LIU001: Growing Pains

Kevin Nanns (0:02 - 0:33) Welcome to Life in Uptime, the show where we talk with the people behind the networks that keep our world connected. I'm Kevin, joined by Alexis, and every week we sit down with the engineers, leaders, and builders in tech to uncover the stories behind their careers. How they started, what they've learned, and where they're headed next. Our goal is simple, to help you see how far tech can take you, no matter where you start from. I feel like I'm really channeling my announcer or game show host.

Alexis Bertholf (0:33 - 0:41) You've got a great radio voice. I gotta say guys, this week we don't have a guest, it's actually just Kevin and I.

Kevin Nanns (0:42 - 0:46) Yeah, this is episode 0.5. Half episode.

Alexis Bertholf (0:47 - 1:03) We just really wanted to come on here and have a little chat about why we're doing this. I feel like we've teased the fact that we're launching a podcast for quite a while now, but we haven't actually talked about why we decided to launch a podcast, have we?

Kevin Nanns (1:04 - 1:25) No, and it's one of those things where we're very public in our social medias, but we're not very public in what we're doing behind the scenes. And this is a great opportunity for us to have direct access to the audience, people who are listening to us, and get a little behind the scenes action of, we don't know what the hell we're doing.

Alexis Bertholf (1:27 - 1:58) Well, not only that, but we get a lot of questions from you guys. I mean, I probably get 20 to 50 DMs on a daily basis, and it's become slightly outside of the limits of human nature for me to physically respond to every comment, question, DM. And I know Kevin's been feeling the same way, and so we were brainstorming some ideas that we could continue to help all of you, and one of them was launching this podcast.

Kevin Nanns (1:59 - 2:34) Yeah, I do some AMAs, and I know that you reach out and you DM and all that kind of stuff, but that helps very few people all at once. Even my Instagram stories where I'm doing a Q&A, those only stay up for 24 hours and only get 1,000 views out of the 300,000 followers that I have. It's not really productive for the vast majority, so this is a way that we can kind of shotgun blast information to the masses, and it stays here.

So if you have a question, we can say, oh, go back to episode three of this podcast, and we talk about that subject directly.

Alexis Bertholf (2:34 - 3:27) Well, and not only that, I mean, Kevin and I are not, we're very public, but we are not the end-all be-all by any means when it comes to networking knowledge or the industry. But obviously, because we've grown these platforms over the past two years, we've got a big network either of other engineers, of professional mentors, of contacts within the industry, whether they're organizations like NANOG or the NUGS or the network user groups or vendors or training programs or universities offering training programs. We have all of these people that reach out to us with resources and stories and careers and tidbits and pieces of advice, and we thought that this would be a great way to share some of that expertise, those resources, and be able to widespread them.

Kevin Nanns (3:27 - 3:53) Yeah, I feel like I'm an average network engineer. I am nothing special. I don't have my CCIE. I haven't been working for vendors and Cisco and been deep into whatever technology. I'm just an average dude who does this nine to five, and on the side, I'm very, very public. And if I could bring that public part to the average network engineer, that's the only difference between me and a normal engineer, an average person, is that I'm more public.

Alexis Bertholf (3:53 - 3:56) At least you can claim to have been a network engineer, Kevin.

Kevin Nanns (3:57 - 4:24) Well, that's another topic where I want to talk about that too, where I think we make a good combo. I get asked the question, why do I associate myself with you? I'm not even kidding. I've gotten that question. Because you're not the typical network engineer, especially now that you've moved on to Megaport and you're doing a lot of cloud stuff and say words that I don't even understand. Half your videos, I do not understand anymore. I'm sorry.

Alexis Bertholf (4:24 - 4:25) It's okay.

Kevin Nanns (4:25 - 5:15) You're dealing with the technology that I don't deal with. But I get that question. So why are you two so intertwined? And what I find interesting is that you are an SE. You've had a completely different upbringing into networking than I have. So you have a completely different perspective of a lot of things than I do, one that I couldn't get on my own. With my experience and the people that I know, I could not get your perspective. So having someone who's completely different than you, I mean, we could not probably get anywhere opposite. I'm like this 40-year-old old dude with kids who's worked his way up through network engineering. And you're the complete opposite. You're a young female who worked her way up through aerospace engineering and worked for a vendor as her first job. Our paths are completely different.

