Oft-asked question that doesn't have a right answer. We discuss non-convential answers that career coaches or self-help twaddle won't give you.

On today's Network Break, Greg Ferro wishes Ethernet an unhappy birthday, HPE and BT want to manage your LAN, TSMC brings in Taiwanese workers to build new fabs in Arizona, Nokia touts new Fixed Wireless Access milestones, and more IT news.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, we explore the concept of sovereign clouds with sponsor VMware. Sovereign clouds provide the agility and scale of the cloud while ensuring data resides in a specific country or geography and meets area requirements for security and privacy. We speak with Tietoevry, one of the first VMware partners to offer major sovereign cloud solutions for its Nordic clients.

Certifications are a part of life in IT. On today's Heavy Networking we explore preparation strategies with guest Mary Fasang. Her certs run the gamut from CompTIA to MCSE to the CCNP, as well as the PMP and ITIL certs. How should you prepare for a cert in 2023 when there’s so much content, so many training options, as well as home labbing available? How do you handle failure? Which certs have been the hardest? What study materials have proved helpful? Mary shares her strategies.

Today we talk about Large Language Models (LLMs) and writing products and applications that use LLMs. Our guest is Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb makes an observability tool for site reliability engineers, and Carter worked on a project called Query Assistant that helps Honeycomb users get answers to questions about how to use the product and get insights from it. We discuss taking natural language input and turning it into outputs to help SREs do their jobs.

This bonus episode of Network Break discusses a new free tier of Prosimo's multi-cloud networking offering, the latest ThousandEyes acquisition, new SEC problems for SolarWinds, and a million-dollar refrigerator.

Packet-level fundamentals are essential for network engineers to be able to diagnose and solve network and application problems. On today's Heavy Networking, we dive into the transport layer and packets with packet analysis expert and instructor Chris Greer.

In this episode, Michael catches up with Anton Smith, Head Of Product at Spectro Cloud. This episode goes outside of the standard engineering conversation and into a conversation of why it makes sense for Technical Product Managers (TPMs) to not only get a certification like the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), but why staying technical as a TPM in the Kubernetes space helps you with your job.

Today's IPv6 Buzz podcast gets into IPv6 architecture and subnetting including how geography fits into IPv6 subnetting, minimum allocation sizes from the RIR to end-users, whether current RIR policies will provide sufficient address space for a future-proof IPv6 architecture, and more. Our guest is Daryll Swer.

Going from a tech role to manager is more than just a new gig---it's a full-blown career change. On today's Day Two Cloud we talk with management coach Steve Dwire about a manager's primary responsibilities, what new managers usually get wrong, management education vs. experience, and how to get better at the job. This episode goes places we didn't expect, so come along for the ride.