An AI walks into a busbar
The Networkers of DC are shocked by the result
This time bootstrap your Network Devices with ZTP 💪; reduce HIP with AI for Firewall Change process 🔥; free two-day workshop on VXLAN as Code 🧑💻; detailed notes on Network Signal Control 🤝; learn how to tune a DWDM optic 🌈; SShiD for covert comms over 802.11 Wi-Fi 🎭; stopping a Culture of Emergencies 🚑; Shell Tricks that actually make life easier 💻 and career decisions if you take AGI seriously 💼. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
Poll 🗳️
Are we covering the NetDevOps and Network Engineering content you want to see? Vote now to shape the Reload in 10 Newsletter to be more relevant to you:
VOXI Mobile 🤙
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NetEng 🔧
Not So Easy ZTP Server: But Hey, It Works! applies a Zero Touch Provisioning approach that actually could scale and work for your Network devices, read on for some bootstrap classics like TFTP, DHCP and Linux bashery 👉
Reducing HIP: This Meeting Could Have Been Code takes you through reducing a Firewall Request from several days to less than a few hours, and most of the work is actually about improving the process for the better rather than spackling with Jira and SNOW tickets; this is what every NetEng process needs to become 🎯
Nautobot - Palo Alto how to keep up with environment? - Part 1 is part of a series looking at how you can integrate Panorama and PAN-OS into your Nautobot (or NetBox, with some API tweaking) Source of Truth and start to enrich the alarm, inventory and general Firewall Management for your own good 👍
VXLAN as Code: Why I Built a Two-Day Workshop Around It is a teaser for a free online 2-day course about implementing VXLAN via IaC and is well worth a go if you’re playing with VXLAN, EVPN, Cisco ACI or even Cisco NDFC and want to get used to the modern approach under the hood 🔧
Virtual WAN Is Not Required For SD-WAN explores Azure vWAN and related concepts in detail, and covers when you can DIY it without vWAN and with a bunch of VPC spanners and IPsec glue, and when you probably should vWAN it instead 🪄
Tuning a DWDM optic. What does it mean? and do you really need a prism cube of light and pack of Crayola to do it properly? Probably not, but err… “Hello? Yeah the SFP slot? Yeah, knackered mate - green crayon is jammed in and won’t come out…” 🌈
How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? do you really need direct IXP Peers anyway? Read on and see what you think 🌐
Notes on Network Signal Congestion Control goes deep on topics like TCP congestion control, BDP, window sizing, Multipath, ECN and has the maths to back it up 🧮
PC Tools - Detecting Wi-Fi Roaming on the Client During Zoom/Teams/WebEx Calls is invaluable if most of the “Wireless is down!” problems at $work actually smell a lot more like “teams.exe sucks”, Wi-Fi is nearly always an End User Device problem 🛜
Book Club 📚
AI Networking Cookbook by Eric Chou
Full Stack Network Automation by Shahzad Qadir
DDoS: Understanding Real-Life Attacks and Mitigation Strategies by Stefan Behte
Network Engineer Toolkit - 22 Production Templates for ISP & Data Center Engineers
Training 🎓
🏦 Cisco U CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA (40 CE Credits) or CCNP (80 CE Credits) with these free Cisco U courses using Continuing Education (CE) credits:
Cisco AI Technical Practitioner (AITECH)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 15h 30m)Cisco AI Business Practitioner (AIBIZ)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 16h 30m)Understanding Cisco Network Automation Essentials (DEVNAE)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 29h)Advanced Automation with Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLAPI)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 8h)Introduction to Network Simulations with Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLLAB)
(Course, 6 CE Credits, 8h 30m)Administering Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLADM)
(Course, 5 CE Credits, 4h 30m)
🪚 Tools
SShiD: Covert Communication via SSID Beacons
(Wireless, Hacking, 802.11)Google Stitch: Frontend (Web/Mobile App) Vibe Mocks
(HTML, Mobile, Vibe Coding)Codeberg: GitHub alternative
(DevOps, Git, GitLab)
🎓 Learning
POV: Your Life as Every Tech Company Rank
(Video, 20 mins, Career)Modular Micro-Reactors - The Future of Nuclear Energy [for Data Centers]?
