Cisco certifications

We had the same speed, the internet speed like America.

The first cable was connect to, um, to Venezuela, the submarine cable, you know? The best Cisco Aca- Academies, I don't know if you remember that, the Cisco Academies, they, they put it the routers and the, you know, CCNA and, and all of that thing.

When, I remember when I did it in Venezuela, I, I did it with people from Colombia, from Ecuador, because they came to over there to do it in Venezuela, you know, because Venezuela has the technology to do it or the, the, the, the academies.

Amazing.

And that's when I started to, I guess, develop a love for networking at that point.

Because once I learned about subnetting and I learned about, you know, the appropriate way to build out a network and the importance of like good design and all those things, because we're sitting there reading the books.

And I think we were going for our CCNAs at the same time.

We all kind of decided like, might as well take advantage of this, all this free lab material and get the cert.

We were setting up servers and connecting them to the internet because, as I mentioned, we had access.

But I did gravitate towards like more pure networking from there.

I started digging into like, you know, I read a bunch of RFCs and I learned about that, you know, that way and then kind of studied some of the CCNA stuff and got my CCNA.

But then found out about Juniper and Junos looked a lot more like Linux.

And so I really kind of went down that path pretty hard after that.

And I think that's the part that really gets people sometimes.

And the question then that I get all the time, and I answer this probably in every single CCNA, and I have a video about it.

I'll link it in the description too when this podcast comes out.

But it's, is the CCNA still valuable in, right? This one was, the video was 2025.

Now we're here in 2026.

But is it still valuable? And inevitably, a lot of it, especially at the end of the CCNAs when we teach them the virtualization components towards the end, right? Because it's a more technical abstraction of all the stuff we had to discuss in the start.

And they go, well, if it's all virtualized, then why do I even need to know this stuff anymore? And I say, and now this is oddly self-serving, as Spock would say in the new Star Treks, as my traditional farewell would be oddly self-serving, I shall simply say, good luck.

But anyway.

But I did gravitate towards like more pure networking from there.

I started digging into like, you know, I read a bunch of RFCs and I learned about that, you know, that way and then kind of studied some of the CCNA stuff and got my CCNA.

But then found out about Juniper and Junos looked a lot more like Linux.

And so I really kind of went down that path pretty hard after that.