Peace Out 2023

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve survived yet another revolution (around the Sun). That means it’s as good a time as any to look back over the preceding year and reflect. What worked? What didn’t? What did we learn? As is my tradition, I’ll do mine “out loud” so you can follow along…

2023 Highlights

Copying the format of my 2022 reflection post, this year I’m again starting off with a look back at the highlights of the past 12 months. 2023 was a year of change for me, a year of growth, and honestly a year filled with more than it’s fair share of existential dread. The 24^th year of the 21^st century was also a year filled with travel and success and love. Let’s start with those bits.

• The year’s first accomplishment was launching a new website for FullCtl, which is a joint venture between 20C and GTS focused on building network automation (NetDevOps) tools specific to BGP and interconnection that my friend Grizz and I founded in 2022.
• At the end of January, Eva and I spent a lovely long weekend down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico celebrating a dear friend’s 40^th birthday including quality time with several great human beings!
• Soon after that, we headed up to Colorado for a most excellent Mild Minds show, and for what is becoming my traditional birthday snowboarding trip, this year in Keystone. It was epic – a full week with great conditions, and I got to see my Sister and her husband!
• The Winter NANOG event is always right on top of my birthday, and this year was no different, so I flew to Atlanta from Denver for the 87^th edition, where I gave a lightning talk…
• Launching my first ever State of Network Automation survey (I say “my” because there was a couple iterations of a similar effort a few years back, so it wasn’t the first ever survey).
• In March we launched Eva’s Open Late Design Co. website and while I’m obviously biased, I truly believe that her eye for aesthetics is supernatural, if you need a fresh, stylish, elevated brand and/or website – hit her up!
• We also launched the FullCtl blog.
• April brought the 2023 Global Peering Forum (GPF) where Grizz and I presented on Interconnection Automation For All in addition to holding dozens of great meetings.
• From San Diego, Eva and I walked over the border to the Tijuana airport (they have a bridge) and flew from there back down to Puerto Vallarta, where we got to house sit for a beautiful and generous friend who was out of town for about a month.
• We got home just in time to drive up to Albuquerque, NM for the first ever ABQNOG, where I gave a Peering 101 talk to help educate regulators and tribal leaders in the face of BEAD and other government money being spent around the country to boost broadband adoption.
• Then it was up to Colorado for a week for my younger Son’s 16^th birthday!
• While there we bounced up to Denver for a night out with a few friends, which turned into a great weekend with a ton of friends, some who I hadn’t seen in a long time.
• We hosted a pool party on Memorial Day for our local El Paso crew.
• In June, NANOG 88 took us to Seattle. We spent a really nice weekend beforehand enjoying the rain, the food, the used book stores, and one or two night clubs (thanks to a great local host) – Black Loops absolutely killed!
• At the NOG, I got to present the results of the 2023 State of Network Automation survey (the slides are available here).
• Closing out the first half of the year, FullCtl announced our partnership with NetBox Labs.

Okay, wow, let’s take a quick break. That’s just the first half of the year, and I’m already exhausted just remembering it all. Not to mention all the other great stuff that happened and has to be left off the list to keep it from being even more unwieldy. Take a breath. And then walk through the second half of 2023 with me:

