Network operators increasingly rely on generic hosts, rather than specialized routers (appliances) to forward traffic. Much of the performance on hosts relies on offloading packets switching and processing to specialized hardware on the network interface card. In this episode of the Hedge, Krzysztof Wróbel and Maciej Rabęda join Russ and Tom to talk about hardware offloading.

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You can find out more about hardware offloading here.

Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration analysis.

How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term “shift left.”

How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-211.mp3

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transcript (machine generated)

Have you ever thought about publishing a book or recording a professional video? It’s not as simple as proposing an idea, doing the work, and becoming famous (or infamous, as the case might be). Eric Chou joins Rick Graziani and Russ to talk about the ins and outs of technical publishing. We are planning a part 2 of this in a few months to cover things we left on the table for later discussion.

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machine-generated transcript

User interface design is notoriously bad for networking gear–but why, and what can we do about it? Frank Seesink joins Tom and Russ to talk about user interface stupidity.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) has been brewing for many years–but how do all these new devices impact your network? Are there new concepts and architectures you need to learn to get a handle on IoT? Jasbir Singh, author of a new book on IoT architecture, joins Tom and Russ for this episode of the Hedge.

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What does it mean to be a network engineer in today’s world of information technology? Phil Gervasi joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of network engineering, and what it’s really like to be in this small corner of information technology today.

As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.

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For this month’s roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and I return to Addresses to Engineering Students by Harrington and Waddell. This book, published in 1912, is a “product of its time,” and hence deserves some trigger warnings. But it is also interesting to see how advice given to engineering students over 100 years ago holds up for today. Have engineering challenges, and the engineering life, changed all that much? What kinds of advice stand the test of time, what kinds do not?

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