Study Tactics – Session 3 (with JT)
Hello everyone! Welcome to another interesting episode. Today, I will be introducing a new guest popular known by his initials, JT.
JT, is one interesting engineer I have had an opportunity of connecting intimately with along my study journey. He currently holds the CCIE Routing & Switching, and he is also a Pythonista . With over 20 years of experience in IT, he is currently knee-deep into the game. He is also from the Middle Tennessee, USA.
Even though JT hasn’t been studying for a certification in the last 10 years, he has been grinding and learning new technologies. There is a lot to learn from someone with this kind of experience.
In my first experience with Dev Net, you were studying for the exam even when the exam material wasn’t even out. It came as a shock to me back then?
JT: Nah, I was never studying for the exam. I’ve casually been learning network automation for a few years now.
Interesting. It makes sense, Cisco isn’t the only vendor out there.
Sure, but almost every vendor has certs. A lot of people have no interest unless their employer is funding it, or they’re trying to improve their resume.
The second option makes sense if they still want to be relevant. But, the first option is a surprising reality for me.
Why take cert exams if you have experience with technology?
Hmmm. Though, I don’t have any experience yet. But I am curious to know how people who have field experience with a technology learn bulky commands and concepts, even though they aren’t studying for the exam.
Reading documentation. Deployment guides and such.
Oh! Deployment guides. This is the first time I am reading that such exist.Nice!
Back in the day, documentation was how you studied for certs. You kids have it easy now
LOL
So many resources.
So back then, to study for a cert, the vendor provide exam topics then you guys look them up in documentations?
Pretty much. There were some books available.
Oh! Like the Todd Lammle CCNA books of today?
Yup, there have been lots of Cisco Press books over the years. But even today, it takes a lot of different books to study for higher-level certs.
Oh! Different Cisco Press books touching different areas, yeah. For the CCIE, I see folks reading one TCP/IP book.
Yea those 2 books have been around since before I studied.
Oh! I wonder how it’s still valid. Fundamentals, right?
TCP/IP hasn’t changed a lot
True!
What tactics were you using to study these resources so you can master them, for example, documentations?
Reading and labbing. Lots of it.
What methods do you use when reading?
Nothing special.. just read. I’m bad at note-taking.
Nice! So, it’s more like, read one concept, lab it over and over again?
Yea, it helps to reinforce a concept through multiple methods. Read about it. Listen about it. Watch someone do it. Try it yourself. Labbing always helped me the most. I learn from hands-on.
Interesting
Build something. Break it. Fix it. Change it.
If you can reliably break something in different ways and know how to fix it you’ve gone a long way in understanding how it works.
Nice, what do you mean when you say “Listen about it”?
Podcasts, youtube, anything audio.
Reading, hearing and typing involve different senses so they reinforce each other more than just reading the same concepts over and over.
Alright.
What approaches do you use to break something (a lab environment)?
Hard to generalize that.
Understand the technology enough that you know how to make it not work.
Create a bridging loop through spanning-tree misconfiguration.
Get EIGRP stuck in active. Create scenarios where OSPF cannot form neighbor relationships.
Look at debug outputs and show commands before and after it’s broken to understand what it should and shouldn’t look like.
Nice!
JT, our conversation tonight is so good, as always!! I had a great time man.
no problem!
To get involved in an interesting IT conversation, go check out JT’s Twitter handle
Check out JT’s Github account too