How I got started in this field was a little bit different. I was pretty young, right out of high school and then at the tying this was in the late nineties and actually you're 2000 right up to the year 2000 started. I got interested in computers and some of the fields that were taken of the time and I went the certification route. I wasn't in college at the time, I eventually went and got my degree, but my original start in there was just to go and get a bunch certifications. I didn't go to take some classes through not, like a big credit or the university or anything. My first job was working for Cisco TAC through the Convergys and that was back in the year 2000 and started getting actual experience with setting up routers and switches and building networks. I'm a network engineer I build networks and the underlying network infrastructure that large businesses, small businesses used to connect to the Internet. I started to support the Cisco TAC and doing some things there then after about a year of doing that, the Salt Lake 2002 Olympics was coming along and they were starting to build infrastructure in Utah in 2001. I was lucky to get on there originally as a volunteer and then they hired me before the actual games so that was the first real career job that wasn't a call center anymore. I was actually out there building networks. I was up in a Deer Valley and Park City building. The network infrastructure to support things like the snowboarding and the slalom and Ariel games and connecting the fiber optics and putting configurations on switches and making sure things could connect. Making sure the Saco timing equipment was connecting to the network properly, making sure that broadcast booths had enough connectivity. From there I've been able to move forward and get other jobs. The Olympics job wasn't permanent but that was kind of where it went from there so that was the beginning.

At Amazon, I'm a senior network engineer. The daily responsibilities are lots of meetings and a lot of interfacing with our partners. Since we build the underlying infrastructure for all of Amazon, I worked in the past on data center infrastructure and now I work more on fulfillment center infrastructure. There's a lot of interactions with various IT personnel in the actual fulfillment centers and Project manager, software development teams they write automation for the network. A lot of meetings and making sure we're all in sync on what we're doing. My core job is really the actual design of the underlying infrastructure. So I spent a lot of time making diagrams the whiteboarding with other engineers, design reviews, typing up documents that explain how the network design works, things like IP addressing and submitting and how links connect to each other. That speeds the type of routers, the type of operating systems that are used between those. Those were all big parts of what I'mdoing on a daily basis and occasionally when there's a network problem, I will be paged or someone will ping me on the internal system. I have to jump on and try to troubleshoot the problem, so there's a fair amount of that operational work as well, but mostly it's just designing and building the infrastructure. Work hours can be as many as 60 or so, but I probably average about 45 to 50 hours a week. When things were really tough and we have tight deadlines, I might go 80 hours if I have to deliver a product that has a tight timeline for customer. My sound average It's 45 to 50 hours a week. I'm not like a weekly traveler but I probably travel at an average of five or six times a year. I travel quite a bit to Seattle. I'm based in Austin so I go to Seattle, which is the headquarters. There's a lot of teams are I'd be with regularly also travel internationally quite a bit. Last year I went to Prague to meet some teens there before that, I was in India for a few weeks. I've been to Dublin, Ireland a couple of times and Romania pretty much wherever we have teams.

As a network engineer, diagrams are a big part of what I do. I'm a Mac user, so I use a lot of OmniGraffle which is kind of like Microsoft Visio, I do use Microsoft Visio as well. I haven't used that in a long time because I'm more Mac user now. As far as programming languages use a lot of pythons and a lot of shell scripting bash between those two, that pretty much covers it. In the world of network engineering, python is the standard language. There's a lot of modules and things that people have written out there in the open-source world that you can use and save yourself literally hundreds and thousands of hours of going and writing code yourself. Python is sort of the language that network engineers are standardized on. If you want to create an automation interface with a router or a network device to add an IP address to it, or change a villain or turn on a port or whatever you might want to do, there's a module out there and somebody's already written and you can go and pull it in with Python, and it works pretty well. That's definitely a big one. Then, of course, there's a lot of SSH, a lot of terminals, a lot of connecting into devices with terminal and various things like that.