• On 7 July 2023, Scott Robohn and I founded the Network Automation Forum and got serious about putting on THE network automation conference: AutoCon!
• I joined the FullCtl crew in Iowa for the Midwest Peering Summit – a really wonderful regional event – where I got to present a couple times.
• FullCtl published my NetDevOps Primer (email for download, or read the blogs instead).
• Then it was time for my elder Son’s 21^st birthday. I took him to Tokyo for a week and we both had an absolute blast! Food, art, culture, shopping – and lots of trains. We also both got tattoos and we crashed the Mandarin Oriental hotel lobby while we waited for our flight home.
• After a couple weeks of final “training” it was off to Portland for the mother of all relays, the 2023 edition of Hood to Coast! What an amazing experience, I’m ready for more group running competitions. We’ve already been talking about a marathon on the Antarctic ice.
• I stepped up and took on the CEO role at FullCtl to help us navigate increasing growth.
• October brought my wife and partner’s 40^th birthday and we went all out. A week at Casa Malca on the beach, followed by another 5 days living in two adjacent Tulum jungle villa’s with 16 of Eva’s closest friends, and then a week on the beach in Playa Del Carmen. Day beds, boats, beach clubs, night clubs, private chef’s, private movie screenings, public debauchery… It was a bacchanalia that would have made Ceasar proud.
• We bought a new car! A Tesla Model Y Performance. The lease on our Model 3 was up and we decided to upgrade, and to purchase this time based on observed resale value and the amazing popularity of the Model Y (it’s the #2 bestselling light vehicle in the US in 2023 through Q3).
• The next week we drove it up to Denver for AutoCon 0 – the first conference to dare to ask “why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation, yet?” Scott and I both took some big risks professionally, personally, and financially for this and it paid off better than anyone could have hoped. That felt damn good. I’m so grateful that we created something so valuable to such an amazing community. Thank you to all of you who helped make it happen!!! <3
• I finally launched a website for the Imposter Syndrome Network and we started accepting guest nominations.
• Eva and I danced in the rain! We were at a restaurant slash night club with a big outdoor patio and it started raining not long after the DJ started. We said “fuck it” and danced in the rain for hours. I haven’t done that since I was a much younger man. Chef’s kiss.
• And we ended the year in Colorado with my family. A cherry on top of an absolute peach of a year.

Or was it? Was 2023 really a peach? Well, yes and no. In the spirit of openness, and as a small way to fight back against the corrosive impact of social media filtering (only showing your friends the very best of your life, thus making theirs pale in comparison), I’m going to let you in on a secret: 2023 was fucking tough.

Don’t get me wrong, those highlights all happened, and they filled the year with lots of love, joy, and gratitude – especially now looking back, my heart and soul are so full. What’s also true is that there was a lot of very hard work, several pretty terrible moments, and a heaping serving of despair mixed in there too. I won’t dwell, but let’s be real about…

2023 Lowlights

Unlike the highlights, these are not in chronological order, they aren’t really in any order at all.

• One of my Uncles completed his journey here on Earth (he died).
• Two members of my extended family suffered strokes in 2023, one severe.
• Eva’s cat, Mr. Pickles, had to have all of his teeth removed to fight an infection.
• My truck blew a head gasket. I think/hope anyway. I have not made time to tear it apart yet.
• Our dishwasher heating element warped and melted both the spray arm and bottom of the machine. A fine mess.
• Tokyo in early August was HOT – we broke a sweat everywhere we walked outside for more than about 30 seconds and by the end of the week it was starting to put a damper on the mood.
• I was hit by a truck. That sounds way worse than it is. I was running through a cross-walk at a four-way stop and a big Texas pickup gunned it and lurched towards me. I put my left arm out and palmed his grill. He either saw or heard the impact and stopped short. No injury at all, maybe a bit of a stiff neck for a couple weeks, and a strong hesitance to cross the street while running.
• I got a concussion. The scary part is I can’t remember how exactly. I blacked out, for a while. I was on my birthday snowboarding trip, riding with Eva on some greens without a helmet. I dove into the trees for a little fun and woke up walking with her at the base towards our car completely unsure of anything at all. It was one of the most terrifying things I’ve experienced. Slowly, over several minutes or more, my memories and in a way my identity, came back to me. I cried, not from pain but from fear. I saw a doctor, and we skipped the last day on the mountain. We went shopping and I bought a new helmet instead.
• I fired my biggest customer. I like saying it that way, but it’s not that dramatic. At the beginning of 2023, something like 70% of our consulting company’s (GTS’) revenue was coming from one client. We had a whole team built to serve just them, including our own project management, etc. We were in a comfortable place, but it was taking a lot of my time and energy, and had become stressful and confining for me. At the same time, they were asking for more work, while simultaneously talking about considerably cutting our rate. So, I quit. We transitioned the team over to work for them directly and I got out of the way. I truly believe that this was the best outcome under the conditions. It was still not a particularly positive experience.
• And then there’s the existential dread…

