10+ years of service provider networking, continuously pushing into advanced protocols and automation
I'm a senior network engineer with over 10 years of experience designing, operating, and automating carrier-grade service provider networks. My career has been built on deep protocol expertise — BGP, MPLS L2/L3 VPN, IS-IS, OSPF, multicast, and traffic engineering — across large-scale multi-vendor environments running Cisco IOS-XR, Nokia SR OS, and Arista EOS.
My current focus is on advanced segment routing: SR-MPLS, SR-TE policies, Flex-Algo delay-based routing, PCE/PCEP dynamic path computation, and TI-LFA fast reroute. I run a home lab on containerlab/netlab with Arista cEOS and Cisco XRd, and I document what I learn — both to retain it and to share it with others in the field.
Network automation has become a core part of my practice — not as a separate discipline, but as an extension of networking itself. I use Python, NETCONF, RESTCONF, and YANG models to build tools that verify, configure, and monitor network state programmatically. I developed a professional production grade automation framework that reduced device provisioning from 30 minutes to 30 seconds using NETCONF multithreading.
I've also built practical AWS cloud networking skills — VPC design, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN with BGP, and hybrid connectivity. I view cloud as a necessary extension of modern network engineering, not a replacement for it. The networking fundamentals don't change; the infrastructure they run on does.
Cisco Certified Network Professional
Network Programmability & Automation
CurrentAmazon Web Services
PursuingReading about SR-MPLS and actually running a live PCE session are different things. I run a home lab specifically to close that gap — to see the failure scenarios, the edge cases, and the behavior that only shows up in real implementations.
I'd rather understand one protocol deeply than have shallow familiarity with ten. That's why I spend time on things like YANG model navigation, TI-LFA path computation, and PCEP session mechanics — not just the high-level concepts.
The blog on this site is how I force myself to explain things clearly. If I can't write it down in a way that someone else can follow, I don't fully understand it yet. Documentation also makes it easier to pick up where I left off after a break.
Automation isn't about replacing network engineers — it's about multiplying what a single engineer can do. My goal is to automate the repetitive and error-prone work so that I can focus on the hard design problems.
Certifications matter, but production experience matters more. I value the kind of knowledge that comes from having debugged something at 2am and traced it all the way down to a YANG field in an RPC response.
The networking community has given me a lot through documentation, forums, and open-source tools. Writing about what I'm working on — honestly, including the mistakes — is how I try to give some of that back.