John Doak
I cut my teeth in networking at LucasArts after I asked the Director of IT what my next career step was. He made me a network engineer on the spot and said to go buy a Cisco book and configure a router for a new T1 we just got. There is nothing quite like staring at a box in a closet, hoping that the Cisco book you have placed on top of your head will give you knowledge via osmosis. I spent the next several years there automating my way out of doing work (portals that reset network MAC security parameters, moved ports to new VLANs, auto-balanced inbound BGP traffic using route maps, and so on).
I moved from there to Google, where I spent the bulk of my time automating the vendor backbone known as Backend Backbone (B2). I wrote the first autonomous services that programmed the various routers. Then, I built the...