Alexis Bertholf (5:15 - 6:08) I think it just goes to show there's no right way to take your career. And that's also something that we're hoping to explore a bit with the guests that we're bringing on this podcast. Because we get asked all the time, what certification should I take? What should my first job be? I want to apply to this, to do this, to do this. And my eventual goal is to be a senior principal solutions engineer at XYZ Company.

And there's no right way to get there. It's just your way. And Kevin and I, again, our paths are not the end-all be-all. You don't have to follow someone's exact roadmap to get to where they are. But it is good to know what options you have within the industry and kind of what doors they'll open up and where they could take you.

Kevin Nanns (6:09 - 6:21) Yeah, the classic answer is it depends. Every single answer is going to be individually tailored. There is no general step one, two, three, and four, and then you'll become a principal engineer somewhere.

Alexis Bertholf (6:22 - 6:39) No, but I think the other thing that's interesting, and Kevin and I were talking about this right before we hit record, is that when you look at our social media, we've been doing this for two and a half years. And saying we talk internally sounds weird because we don't work at the same company.

Kevin Nanns (6:39 - 6:45) It is work, though. It does feel like work. It feels a little bit like work. We have a small business here of social media.

Alexis Bertholf (6:46 - 7:18) But we'll look at TikToks that we posted a year ago, two years ago, and be like, so cringy. Oh my God, do you remember where we started? This is crazy.

And it's grown so much that if you have recently started following us or you're seeing our content now, we are very practiced at what our TikTok and our Instagram and what we put out on LinkedIn, right? All of that is pretty well set and defined. But this podcast, man, we're new at this. This is brand new. This is uncharted territory.

Kevin Nanns (7:19 - 7:33) Yeah, our first episode. So this is not the first episode we've recorded. This is actually the third or fourth episode. Third, I think, now. And what we've decided is that we suck at this. We're not very good at this at all. And it's funny.

Alexis Bertholf (7:34 - 7:45) Hopefully, when we put out the first couple episodes, the editors do a really good job of editing.

Kevin Nanns (7:45 - 8:06) If you listen to those after this and go, oh, it's not that bad. It's because of editing. The guests were amazing. We have some amazing guests lined up. These people are heavy hitters in the industry. These people are very, very insightful and are leaders in what they do. These guests are amazing. It's us. That's the problem.

Alexis Bertholf (8:07 - 8:23) Yes. Interviewing has been quite a bit more difficult than we anticipated. What was I going to say? My eye keeps watering. Hang on. Give me like 30 seconds. Hang on. Just stay there.

Kevin Nanns (8:24 - 8:28) Should I leave this part in? This is what I mean by us not being great at this.

Alexis Bertholf (8:28 - 8:34) It's only this one. No, I can't hear you. I don't have headphones in. It's only one of my eyes, too. It's not both of them.

Kevin Nanns (8:35) Just wear a patch.

Alexis Bertholf (8:36 - 8:48) Okay, we're good. Naturally. What else did we want to talk about? If we keep this in the episode, this is what we mean. We're new at this.

Kevin Nanns (8:48 - 9:08) That's what I was saying while you were gone. I was like, if this is still in here, this is what I mean by us being terrible. It's all over the place. Alexis is using literally an old school Apple headphone microphone. The old school ones that were wired. During the episode, you can hear her rubbing her shirt and all this other stuff.

Alexis Bertholf (9:09 - 9:33) Right now, I got a DJI Osmo to travel with so that when we take videos. When we do videos for the podcast, I wanted something nicer than the camera that's on my Mac. I don't have a stand for it. It's propped up on a toaster behind my computer. We're doing our best. We're doing our best.

Kevin Nanns (9:34) It's fun.

Alexis Bertholf (9:35 - 10:01) It's great. It's good memories. It just goes to show when you're trying to get started, you got to just start. We're trying to remind ourselves. This is something that's hard for us because our standards right now are up here from all the content we've created. We're trying to remind ourselves we're new at this too. If you guys are here with us, you're about to go on a journey. Not just a career journey, also a podcast journey.

Kevin Nanns (10:01 - 10:35) Podcast journey. I think it's cool. It's good for us. The way I approach things is the engineering way where I come up with my best idea how it's going to go. Then I try to implement it. If something breaks, something doesn't work, then I go, okay, that didn't work. Start over. Take the stuff that did work. Take out the stuff that didn't work and try something new. That's basically what we're doing this podcast. Each episode, we're going to evolve. We'll get a little bit better, hopefully. Take some stuff out that doesn't work. Basically, what I'm saying is stick with us. Don't listen to one episode and go, this is trash.

