Last night a podcast saved my life

2020 was an emotional hell in our home.

Covid-19 sent our small children home from school and our little ones (3 and 5) were suddenly home during the days while my wife and I tried to work from our home offices. We worked from home successfully and productively for years, in part because the kids were away at school every day. With them home during the day and interrupting our work days every 5 to 10 minutes, I slowly transformed into a person I barely recognized.

As most of you reading this article are probably aware of, network engineering requires long periods of extended concentration. Having my concentration broken 40-50 times during each work day was bad enough, but a perfect storm was simultaneously hurtling toward our family.

My rather large employer merged with another large corporation and I was moved to a new team; the A team, as we are referred to. This team is filled with decades of deep technical expertise and a dizzying array of technology stacks. I had to learn MPLS, NFV, automation, Junos, cloud and SD-WAN to name just a few. I also had to learn the new company's network designs, which were vastly different than my previous team's domain. The new culture I found myself in was also a shock. An endless torrent of meetings became my new norm, all the while feeling completely lost with all the new technology swirling around me.

I was also nervous about losing my job. The global economy was suffering under the weight of the pandemic. A few folks I worked with on my previous team, two of which had hired me, had been let go post merger and I was the least experienced member of my new team.

Couple the aforementioned corporate chaos with our young children coming into my home office dozens of times a day with tears to wipe, snacks to make, butts to wipe, conflicts to resolve, remote learning meltdowns to manage and I started to morph into an irritable and grumpy daddy and husband.

Never in my life had I been busier at work and simultaneously, my family had never needed me more.

How did I manage, or more accurately, mismanage this new reality that Covid-19 brought into our home? I started working every spare moment I had, which in hindsight was a huge mistake. I decided that the only way I could keep my pre-covid level of productivity intact was to wake up early and work before the kids woke up, do my best during the day, then work after the kids went to bed. This often included me working 8P-1A most nights, after working all day in a chaotic home environment. I stopped working out, started sleeping less, started stress eating and drank pots of coffee to compensate. Everything in my life that was not work became an impediment to me getting my work done; to me keeping my job and keeping us from living in a van down by the river.

I was snapping at my wife, kids and dog, raising my voice and slowly descending into burn out. What eventually stopped this runaway train was when my body cried out in agony. Mind/body connection and such. I got the first migraine of my life and wound up with a month-long migraine that almost ended me. I sought medical attention, got brain scans, medicine and ultimately learned that I cannot push myself to my absolute limits without suffering considerable mental and physical consequences.

I talked about how my boss and skip level helped me get out of the tailspin I was in on Episode 49 of The Art of Network Engineering podcast so I won't dive deep into the solution here, but in the rest of this post I would like to share how that same podcast may have saved my sanity and possibly my life during the hardest year the Lapteff family has endured thus far.

For context, I have experienced enormous and seemingly insurmountable tragedies in my life starting at a young age, so a global pandemic was not my first harrowing rodeo. I don't claim to be unique in this regard, but I think it's helpful to highlight the fact that extreme duress is not new for me. My parents’ divorce when I was 6, the often unbearable emotional agony their split caused my young mind, taking care of my little sister while my single mom worked long hours, an injury that ended my high school sports career months before I would have found out if I had earned an athletic scholarship to college and a second parental divorce that left me momentarily homeless are just some of the lowlights of my early life; all occurring before I turned 21.

With context out of the way, back to 2020 Covid hell at home.

Right around the time that the planet shut down due to the pandemic and my mental state was unravelling, a study group called "It's All About the Journey" was started by AJ Murray. He posted on twitter about a CCNP study group he was starting, so I joined. This small study group was also born of strife. AJ had failed the CCNP exam multiple times and was down on himself when someone said to him, “it’s all about the journey.” So, he started a support group, I mean study group, and we started grinding through the ENCOR material together.

This study group evolved into a community and an idea took hold in AJ's mind; he wanted to start a podcast around network engineering. Instead of focusing on the social media super stars in tech, he wanted to tell the stories of the faceless folks grinding away each day, without fanfare, keeping the Interwebs running. He wanted to give a voice to the voiceless and hear from folks in the trenches of networking, as well as those who were just starting their journeys in tech.

