About This Blog

As I began my journey of working towards my CCNP I realized that I was building practical skills in Cisco Modeling Labs and I had no way to document them. It’s hard to put “homelab” on your resume. There’s no way for potential employers to verify that you’ve actually done the work and learned the material. Even passing the certification only proves that you can memorize what is needed to pass an exam. Because of this I decided that I needed some sort of portfolio to document the labs that I’m building, and the issues and challenges that I am overcoming. While I don’t expect this blog to reach a large audience, I also hope that I’m able to help a few fellow network engineers. I’ve noticed that the deeper I go into networking, the fewer resources I find. For example, there is only one CCNP SPCOR course on Udemy, compared to countless CCNA courses.

My Background

I’ve been studying technology most of my life. In middle school I began teaching myself basic HTML and CSS because I was fascinated with websites. Over the years, I taught myself several programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, C++, and Java. I even dabbled in Rust. While I enjoy coding, it didn’t fascinate me in the way that networking did. I was always curious about how the internet worked, about how websites were hosted, and how I was able to reach them through the phone line (I grew up in the age of DSL). I really fell in love with networking in high school. I went to a vocational school that had an Information Technology shop with two branches: Programming & Web Development and Information Support Services & Networking. Now you might think I would pick programming, and that’s what my teachers thought too. But our exploratory class was given a tour of the school’s network and I got to see structured cabling, switches, servers and routers for the first time in my life and I just knew that I had to figure out how all those things worked.

Fast forward to today, I’ve been working in the technology field for five years now. I’ve been a network technician for the past 4 years, 3 years for a school district and 1 year at a large telco, my current employer. I’ve obtained a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems, a CompTIA A+ certification, and a CCNA. I’ve installed servers, switches, and wireless access points, run cable, and administered a Meraki Wi-Fi network of more than 300 access points and approximately 2,500 clients. My career has now led me to service provider networking, where I’ve discovered I have a lot more to learn. Therefore I’ve decided to work on obtaining my CCNP Service Provider certification. I’ll be using Cisco Modeling Labs to gain practical experience configuring advanced networks and I’ll be documenting everything here.

Unless otherwise noted, every lab published on Nick Does Labs is personally built, tested, and documented by me using Cisco Modeling Labs or my own lab environment.