The Hedge

Just about everyone is watching the financial markets, either wondering how much better they can get, or when the AI financing bubble is going to crash. Dough Dawson, from POTs and PANs, joins Tom and Russ to talk about the logic of a coming crash, and consider where engineers should be looking for potential future career fields to weather the storm.

There are many “unsung technologies” in the Internet. While we often think of TCP/IP, various models, Ethernet, and DNS, we don’t often think about the lowly socket interface. What is the history of the socket, and why is it important in the world of the Internet? George Michaelson joins Colin Doyle and Russ White to discuss the history and importance of sockets.

Over time, services like DNS and email have been centralized, leaving the Internet itself much more centralized. In this episode of the Hedge, Doug Jacobson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss centralization and service consolidation.

AI is everywhere. While there are many questions about whether AI is a bubble, the ethics of AI, and the cultural impact of AI, in this episode of the Hedge Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to talk about how network engineers can use AI. Are some use cases better than others? Are there pitfalls network engineers should avoid? Listen in and find out.

It’s time for Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to gather round the hedge and talk about various items of interest. In this roundtable, we consider what we can learn about product development from Bastiat, and the various ins and outs of Parkinson’s Law.

Deploying AI for AI Ops, or even just for general use in your network, is very simple–but we often forget that these kinds of new technologies need to be governed. From privacy through cost, operators need to decide how to govern their AI deployments to control costs, ensure accuracy, measure productivity, and make certain these systems are being used effectively. Colin Cosgrove joins Russ and Tom to look at AI governance.

This episode was published with a link to the wrong audio file. I’ve updated it to the corrected filed.

Strong opinions loosely held? This is probably not as good of an idea as it seems. Instead of producing confidence, it might produce overconfidence. Michael Natkin joins Tom and Russ to discuss the problems with this mantra.

We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.

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You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.

Sometimes we can be so focused on the problems in front of us that we forget the people who are following in our footsteps. Michael McCollum, a new network engineer, joins Tom and Russ to ask questions about life as a network engineer.