E84 - Dmitry Ashmarin at Cisco

On this episode of The Route to Networking, our Network & Security Consultant Jake Brown was joined by Dmitriy Ashmarin, the Site Reliability Engineer at Cisco. Dmitriy talks to us about his journey into the world of Networking and how and why he decided to go down the Programming route.

Dmitriy started out with a curiosity for programming and always found it an attractive area but for a long time, he found it difficult to get started by himself. His first attempt to learn was in 2012 which didn’t go so well. It wasn’t until 2018 that he had a turning point and started to learn Python and then applied those skills to his work.

He received some great advice from one of his senior friends, who said that in order to be a programmer, you just have to program. The most important thing about programming is you need to find some projects for yourself to work on. Once you have something that energises you, you can spend a lot of time making it better and little by little you will become a skilled programmer.

One thing he has learnt throughout his career he thinks everything needs to know is all Network Engineers should know how to program. This is where the industry is going and was going to see more demand for these skills in the future. We need network engineers who know how to code, we need network engineers that can automate repetitive tasks using scripting tools and languages.

When going into any industry, there is always a chance you expect it to be completely different to what it is. For Dmitriy, his expectations vs. reality were not massively different, this was down to his research into the industry and the role he was applying for. For anyone who wants to have the smoothest transition possible, do your research! This will make the gap between expectations and reality a lot smaller.

One of the projects he’s working on is the Business Process Automation Product. This allows him to automate different business processes and defines scenarios on how you can perform certain tasks. His role in this project is to make sure the platform is up, running, and stable and what it does is it notifies the engineers if anything goes wrong.

With the industry moving at a rapid pace and the technology evolving every day, it’s hard to tell how the industry is going to change due to the technology growing and improving. Dmitriy thinks there will be more cloud-based applications and more controlled-based networks. What we see now is just the beginning, in the future, there will be more products to orchestrate. Not only that but it’ll simplify tasks for organisations and engineers will be able to focus on multiple projects at one time and more time will be spent learning.

For anyone who’s considering a career in the industry, don’t hold back, just try it! Check with your feelings and ask yourself a multitude of questions. How do you feel about it? Does it give you energy? Is it something you love doing every day? If your answer is yes, then go for it. Without trying something you will never know if something is meant for you or not.

Tune in now to hear the listeners’ favourite… The quick-fire round!