Reflections on Cisco Live and Sharkfest 2014
In May/June, I had the opportunity to attend both Cisco Live and Sharkfest. This was an excellent opportunity to learn new (at least to me) technologies and most importantly to meet the engineers that use Cisco and Wireshark. I had an amazing time at both, and would highly recommend either of these conferences to anyone who is excited about Cisco or Wireshark. They are very different conferences though, so if you only have the opportunity to attend one, I would like to provide my experience to help make your decision. If your budget/time allows for it, you should attend both.
Cisco Live was the first of the two and was May 18th – 22nd. The 18th was a Sunday and as the conference goes, Sunday was a pretty light day. Unless you paid for a premium training package, there were very few sessions that day and none of them were particularly technical. I was able to attend an EWN (Empowered Women’s Network) presentation that was aimed at increasing the female presence in STEM and particularly IT. It was a good session, and had a lot of really great speakers like Amy Lewis (@commsninja). My undergrad was highly geared towards social justice, so this session was right up my alley. After Sunday, the sessions and keynotes were jam-packed. I ended up taking a shotgun blast of sessions, including EIGRP, SDN, VoIP, DataCenter, DMVPN, and MPLS. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken sessions I was less familiar with. The MPLS and DMVPN in particular were pretty difficult to sit through after listening to CBT Nuggets on the topics a couple of times and then receiving world class instruction from Marko Milivojevic (@icemarkom) and Narbik Kocharians (@narbik).
Cisco also has two other offerings that really appealed to me: world of solutions and meet the engineer. The world of solutions was huge, but the part I really enjoyed was the section where there are a bunch of whiteboards with CCIEs in front of them. If you have spent even 5 minutes with me than you know how much I LOVE whiteboards. I spent a good amount of time walking around talking to the CCIEs, drawing ways I have setup networks and received a fresh perspective on how other (much more qualified) people approach similar problems.
Meet the engineer is a one-on-one style sit-down with senior Cisco engineers. One of my co-workers and I sat down with Donnie Savage, the EIGRP lead and talked about some of the new enhancements to EIGRP and how they could make Marine Corps configurations easier. It was pretty amazing to get the opportunity to sit down with such a high level engineer and get the chance to have him evaluate the way we were doing business and recommend changes. This particular experience was more geared towards the future than working changes to our current architecture. It was a pretty amazing opportunity.
Probably the most beneficial to me were the social media meet-ups. I got the chance to meet all the people I have “known” throughout the internet and put a real face to the name. All of the social events were top notch, and the community was very accessible, nice, and exceptionally intelligent.
Sharkfest ran June 16 – 20 and was a much smaller conference in sheer numbers, but every bit impressive when you consider the quality of attendees and speakers. The 16th, a Monday, is reserved for “newbies” (or other events you have paid for or are attending by invite). I attended a WCNA bootcamp, so much of that session was old hat for me, but I still sat in for a good bit of it. The newbie day and the different tracks offered (beginner, intermediate, advanced) really make this conference accessible to nearly anyone with any level of experience.
Sharkfest did not have near the social (media) presence that Cisco Live did, but the social events put on were very good and entertaining. Nearly everyone came to the after-conference event held every night, which really worked out well for me because I did not come to Sharkfest with anyone and knew very few people in attendance before going. It was really nice to have a chance to speak to the presenters in the evening sessions, which is something I did not get the opportunity to do at Cisco Live.
The community that has formed around Wireshark is very interesting and inviting. At Cisco Live, it seemed that like the other attendees were pretty much like me (in terms of professional duties and responsibilities), which did not seem to be the case at SharkFest. You would think this would make it much more difficult to fit in and interact with the other attendees and presenters, but it wasn’t at all. I genuinely enjoyed meeting all the attendees and presenters and hearing about how they use Wireshark and their experiences. Much like some of my twitter friends at Cisco Live, a lot of SharkFest people went out of there way to make the experience enjoyable and to introduce you around the community.
One of the benefits of it being a much smaller conference is that you can meet everyone if you would like to. I met too many individuals to list out, but I’ve got to admit it was really cool getting to have several conversations with Gerald Combs (the inventor of Wireshark) and I even got a chance to have a troubleshooting chat with Vint Cerf. The nerd meter was definitely pegged and I was able to learn a whole lot in the process.
Both conferences were amazing opportunities and I will be doing everything I can do to attend both in the future. If you don’t mind a big conference and want an incredibly large selection of presentations to attend Cisco Live would probably be for you. If you are looking for a smaller conference and have a passion for Wireshark, you cannot go wrong attending SharkFest.