Instead of replacing that customer, or actively seeking new consulting clients at all, I chose to pour all of my time and energy into the three projects that I recently co-founded: The Imposter Syndrome Network, the Network Automation Forum, and FullCtl, the interconnection automation platform. That lead to many of the highlights above. It also lead to Eva and I having negative cash flow for much of the year. As consulting work and it’s associated income dwindled, abruptly when we “fired” that big client in early April and then more gradually until we hit $0 income in December, we had to start pulling money from savings to live.

I don’t want pity. I’m very grateful that we did so exceptionally well in the first couple years out on our own that we had savings to dip into – that’s a position I’ve never really been in before in my life. And what better to invest that money in than myself, and the ideas I believe passionately in?

What I do want is to be real about how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. I guess especially, or at least in my case, a boot-strapped entrepreneur. It’s scary when you can see the end looming ahead of you like some chasm waiting to swallow up your dreams. When people are relying on you.

As AutoCon was winding down I admitted to a friend just how anxious and afraid I had been leading up to the event. He asked, why? I said it’s simple; there had been so many ways to let so many people down. And that’s the weight I carried through most of 2023 – not just for NAF, but across essentially everything I’ve been working on.

As we made less and less money, I worked harder and harder. Not to compensate, it was simply that the projects, my projects, my babies needed more and more. Not only did these babies need more and more without giving much in return (for a while), I also had no idea if they would pan out. Everything I’m working on seems obviously valuable to me – that is of course why I’m choosing to work on it rather than get paid. =) Yet, that’s no guarantee that others will understand or see things the same way. In fact, I could be totally wrong about all of it. Or worse, I could be right and just not good enough to pull it off.

I’ve never lead a software development company before. I’ve never put on a full scale trade-show style conference before. I’ve never interviewed Vint Cerf before. Okay, that one is a lie, I have. And I did host INET Denver a decade ago. And I’ve built and run plenty of organizations over the years. But man oh man did I go through a lot of doubt and despair in 2023. Stress. Perhaps more than I needed to.

After all, most of these lowlights are squarely in the “first world problems” category. In fact, ‘getting to’ fix our dishwasher was kind of a highlight – I’m proud that I’m handy. And did you see that list of highlights! So, not letting worries and troubles turn into fear and stress so much will be a focus in 2024, I want to set a more confident and calm example this year, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Before I document my focus for this year (in another post), it’s time to finish reflecting on last year (in this post).

2023 Words

My three words for 2023 were learn, teach, and wait. Let’s take a quick spin through them to see how that worked out for me.

Learn

Man oh man did I learn in 2023. So much so that it feels like one of the longest years of my life. In many ways I feel like a different person than I was when I started the year. The position I was in 12 months ago feels a world away from where I sit today.

While I still have a lot of work to do, I became a better listener. My focus on Stephen Covey’s advice to “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood” paid off. I also read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People this year with the Impossible Book Club and it’s classic lessons helped reinforce my drive to see the world from other people’s perspectives. To get curious instead of furious when something doesn’t go how I had wanted it to.

In addition to talking to more folks more often, listening better to each one of them, asking better questions, and working to understand the answers; I also kept reading in 2023. And I started taking better notes on the key insights from what I read.

I read about and then put into practice the “V2MOM” system from Salesforce. After listening to his autobiography, I adopted Paul Van Doren’s approach to: “Control as much as you can, keep your options open, and then let nature take it’s course.” And I was calmed after learning Kanter’s Law (“everything looks like a failure in the middle”). I’ll refrain from dumping every lesson here, but suffice it to say that I collected several dozen of these nuggets, along with some more in depth notes on certain topics.

