David Gee

David Gee is a Director of Product Management at Juniper Networks. He blogs at dave.dev, previously ipengineer.net. He is the creator of the JUNOS Terraform Automation Framework (JTAF), among other things. Twitter: @davedotdev

If you’ve built knowledge in the network space, chances are you’ve purchased and inhaled knowledge from Cisco Press books. These books, for the most part, are well structured and provide knowledge that opens up like a flower. For those looking to build automation knowledge, good sources of knowledge that are multi-vendor-friendly are hard to come by. The industry itself is fairly immature, and network engineers developing software skills vertically in the networking silo tend to make very questionable decisions. This isn’t the fault of the network automation engineer but is due to a lack of discipline that’s present in the industry. In plain-old networking, if you configure BGP badly, a session might not come up. If you...