A thank you

Dear Ciscoinferno Readers,

I have been blogging for a little while now. It initially started out as a simple way of putting down my study notes. They were rough and messy. I started off with a Warhammer 40k styled post to test creative writing and technical posts. As I started to evolve as an engineer I started posting on general musings or thought pieces. I was egged on by a few people to post on Packetpushers. I did. I posted up about CDP and a few other topics since then. My footprint grew and the Ciscoinferno brand became a little more recognizable  Twitter helped me befriend the network engineering community and now I feel like I am one of them.

So where did 100,000 come from? Well you. And for that I am extremely thankful. This last year has been a blur for my career. I started my current place of employment a year ago this week. I tend to Nexus, ASA, Catalyst, and various other Cisco devices to deliver an Emergency Services call center for 8 million Victorians. It is definitely a rewarding job. In the September of 2012 my career had an unexpected twist. I received a call up to the USA for NFD4 hosted by Stephen Foskett. This was a catalyst that I did not expect and haven’t looked back at all. I am exposed to new audiences, new people, engaging conversation, and the best of it all is that it is 100 percent networking!

As my pictures below show an interesting story. I started off getting a few hits per day and totaled maybe one hundred per month. At first this was exciting. I slowly changed my tune of my blog posts and started linking in various social media topics. The hits continued. I now hit around 600 hits per day and achieve around 13,000 hits per month. This inspires me that the content I am producing is what people want to read.

It is extremely interesting to see what posts are popular. My GNS3 and ASA 8.4 entries have seen a lot of traffic which have driven these results but other things such as my SRX110 lab and BPDU guard vs BPDU filter have seem to have drawn decent crowds.

So where to from here? I currently am in ( as some of you may have noticed) the midst of JUNOS fever. I am studying for my JNCIS-SEC certification and I hope I can clear this in near future. Then it will come down to attempting the CCIE RS written. At this stage my day job is Cisco and that is the smart next step. VCP5 is sitting on the horizon and may jump ahead  of IE written as I will be involved in a large VMware deployment at work.

Either way, what ever happens moving forward I am most humbled by you my readers. Thank you and I hope to keep the content coming. We live in exciting times and I am lucky to be involved in a career I am passionate about and respect immensely.

Regards,
Anthony.