HN843: From Network Engineer to Network Architect with Kevin Nanns

Ethan Banks (0:00)

On today's Heavy Networking, we've chatted with Kevin Nanns about his experience transitioning from network engineer to network architect. I'm Ethan Banks with Drew Conray-Murray, and we'd like it if you'd follow us on LinkedIn. That would help boost our fragile egos and remind us that you do indeed care about networking. You might also like our community Slack group, where thousands of other folks who care about networking from around the world hang out, talk, shop, share memes, and solve problems together. Not to many of you guys that are out there, Kevin Nanns is a familiar face and voice that you see and hear on your social media and your content feeds. He is a busy human both on and off the mic, and we appreciate him joining us on short notice and bringing an excellent topic along with him. So Kevin, welcome to Heavy Networking.

This is your first time on this podcast, right?

Kevin Nanns (0:45)

Yeah, 100%. I was saying in the pre-production thing, this is the big show, like I finally made it. You can tell, I know I've made it in my career when I'm on Heavy Networking. This is the show to be on. So thank you for having me.

Ethan Banks (0:58)

Well, that said, you are no stranger to the world of Packet Pushers. Of course, you are a co-host on Life and Uptime and so on. But let's back up for a second for people who maybe don't know you. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Kevin Nanns (1:09)

Yeah. So my day job, my how the majority of people, I guess in my personal life know me as a network architect, recent network architect. We're going to dive into that for Hillsborough County Government, which is the eighth largest county in the United States, second largest in Florida.

And it is an enterprise network, and that is my day job. And my side job is content creation, which I've been doing for about three and a half years now. And I started on TikTok and it has just blown up to being probably more hours sometimes than my day job, which is scary to think about how much time content actually takes in researching, and scripting, and recording, and editing, and all that fun stuff. But yeah, so I'm burning the candle of both ends right now.

Ethan Banks (2:00)

We got to pause and talk about TikTok for a minute, because there's a lot of people listening to this that have never been on TikTok. I'm one of them, because to me TikTok is kids who are doing weird things and taking absurd challenges, and it's short form content, it's doom scrolling, it's brain rot. And that's not what Kevin's doing on TikTok. So tell us what's up.

Kevin Nanns (2:17)

Well, to be fair, sometimes I do do that.

Sometimes you have to play the game a little bit. One of my most popular videos is about IT fashion, and I'm literally going from t-shirt and my normal clothes to an IT uniform, where I'm putting on a too tight polo, khakis that are too tight, my butt crack showing, that kind of stuff. Making fun of the IT profession a little bit. So there is a little bit of funny memeing going on, but I do try to stay to the educational, actually helping people. And I would say TikTok is a lot of the kids dancing and doing challenges, doing stupid stuff. But there is a STEM feed, just like all science-based, engineering-based feed. So you can even not see that kind of stuff.

Ethan Banks (3:10)

I mean, you don't have to make that feed. TikTok actually gives you a STEM feed?

Kevin Nanns (3:13)

Yeah, it's in the settings. You have to enable it.

So it's not on by default, but in the general settings, there's a STEM feed that you can enable. And you can stick to that feed if you want. And it's all bite-sized learning. And I quit to like CBT Nuggets, where they have those small bugs, they saw 10-minute video on what spanning tree is, and then they go into a little more depth. It's how I kind of approach it, where it's max like three-minute videos on a certain topic, and it's to whet your appetite.

I don't say that I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about spanning tree. But I give you enough information where for the average person who's maybe interested in technology, interested in possibly networking, and they stumble upon my video, it gives them enough information and then they go, oh, that sounds pretty cool. That's how that works. And if they want to learn more about it, then they can go to YouTube or something else to get more in-depth knowledge. So I just think of myself as an appetizer for networking.