This episode we have a link to send to someone when they moan the Wi-Fi is down 🛜 take a Baker’s Dozen to check in on the Tier 1 Carriers 🍩; get down and dirty with the “W” of Optical Networking at Google 🥽; make sure we don’t skip ISE Upgrade day at the gym 🏋️; let Terramaid make our Terraform diagrams ✍️; see the Business like an LLM would 🤖 and motivate ourselves to do something we don’t want to 😤. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
Poll 🗳️
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NetEng 🔧
IP In Heels is a space where women in tech connect, grow, and lead together, and we’re here for it 💪
Did You Know Your Wi-Fi Works Without Internet? - of course you did, but for your colleagues that don’t, bookmark and pass this on; “The Wi-Fi isn’t down, Sir, actually…” ✌️
A Network Crumb Back Story: A Baker’s Dozen Retrospective is more about Carriers and Telco than doughnuts and baking, but you could learn a thing or two about the Internet DFZ in this one 🍩
Large scale optical switching at Google - AS15169 is a fascinating insight into how Google built it’s own Optical ToR Switches, including pictures of the “W”-shaped lasers and mirrors inside 😲
Redundant VPN with Failover on a Palo NGFW is easy up until the point it isn’t and Tunnels are involved 🚝
The Hidden Threat of Dangling DNS Records explains this often-overlooked risk, especially in the Cloud world where the CNAME shim in between wasn’t ever yours in the first place 📱
The N-1 Rule: Why Smart Engineers Never Skip ISE Versions is somewhat like skipping leg day at the gym; sure it feels good at the time, but your scrawny posture will pay later 🦵
Introducing QUIC Obfuscation for WireGuard shows how the protocol is making its way to the mainstream; it’s no longer IPsec vs SSL-VPN 🔐
Pydantic series covers pretty much everything you could do with knowing about the useful Python library for all things Network Automation and more 📕
Videos, Tools and Papers 🎓⚒️
🏦 Cisco U - Free CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA or CCNP with these free Cisco U courses worth over 100 CE Credits
Cisco U: Managing Cisco Network Operating Systems (CNIOS)
(Course, 37 CE Credits, 37h 15m)Cisco U: Enhancing Cisco Security Solutions with Data Analytics (ECSS)
(Course, 32 CE Credits, 31h 30m)Cisco U: Understanding Cisco Network Automation Essentials (DEVNAE)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 28h 40m)Cisco U: Troubleshooting Cisco Enterprise Networking Solutions (ENTSHRU)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 16h)Cisco U: Introduction to Network Simulations with CML (CMLLAB)
(Course, 6 CE Credits, 8h 30m)
🎓 Network Engineer Learning
Uptime Kuma is an easy-to-use self-hosted monitoring tool
(Tool, GitHub, o11y)Terramaid is a utility for generating Mermaid diagrams from Terraform configs
(Tool, GitHub, Documentation)HN789: How a Global Payments Processor Automates Firewall Changes at Scale
(Podcast, Network Security, 48 mins)Chimera virtual file system for NAS appliances
(Tool, GitHub, Storage)DeepCode: Open Agentic Coding (Paper2Code & Text2Web & Text2Backend)
(Tool, GitHub, AI)
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
🇮🇪 Staff Network Development Engineer @ ServiceNow, Ireland, Dublin
🇨🇦 Network Automation Developer @ Nokia, Canada, Ontario
🇨🇳 Network Engineer @ Corning, China, Shanghai
🇫🇷 Senior Data Center Ethernet Network Engineer @ NVIDIA, France, Remote
🇮🇳 Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ Chevron, India, Bengaluru
🇮🇪 Esports Network Engineer @ Riot Games, Ireland, Dublin
🇮🇪 Senior Access Network IP Engineer @ Vodafone, Ireland, Dublin
🇬🇧 Network Security Engineer @ Meta, UK, London
🇬🇧 Network Engineer @ Wave, UK, Remote
NotEng 🤔
AI is changing the CTO role for the better (?) but we’re not sure about what the CAO (Chief AI Officer) thinks about all of that 🤔
Seeing Business Like a Language Model might help you work out why the LLM is stuck in the same process loop you are about getting Barbara to approve your RFC under the Implement queue already 🤬
MCP vs RAG: A Practical Guide for Data Engineers and AI Builders is so good we may have already featured it, read for a no-fuss guide on how to actually use AI stuff like RAG and MCP in real life 👓
The Struggle for Trust Online probably explains something you knew to be innately true; people online trusted each other more in the AIM and MSN days than they do today; ICQ was right all along 💬
How to Motivate Yourself To Do A Thing You Don’t Want to Do and with no carrot or stick required, some good practical tips to JFDI the thing you really don’t want to 🥕
5 Tiny Phrases Every Engineer Should Use With AI and they don’t end in “off” or “didn’t work” 🎤
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See schedule
London Network Automation Meetup, London, 29 January 2026
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
ESNOG, Barcelona, 30 - 31 October 2025
IETF 124, Montreal, 1 - 7 November 2025, Canada
DENOG 17, Essen, 9 - 11 November 2025
EMEA Arista Cloud Builders, Munich, 13 November 2025
AutoCon 4, Austin, 17 - 21 November 2025
France IX Tour, Paris, 27 November 2025, France
CoNEXT 2025, Hong Kong, 1 - 4 December 2025
Industry 🏭
First Malicious MCP Server Found Stealing Emails in Rogue Postmark-MCP Package was only a matter of time; API + AI = Viiiiiibes man, vibes don’t care too much for security 😎
Optus firewall upgrade behind 13-hour Triple Zero outage covers what happened during a very dark period for Australian Telco trust ☎️
Introducing the new Network Security Hub in Azure to summarise all the constant changes in everything Azure Networking from Azure Firewall to DDoS and more ☁️
AI-powered penetration tool, an attacker’s dream, downloaded 10K times in 2 months which could explain the exponential increase in attacks and outages over the last few months 🛠️
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 💬.