(Video, 20 mins, Power)CS615 - System Administration
(Course, 13 weeks, SRE)
Hiring 💼
📢 The Reload in 10 Jobs Board is here 🥳, with a hand-picked selection of awesome Network Engineering, NetDevOps and Network Automation jobs.
It’s also free to list a job if you’re hiring and want to let us know 👂
🔥 (just some of) This week’s Hot Hirings
🇮🇪 Lead SRE Network Engineer @ Mastercard, Ireland, Dublin
🇬🇧 Senior NetOps Engineer @ Bumble, UK, London
🇺🇸 Network Security Engineering Manager @ Barclays, USA, Whippany, NJ
🇵🇹 Senior NetDevOps Engineer @ Expleo Group, Portugal, Porto
🇮🇳 Network Engineer @ Verizon, India, Telangana
…and over 230 more jobs at the Reload in 10 Network Engineer Jobs Board
NotEng 🤔
Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity) has some absolute solid gold, especially
resetafter you accidentallycat’d the binary file and not the log file for it… 😔Avoiding a Culture of Emergencies hits hard especially if you’ve worked in this chaotic culture where everybody seems to be turning 9-5 into 999 (or 911 for our American cousins) all the damn time 🚨
Context Hub is a way of version controlling, managing and feeding your documentation (maybe Network Docs, HLD, LLD, Standards…) into your AI LLM of choice to start automating some of the documentation toil out of your life ✍️
From Engineer to Architect - It’s much more than pretty diagrams because learning how draw.io works is only a small part of the transition from the what to the why in the Network landscape sky ⭐️
Why working harder stops working because at some level the next step isn’t known to the person paying you, and that’s the point - you’re paid to figure it out, not to draw it out 🤔
Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase lets you slice your time “in half” in a world of AI-generated code and time-deprived living 👀
Career Decisions If You Take AGI Seriously goes down both paths of what might happen if AGI comes true, with practical advice either side and a mental model to work out where we are in that hype cycle, if at all 🔖
Self-taught people often don’t realize it, but psychology says the way they solve problems is fundamentally different from most people reminds us that learning how to code HTML in FrontPage Express was and always remains, a bad, bad move 🥸
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See schedule
Network Automation Community Exchange, London, 21 April 2026
NL Network Automation Meetup, Amsterdam, 13 May 2026
CPH Network Meetup, Copenhagen, 2 October 2026
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
TORNOG, Toronto, 13 April 2026
FutureNet World 2026, London, 21 - 22 April 2026
SwiNOG, Geneva, 28 April 2026
AI Networking Summit, Dallas, 13 - 14 May 2026
RIPE 92, Edinburgh, 18 - 22 May 2026
Cisco Live USA, Las Vegas, 31 May - 4 June 2026
AutoCon 5, Munich, 8 - 12 June 2026
NetUK 3, London, 6 - 7 July 2026
AusNOG 2026, Brisbane, 3 - 4 September 2026
BalticNOG 2026, Riga, 23 - 24 September 2026
AI Networking Summit, New York, 28 - 29 October, 2026
Cisco Live APJC, Melbourne, 9 - 12 November 2026
Industry 🏭
AI promised supreme productivity, but it’s actually straining workloads for employees - time spent emailing has doubled, and focused work sessions fell by 9% could definitely never have been predicted by those of us who have worked for one of the other eleven billion non-San Francisco-area Tech Companies 😒
ProbeNet Live: Run Network Measurements from 150+ Countries from the brilliant people at IPinfo to track geolocation changes, privacy detection, IP stability and more 👏
Airtel traffic to Europe faces intermittent disruptions following cable cuts is probably telling you something you may already have guessed thanks to a little ongoing event in the Middle East 😢
The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis managed to spook the Markets and make stock prices actually change, regardless of what you think about it’s view on a future with AI everywhere 😦
User accidentally gains control of over 6,700 robot vacuums while tinkering with their own device to enable control with a PlayStation controller - security flaw reveals floor plans and live video feeds but luckily doesn’t affect old Henry Hoover, clearly the original - and best - vacuum cleaner available today (cheque’s in the post, Numatic, right?) 🧹
That’s all for this week, but if you have any tip-offs, blogs, events or job posts you’d like us to feature then please feel free to let us know at newsletter@reloadin.net 📮 and we’ll see if we can add them in 💬.