Being a successful entrepreneur seems to hinge on two core abilities; being able to create and grow relationships, and being able to learn faster than you fail. I believe that I succeeded in both of those areas this past year and that allowed me to help a lot of people, which feels great!

Teach

Part of my reason for choosing this word for 2023 was to renew my focus on writing and speaking, and that worked out pretty well. I published 20 papers and articles and gave 21 talks across online and in-person events. If you’re curious, you can find much of that work in my portfolio.

Another reason for selecting Teach last year was in support of my first word, Learn. Teaching is a great way to learn (recall is just as important as “storage”). And setting out to teach something forces you to learn more about it. That all worked out as well, I got much more hands-on into technology again in 2023, and I dug deeper into network automation specifically than I probably ever have.

The primary thrust behind the word Teach however wasn’t about me at all. It’s about everyone else. I wanted to continue and to accelerate my knowledge sharing. And I believe I did that on a scale beyond anything I even thought possible at the beginning of the year – but I did it more indirectly than I might have imagined as well.

For one thing, Zoë Rose and I published 50 episodes of the Imposter Syndrome Network podcast. In each episode we chat with an IT, digital infrastructure, or tech-adjacent person about their career journey. The highs, the lows, and the lessons learned along the way. So, while the guests are the one’s who do all the real teaching, I’ll take some credit for bringing these valuable insights to your ears.

Another example of this indirect knowledge sharing was obviously the Network Automation Forum (NAF). The NAF Slack workspace is now over 1,200 strong, there are more than 1,000 folks on the NAF email list, over 3,000 people follow NAF on LinkedIn, almost 350 engineers have subscribed to NAF on YouTube, about two dozen are following NAF on GitHub, and at least 340 network automaniacs showed up in person for AutoCon 0! And again, while almost none of the knowledge in any of those forums comes from my mind or mouth, I am grateful to have been able to help create these rally points for such an intelligent, curious, and generous community.

Finally, I will note that FullCtl is also a vehicle for indirect knowledge sharing. A big part of what we’re doing is embedding best practices into software to make networking easier to get right. We also spend a lot of our time directly teaching clients about the principles of NetDevOps and even just basic network hygiene.

Wait

This word was mostly about patience, and through that increased patience, kindness. I did okay here. Maybe even pretty good.

By the end of the year I found myself almost always going silent when I didn’t quite grok what someone was saying to me, instead of always trying to respond immediately. I let things sit for an hour or overnight or even over the weekend to give myself time to process and respond more thoughtfully, mindfully, and intentionally.

I also continued to enhance my new-to-me unhurried work style. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, I was constantly rushing, consistently harried. In 2023 I built even more time to rest, reset, and reflect into my schedule. Maybe not quite enough. But progress was made. =)

And working without pay to build projects that may be valuable in the future is most definitely an exercise in patience. You have to build and build and build and wait and wait and wait. I did this well last year. I turned down multiple near-term opportunities in order to remain focused on long-term value creation. I staid in on a lot of weekend nights, eschewing fun tonight for energy tomorrow. And I generally invested in my future by planting seeds and taking the time to tend to them while waiting for them to bloom some day.

Of course, if I had been better at this I would have had an even better year. Remember that existential dread I spoke about above? The depths of despair I found myself in on multiple occasions, freaking out about whether or not I was doing the right things at all? Yeah, most of that boils down to straight up impatience. I still have a tendency to want the end result to happen as soon as I figure out how to get there. Putting in the time to actually make that journey can still be frustrating for me – so, I’ll keep working on this one.

2023 Goals

Still with me? Wow, you are a trooper. I hope you’re taking something away from all this. As we look to wrap this annual reflection up, I’ll do a quick run-down of my 2023 goals:

Personal Fitness

Keeping my mind, body, heart, and soul fit and in alignment is the most important job I have. Here’s how I did.

