course with Packet Pushers on their Ignition platform. The course is titled "Practical Python Lessons for Networking": Course: https://ignition.packetpushers.net/courses/practical-python-lessons-for-networking/ Ignition: https://ignition.packetpushers.net/ Here is a high-level

Introduction: Python doctest module example. Python doctest module is a way to test simple Python functions via the interactive shell output. It simply searches through a set of text, such as docstring, and looks for what appears to be interactive Python sessions, and executes those sessions to compare the output.

Introduction: My notes on installing Cisco CML2.0 on ESXi 6.7 I have used Cisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL) pretty extensively as a sandbox lab in my books and classes. I like the fact that it contains all the Cisco images as a bundle, from legacy IOSv to

Introduction: A quick start for using Guestshell and Python on the Cisco IOS-XE platform It has been many years since I explored onboard shell and Python options for Cisco platforms, the post on Cisco Nexus 3000 (https://blog.pythonicneteng.com/2013/06/quickly-change-cisco-nexus-config-via.html) was the last I can recall.

Introduction: Thoughts about the experience of translating my book from English into Mandarin Chinese I was born in Taiwan R.O.C and moved to the United States at the age of 13. Shortly after graduating from elementary school, my parents were divorced. Long story short, after moving around a

Introduction: An Q&A on the topic of Network Programming and the Suitability of Python Here is an excerpt of the Medium post by Packt Publishing for a Q&A session with me on the topic of Network Programmability and Python (July 28th, 2020 4 min read): Link:

Q&A for new LinkedIn Learning course for Cisco DevNet Associate Cert Prep 1 I am excited about the newly released course on LinkedIn Learning titled 'Cisco DevNet Associate Cert Prep 1: Software Development and Design': I thought it might be a good idea to write a

How to improve CAB from a network engineer's perspective Last week, Monika from Packt Publishing's marketing team shared Kenneth Hunt's kind video book review for my book with me. First, of course, I want to thank Kenneth for taking the time to do such

Network Programming and the Suitability of Python Interview The blog interview from the collaboration between Packt Publishing, JavaResisited, and me is published on Medium today. The title of the article is "Network Programming and the Suitability of Python". What is a bit interesting is the fact that I

Introduction: What is the Python __name__ variable and when to use it in your code. You probably have seen this block of code many times before: if __name__ == "__main__": ....<code> You probably also know the purpose of this code, it means the code below if __name_

Using PySerial to capture serial console outputs Many of the IoT devices do not have WiFi or 3G/4G connections. They are simple single-board devices that lack computing resources in favor of low power consumption, cost, and footprint. In which case, we can treat it as an extension to a

Book Review for 'Coding Projects in Python' Over the weekend I read 'Coding Projects in Python (Computer Coding for Kids)' (Amazon Link) to see if this is a good book to start coding projects with my kids. The book has over 117 ratings on Amazon and

Thoughts about remote presenting at PyCon TW 2020 PyCon TW 2020 took place between September 5th - 6th, 2020 in Taiwan a few weeks ago. I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on this experience, particularly because most of the conferences have gone 100% virtual due to COVID-19

Adding URL Filtering in Nginx Configuration I worked with a few Apache configurations back in the days when I was a junior system administrator for a small ISP. Throughout the years I sporadically work on projects that have some tie-in to web servers but always in the context of network

Recounting Blog Post for missing email recipients Last week I discovered that I have been doing the email tagging wrong. Over the years, people have been signing up for my email in various ways, such as websites, blogs, podcast appearances, etc. Long story short, when I consolidated the list into

My first experiment with Scrapy I have not done much web scraping since playing around with BeautifulSoup many years ago. Back then, I felt BSoup was a great tool but needed a deeper understanding of the HTML tags and CSS selectors to make good use of the tool. There were

Introduction: Why learning JavaScript might be the next logical step. I have always had a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. I like the fact that it is always backward compatible even to the earliest of websites, I like the fact that it has evolved into a full-featured framework including Vue and

Using Google Charts JavaScript Library for Graphs Last week I wrote a blog post about "Why Learn JavaScript", one of the main reasons for learning and using JavaScript is the fact that it is the de facto standard for interactive web frontend. To that end, it would be

Introduction on Vue JavaScript Library This is the second part of the three-part series on JavaScript. In the first part, Google Charts for Graphs, we discussed a bit about HTML and using the Google Charts JavaScript to make client-side charts. Instead of downloading potentially big, static graphs from the server,

Combine Vue with Google Charts This is the third of the three-part series on JavaScript. In the first post 'Google Charts for Graphs', we talked about using the Google Charts JavaScript library to render client-side charts directly in the browser. In the second post 'Vue Javascript Library