It’s been a while since I’ve posted something here. Multiple reasons of course, but lately I just had to focus on learning so much I didn’t take the time for it anymore. Why? Well since I got my CCNP almost three years ago, it had to be recertified. Together with my CCDA that presented the opportunity to gain a CCDP certification and renewing my CCNP at once by just taking one more exam: ARCH.

So it’s been done. Was it hard? I honestly don’t know. So much has changed this last year for me: how I look at my profession, how I look at learning, at certifications,… I can’t compare it anymore to past experiences. So many things I learned outside of the certification path that are so important to have insights as an engineer… Examples like TCP Windowing, ASIC behavior, VRF deployment, application behavior in LAN and WAN (Citrix, SCP, FTP, NTP, vMotion, SCCM), load balancing and SSL offloading, …

All I know that this was a lot of (useful) theory and I had to devise a plan to learn it all, which eventually succeeded. So besides the certification I improved my ability to learn with it. And that in turn gives me strength for the next one: CCIEv5.

Yes, there I said it. For over a year I kept doubting it a bit, saying I wanted it but not putting a date on it. That’s over now. In a month I’ll start preparing the written with hopefully the exam in the first quarter of 2015.

I am ready.

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