Darrel Clute

Weeks Activities

I will be arriving in San Francisco on Saturday the 17th at about 2:00 PM PDT. With registration being open on Saturday I will be ensuring that I get all of that out of the way prior to event sessions starting on Sunday.

My tentative schedule of sessions is in the tables at the bottom of this article. I say that this is tentative as I am subject to make changes to this as slide decks are posted to Cisco Live Online and I review to ensure that I am getting the best of the event.

In addition to the sessions there are other activities that I typically partake in and even draw benefit from. The customer appreciation event is a good wind down to the multitude of sessions. This year Lenny Kravitz and Imagine Dragons will be performing for us at AT&T Park. For those of you that aren't aware of the weather in San Francisco in May, it will likely be a good idea to have a jacket for the customer appreciation event, as this is an outdoor stadium.

Cisco Live Social Networking is ever growing and gives you an opportunity to meet and talk with people you interact online with Twitter, Google Plus, or your social media platform of choice. There will be opening and closing TweetUps specifically for this, in addition to the social media lounge being a place where a number of us hang out when we are not in a session.

Mixing it up a bit this year on the exam front. Every prior year that I have attended a Cisco Live event I have taken the CCIE Route/Switch written exam, and usually haven't had sufficient time to study, and recently traditional route/switch has not been my focus. This year I will be attempting the CCIE Data Center written exam. Although I have not really had time to devote to studying, these are the technologies I have been interacting with more regularly as of late.

New this year, Cisco DevNet, formerly Cisco Developer Network, will have a DevNet Zone where you can come and try your hands and working with the APIs and SDKs through a learning lab or the hackathon. There will be theater sessions and ask the experts where you can get high level overview or deep dives with the expert respectively. Additionally they will have partners in the DevNet Zone to talk specifically about their technologies and how they are leveraging Cisco's programmability features. The DevNet Zone may preempt some of my sessions as a significant amount of my free time has been around addressing automation, and being able to better control and monitor environments.

There will likely be other activities after hours that I will be partaking in as well, and if last year is an indication I will probably be hanging out with people I interact with online more than day-to-day.

Closing Thoughts

I am really looking forward to attending Cisco Live again this year. If you are in the networking space, or any aspect of the data center space, I highly recommend you attend at least once. For me personally I attend as the educational consumption model works better for me than other venues. Additionally it gets me out of my inverted shell a bit for a short period of time. Look forward to seeing everyone this year and being able to talk in person with people I haven't seen in nearly a year.

Tentative Schedule