I love the networking community, and I attribute much of my success as a network engineer, network architect, and now a technical marketer, to the interactions I’ve had with other network pros over the years. That’s meant interaction on Twitter, Reddit, the big conferences, and the small events like Tech Field Day. From those sprang up private Slack and Discord groups, the occasional iMessage or Google Hangouts group, and so on.

That changed significantly during the pandemic. Both the large and small conferences, meetups, and even company events stopped altogether and didn’t come back for a few years. And when they did, they were different. I noticed the large events weren’t as large (although I’m always shocked by how many people are at re:Invent), and the hybrid conference idea didn’t work for me. I missed the days of attending sessions, chatting with people over coffee in between keynotes, grabbing drinks in the evening with old nerd-friends, and getting to interact in person, engineer-to-engineer.

We needed a new networking community.

Continue reading “The (US)NUA – A New Networking Community” →