I'm never listening to this again.

Alexis Bertholf (10:35 - 10:40) Please listen to a couple of them before you judge us too much.

Kevin Nanns (10:41 - 10:52) We'll be improving as we go. Hopefully, Alexis and I as hosts will be improving because right now we talk over each other. We're clamoring for air time.

We fight. You can't see it on the screen.

Alexis Bertholf (10:52 - 11:35) I wouldn't say that. I would say some of the issues have come from me being in Europe and my Airbnb Wi-Fi, which is questionable. Sometimes the bandwidth is good enough for me to turn my video on and sometimes it's not. We're trying to figure out, can we use hand signals to not talk over each other? We're not really sure. Like Kevin was saying, if you guys have questions or ideas or things that you would like to see, we're really putting this together for you, for the industry to create an on-demand resource.

If you have specific questions, topics, career advice, anything like that that you want us to cover, just let us know in the comments or on social media.

Kevin Nanns (11:36 - 11:57) Ideally, we're going to have a lot of guests. But also, I want to have a couple episodes where it's just Alexis and I talking about a certain topic or a certain question that we get asked over and over again because we do have very different perspectives. I'm an old school network engineer who's come up a certain way, and Alexis was gifted this career.

Alexis Bertholf (11:59 - 12:01) Raised on Meraki in Ubiquity.

Kevin Nanns (12:01 - 12:02) She was just...

Alexis Bertholf (12:02 - 12:07) And I took my CCNP in COVID with limited hands-on experience.

Kevin Nanns (12:07 - 12:24) So different. Literally, I say it all the time, but we're opposites. We're complete opposites. So I think it'll be really cool for us to talk about certain topics because we have very different perspectives. So I like to mix that in every once in a while. We'll see how it goes and working with scheduling and stuff. But I think it'll be fun.

Alexis Bertholf (12:25 - 13:45) Oh, I think the other thing, I don't know if this is the last thing, but another thing, we had a couple questions. We're hosting this on the Packet Pushers Network, which to me was a very intentional decision. This was an idea that I had kind of kicked around for a couple months, but especially working full time at Megaport, creating content full time with the travel and the events and all of the things, I didn't really have the bandwidth to put out a podcast on my own. There was just no way I was going to be able to do something and have it be a good quality product. A good quality product at the end of the day. And so hosting it with Packet Pushers made a lot of sense because we talk a lot. Kevin and I talk a lot about the community, community engagement, supporting the technical community. But Packet Pushers has a whole suite of technical podcasts. I think there's like 10 or 12 different shows that all deal with technology, with networking, with the industry. And we really wanted to support other creators and band together. And if we can help you guys discover another show like that where you can learn something or meet someone new or find something that you like, we thought it would be a great way to do that.

Kevin Nanns (13:46 - 14:29) Yeah, I mean, that's how I basically started listening to the podcast where you join. You have one podcast that kind of introduces you to the area. And then with Packet Pushers, there's wireless. There's Heavy Networking. There's security. There's operations. Like there's so many different avenues you can go down that if you're new to networking, if you're new to technology and you discover one of the other podcasts in the network, maybe it's ours. You can then pivot and not stop listening to ours, but also listen to when you have time, another area of interest and see if that's something that you might enjoy. Hearing some industry professionals talk about it will give you a great insight onto something that that's something that you would enjoy doing in the future or want to specialize in or something like that.

Alexis Bertholf (14:29 - 15:01) Yeah, I mean, they've they've got everything from basic networking. I think it's called N Is For Networking to automation experts. Really anything you could think of. Cloud. Of course, there's cloud. There has to be cloud now. There's freaking cloud. But I think that's everything that we wanted to cover. So thank you for joining us on our first ever episode of Life in Uptime. And we'll see you next time. Bye.

Kevin Nanns (15:05 - 15:27) Why was that so awkward? Why did that feel awkward? We're going to leave that part. We're going to leave this part in. If you were listening in the podcast and you felt awkward, well, it's because it was. It was very awkward. Okay. Catch you in the episode or catch the next episode. I don't know. This has been Life in Uptime. Finger guns.