Staying updated as a network engineer

When you work in IT, you need to stay updated. It’s not one of those jobs where you get
an education and then you are fully learned and can stop reading. To stay updated you
need to keep an eye on what’s going on in the industry and read about new technologies.

Here are some of the things I do to stay updated:

Subscribe to mailing lists:

• Subscribe to Cisco-NSP – It’s the best list for anything Cisco related
• Subscribe to Juniper-NSP – I’m not on this but if you work with Juniper you should be
• Subscribe to NANOG – It’s a list for North America but it’s still interesting even if you are in Europe. You will know about major issues in NA and other interesting things.

NANOG also has meetings where they do presentations. You can find a lot of interesting
things in many different areas like DNS, BGP and development of 100GE.

Cisco has several conferences every year called Cisco Live. You can access all the
presentations at no cost.
Although it is focused on Cisco products you can find out a lot what is going on in
the industry.

RIPE also has meetings where you can find information on BGP, IPv6, updates from different Internet exchanges and a lot more. It’s a really nice resource.

If you want to really get technical or get involved in developing existing or new protocols then
you should check out the IETF working groups. There are working groups for OSPF, ISIS, BFD, LISP etc. Generally you subscribe to a mailing list. You can just listen in if you want to hear what is coming or you can try to be active yourself.

Another resource that should not be neglected is Twitter. It is very noisy but you can find a lot of great people here.
You can find a lot of great network engineers and old timers like Scott Morris, Ivan Pepelnjak,
Brian Dennis etc. Being able to communicate with guys like this is great.

Besides this I also check some forums and blogs of course. I hope you found some new good
resources to stay updated as a network engineer.