It was my first day at Hawk’s Cay Resort, eager and wide awake, full of energy. I was given the task to clean up the network rack behind the front desk area. Switches were mounted on the wall and daisy-chained from one another. Cables of all different sizes and colors looked like a tangled mess of colorful webs.

Todd showed me what I needed to do: take a new, shorter cable, either 1 foot or 18 inches, and untangle and replace each cable as I went, neatly fixing the mess that was hanging from the wall. I thought I could do this and wanted to shine, so I swapped cable for cable, not really aware that for each cable I swapped, I was dropping someone’s network connection. But that’s okay, this was my first lesson in technology and my first job. No better way to learn how a network works than to start unplugging cables and hearing people scream in the distance.

I finished cleaning up the rack, every cable looking perfect. But then Todd came down to check out my work. He was getting reports of the network throughout the 60-acre private island dropping connections. Concern on his face, Todd looked at my work and after a long minute, wondering what the issue was, he found it. I had plugged a network cable back into the same switch, causing a network loop that for a brief period brought the network on the entire island to drop and flop. Connections were dropping, credit card processing was stopping, check-ins couldn’t be done, HR unable to work, and accounting unable to crunch their numbers.

My first lesson in networking was simple: plugging a cable into the same switch causes a network loop, which wreaks havoc on the network causing connections to drop.

Todd was cool about this; it was an innocent mistake, my first technical mistake on my first day of work. I learned my lesson and never made the same mistake again.

The network loop was not the biggest mistake I ever made, but it is the one that stands out the most. First day, first mistake, first lesson, and the first time I saw an authority figure remain cool and calm under pressure. That taught me a lot and sticks with me to this day.

Closing The Loop

The early mistakes I made at Hawk’s Cay followed me throughout my career. Always cautious, never be a cowboy—nothing is worse than a technical cowboy who is not cautious and calculated in procedure. Cowboys make changes in production; cowboys don’t listen or pay attention to the details.

The network loop is always a reminder to look at what I am doing, document the steps, and create procedures that are recreatable by myself and others who come after me. Mistakes should happen once, and you learn not to repeat them.

Whether deploying changes or updates to small environments or large global environments like I have been working on for the past years, my work always starts in a Dev environment and works its way up the chain of process. From Dev to QA to UAT, and then finally to Prod. Testing meticulously at each step, catching issues early and with different sets of test users and procedures to ensure that quality assurance (QA) is reviewed and followed at each step.

More about me can be found on my LinkedIn page @ www.linkedin.com/in/boehmjesse

Email me @ IAM@jesseboehm.com