On an otherwise unremarkable day in 2020, AJ asked me to join The Art of Network Engineering podcast team. Prior to him asking me, I had been researching how to start my own tech podcast, so this was one of those times that felt like everything happens for a reason. I was in the right place at the right time and when he asked, I immediately said yes.

The nights we recorded the show became the highlight of my otherwise dreary and stressed out weeks. I looked forward to getting together with these new acquaintances and slowly, these virtual strangers became friends. We started out telling our own stories to each other, discussed our favorite and not so favorite technologies (I'm looking at you, frame relay), talked about soft skills, personal branding and finally started interviewing guests who were not on staff.

I was immediately taken aback by the level at which our guests were succeeding in their careers and certification journeys while I was drowning at work and spending my formerly allotted study nights working on the podcast instead. The team loved ribbing me about what became my tagline early in the show, " So I have a question. You have kids and a career; how are you finding time to study and getting all these certifications?" I was genuinely amazed at how these folks were studying for and passing certs while I was working around the clock, with migraines, getting 4 hours of sleep a night and not able to find any time for self care, let alone time to study for certs.

There are too many memorable moments and people to list here, but the discipline that Eugene and Teneyia exhibit stand out to me, mostly because they answer my tired question; "how do you do it?" They do it without complaining and without excuses. They shut up and do work, no matter what and that inspires me.

I got to meet and interview CBT Nuggets celebrities Knox Hutchinson, Bart Castle and Keith Frikin' Barker, who all blow me away with the amount of extremely helpful content they create for the tech community. I came up in networking listening to and watching endless hours of Keith's content, so getting to meet him and chat with him was surreal. We got to spend over two hours with each of these titans of industry and I still can't believe Keith Barker knows my name.

We had a New York Time's best-selling author on who was an absolute pleasure and taught us how to "Make it Stick" when studying and we got pretty vulnerable on our Mental Health episode, where we talked about how hard 2020 was on us and our loved ones.

We interviewed the man, the myth and the legend Tim Bertino who quickly became a permanent co-host on the podcast. Tim's fresh ideas, easy going personality, hard work ethic, thoughtful questions and creative intros have all coalesced to raise the show to another level. I can barely remember doing the show without Tim. To me, it feels like he's always been on the team.

Dan, Howdy Packet, Richards has really come into his own on the show. Once the quiet one, Dan has grown into a strong voice who asks great questions. He has recently used his professional video production skills to vastly improve our video production quality. He created a beautiful overlay that we use in every video episode, which makes for a very polished look. He’s also a photoshop wizard, so don’t get on his bad side or he’ll make you look ridiculous. With Dan being the youngest member of our team and I being the oldest, we tend to frequently bust each other’s chops on the show, but its all in good fun and I have great respect for him and feel lucky to be his teammate.

We landed our first sponsor (thank you opengear) who actually paid us to come on the show and talk about out of band management, which was a big hit with our fans. Opengear doubled up on their investment in us with a kick ass give away for 10 lucky fans. With their investment, we had AONE branded backpacks made with our logo on them, full of Cisco Press books, socks, stickers and a screaming, winning goat.

The show has generated a momentum of its own and we get so much positive feedback from listeners that its truly humbling. People telling us that we changed their lives or that they couldn't have passed a cert or landed their first IT gig without us is such an incredibly fulfilling feeling that I am truly grateful and honored to be a part of this team. My darkest days of 2020 got a little bit brighter when I said yes to joining the AONE team. I’ll never be able to pay AJ back for what he did for me and for all of us, by starting a study group that morphed into a podcast which helped countless “faces of the journey,” but maybe this blog post is a start.

If I had to summarize what The Art of Network Engineering podcast experience has taught me in the last year or so, I’d say the following. I learned to say yes when an opportunity appears. I learned that we are better together than apart and that we can do great things even when the world around us is crumbling. I learned that some of the best gifts in life are disguised as hardship. I learned that by giving, we receive. I learned that we should all help each other every day no matter what because when we do, we all win. Like AJ likes to say, "A rising tide lifts all boats."

This is just a small slice of the amazing journey that has been my experience as part of The Art of Network Engineering podcast; my harbor in rough seas; the podcast that just may have saved my life in 2020.