• Run at least 2,000 km in distance
  • No – but I did run over 1,500 kilometers
• Run at least 20,000 meters vertical
  • No – but I did run over 18,000 meters of elevation gain
• Meditate every day
  • Not even close – but I did beat last year with 264 days of meditation
• Read at least 50 books – focus on biographies and history
  • Another miss – but I did finish 34 books, with 3 more in progress at the end of the year – I blame biographies for being so much longer than business books =)

Business and Productivity

How I create value for my fellow humans.

• Grow the Imposter Syndrome Network by at least 10x
  • No – but we did grow weekly downloads from about 150 to about 500
• Publish at least 100 original works (blogs, podcasts, papers, webinars, etc)
  • Nope – but I got really close with 94 (if you count all those ISNP episodes)
• Write at least 6 more chapters for my first book as blog posts
  • Okay, this was a “casualty of war” – I didn’t make time for a single paradox post in 2023 – total fail
• Interview at least 100 colleagues about interconnection and automation
  • I’m going to call this one a WIN – somewhere along the way I lost track, partly because I was overwhelmed by so many great new connections and amazing conversations this past year – but I am confident they number well over 100
• Publish the NetDevOps Handbook
  • Kind of – I pivoted and turned it into “just” a primer to start, it’s published though!
• Be quoted in the media at least 5 times
  • Yes! – you can see my 7 media mentions here (and that doesn’t count the press releases I was involved with putting out myself)
• Help my wife, Eva Leos, launch her new branding and digital design firm
  • Yes! – as mentioned, Open Late Design Co. is alive and well!

Financial Health

Building my family’s future with income and investing. As last year, numbers are redacted, but the goals are included here because I do think it’s worth sharing generally how I am approaching achievement in this area of life.

• Collect $X in gross profit (forget revenue, what do I need to make after I pay everyone else?)
  • No – as discussed, we made a hard pivot in 2023 that led to far, far less income than we originally hoped – we hit about 50% of this target
• Invest $Y in retirement brokerage accounts (most stocks are on sale!)
  • No – likewise, we only invested about half of what we had hoped to for retirement last year
• Save $Z for future investment in real estate (I remain convinced that real estate is the most accessible method for working and middle class families to build inter-generational wealth)
  • No – in fact we went negative here as we pulled money out of savings to cover revenue shortfalls

Last Words

What’s left to say? This is already an impossibly long post. I’ll just note that while this was one of the longest and toughest years of my life, it was also one of the best. While I ended up missing almost all of my goals, I made incredible progress in the right directions. And the groundwork we laid together in 2023 will continue to grow and evolve for years, maybe decades to come. I’m happy and I’m proud.

Some Good Books

I’m a little discouraged since Amazon broke all of the image links in all of my previous book recommendations… But, that’s not your fault, so, here are a few recommendations from what I read in 2023:

• Steve Blank – The Four Steps to the Epiphany & The Startup Owner’s Manual – both are must reads if you are starting or growing a new company.
• My son and I finished reading the Dune series from Frank Herbert last year and I can confidently say that it keeps getting better with every book after Dune.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a classic for a reason, reading it makes me want to be a better person, and provides many of the tools I need to do it.
• Confucius Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid provides interesting insight into how and why Eastern culture is so different from Western culture, and what we can learn from each other.
• Team of Rivals lived up to the hype – not just a compelling picture of an amazing American president, it’s a fantastic snapshot of a key period of our history.
• Likewise, The Tycoons paints a vivid picture of the men and events that ultimately led to American economic hegemony.
• Authentic, the autobiography of Paul Van Doren, is in many ways a counter-point to the memoirs and biography’s of so many other business people – I really loved learning about the scrappy success of the man, the family, and the company behind my favorite shoes.
• Finally, As a Man Thinketh is a “self help” book written in 1902 by James Allen that provides a beautiful reminder that we’re in complete control of the only thing that matters; our own thoughts – and through them, our personal reality. Shout out to Du’An Lightfoot for this recommendation!

That’s It

Peace out 2023.