Machines made this, mistakes and all...

[00:00:00] Chris: Hello, and welcome to the imposter syndrome network podcast, where everyone belongs, especially if you think you don't, my name is Chris Grundeman, and this is the Simone Spinelli episode. Simone is a network and system engineer focused on automation, virtualization technologies, and high availability. He spent most of his professional life at the university of Pisa until at the end of 2016, he moved to the Netherlands and started a journey in the world of ISPs.

[00:00:36] Chris: During his career, Simone has gained experience across several fields, from networking to cloud computing and from identity management to optical fibers.

[00:00:48] Chris: Hey Simone, uh, would you like to introduce yourself a bit further to the Impostor Syndrome Network? 

[00:00:52] Simone: Uh, what can I say? I'm just nobody. So it's fine. What you said is correct. 

[00:01:01] Chris: Well, perfect. Hopefully we'll dig into a little bit of that, uh, possibly Impostor Syndrome there as we dive through this, uh, episode, but I think you're right in the right place.

[00:01:09] Chris: And, and where I want to start is with where you work now, GEANT, I think I'm saying it right. It's G E A N T for those who can't spell how I pronounce things. Um, but anyway, it's a collaboration of European national research and education networks. I think, you know, we had Chris Cummings on not too long ago, who told us a little bit about what the idea of a research and education network is, but I do think that's still a topic that's foreign to most folks, even who work in networking, you know, people kind of understand data center environments.

[00:01:37] Chris: They understand enterprise environments. They understand ISPs, but regional, you know, research and education networks are, are maybe slightly different or a combination of all of the above. Can you tell us a little bit about what GEANT specifically is and maybe, you know, how that fits in with R and E networks?

[00:01:51] Simone: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a, it's a very exciting. Environment and I'm happy to, to, to, to be able to explain it all from the bottom of the chain to the top where I am now, let's say, so every country have a research and education network that connect educational institution, for example, the University of Pisa, where I spend most of my professional life, uh, and these networks.

[00:02:17] Simone: Created the association, which is a, which is a strange beast that runs a physical, really tangible network, but interconnect these European countries and their research and education networks and interconnect them to the rest of the world. So. For example, to our friends, uh, in a, in a ESnet or Internet2, or we do projects in Africa, uh, like Ubuntu net, uh, Africa connect, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:02:51] Simone: So it's a, it's a very different world from, uh, from the commercial service providers. And, uh, yeah, it's all about community. It's all about, uh, helping each other and do what's the best for your users, right? I started my career in a university where we didn't have customers. We only had users. And now I'm back to that.

[00:03:13] Simone: And it's a very nice concept to, to think about, uh, users rather than customers. 

[00:03:20] Chris: Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that distinction between kind of looking at, you know, users versus customers. I mean, what, what are the differences from, from your experience and kind of, you know, the way that that interaction happens?

[00:03:32] Simone: Um, I might be brutal, but I always had the, the feeling that you try to squeeze customers. To exploit them, but I'm not sure if this is too much on the, on the other hand with users, you work together. So you have a common goal and you try to do what's the best for them to fulfill how to say their goal becomes your goal, enabling.

[00:03:57] Simone: Your users to do more, to do better, to do easier. So that's the main distinction. And I've been in some commercial situations, right? It's nice. There is a lot of technology, a lot of good people, and it's really nice to work in, in, in certain environment. But the goal, the final goal was. It didn't fit to me.

[00:04:21] Simone: I don't really care about, uh, selling few more subscriptions for TV on demand. I really prefer to support big science experiments or bridge the digital divide in the Eastern part of Europe. That was, you know, it gives me a fuzzy feeling that, that really. Makes me feel happy. Yeah. 

[00:04:44] Chris: That's awesome. I like that.

[00:04:45] Chris: And I think that is, I think that's the right distinction. I definitely can see it that way. Um, right where you're, you know, truly trying to help and work together versus trying to find a way to fit them into a box that lets them pay you for something. Right. I mean, it kind of, yeah, definitely. 

[00:04:57] Simone: Yeah. How can I ask you a little bit, some money, more money?

[00:05:01] Simone: How can I create a need for you? Or how can I optimize cost, you know, to, to maximize revenue. These are concepts that perfectly fine. I'm not condemning it. I mean, we need this, but it's just not for me. It's not a powerful enough as a driver. 

[00:05:20] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. So you've, I mean, I fairly recently within the last year, you moved from being a network engineer to a network architect.

[00:05:28] Chris: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about, you know, what your day job actually looks like. What do you do day to day now as a, as a network architect for GEANT? 

[00:05:35] Simone: Yeah. So I, I think just, first of all, titles are just titles. Okay. So I can praise myself being a super mega something, but it doesn't change with the nature of my job.

[00:05:48] Simone: The fact is that I like to build things. I like to build things for others so that, that I can make their lives easier. And, uh, in GEANT right now, we are going through an automation journey, let's say. So we started, we re tendered our I-P-M-P-L-S layer and we are switching vendor from Juniper to Nokia. So we have to, to redeploy, reconfigure, and migrate our entire network that it might.

[00:06:18] Simone: Seem a small network, but it's also dispersed across the entire Europe. And so you can imagine how many things can go wrong and how many, how much space you have for optimization. Yeah. So my, my main focus is to drive these transition with a small team. And. To be quite honest, I spend most of my days on Zoom having calls and trying to get things done.

[00:06:45] Simone: But yeah, I'm lucky enough to have a very wide variety of problems to tackle from really low level technical things. How this configuration should be done, how can we generalize it? To more, um, high level thoughts. So what is our model for this service? And the work is becoming really interesting. And if I'm not mistaken, I'm going to present this at Autocon1 in Amsterdam in, uh, In, in few weeks.

[00:07:20] Simone: So yeah, I have a pretty chaotic day every day of the week. 

[00:07:26] Chris: Yeah. So, and this episode's gonna air on the 4th of June, which means you just presented at Auto Con. 

[00:07:32] Simone: Oh, oh, . Okay. 

[00:07:35] Chris: Yeah, that's so, uh, by this time, by, by the time everybody hears this, they can go on YouTube and probably find the talk, so that's cool.

[00:07:41] Simone: Oh, so it's nice that, go, go guys. 

[00:07:44] Chris: It's good timing. Yeah. So, hey, so looking back a little bit, uh, you know, you said you've kind of spent most of your career at the University of Pisa. I know you started as a network admin there, um, right around the turn of the century. I'm wondering if we go back even a little bit further, what was your first ever job or, or was that it?

[00:07:59] Chris: Was there something else you got paid to do before that? 

[00:08:02] Simone: Yeah, including summer jobs. No, I think that was my first real job, but apart from delivering pizzas on, uh, super fast motorbikes. And, um, yeah, that, that, that was it. But I started really from the basics. So I started doing, uh, PBX administration. So telephone systems.

[00:08:25] Simone: Yeah. And these were the years where we, with VoIP was starting, uh, and we had a lot of, And, uh, fortunately enough, the University of Pisa was the owner of a fiber network that went across the whole city. So I had the chance to, to, to, to play with every kind of technology and, and, and things now from, from the telephone cables and learn to fix it to fibers.

[00:08:53] Simone: And, uh, technologies. So it was really, really cool. I would say at that point in time. 

[00:09:00] Chris: Yeah. To get that kind of full view of, of not just the fiber, not just the network, not just the phone calls, but kind of the whole stack of the communication. 

[00:09:08] Simone: Yeah. And only now is like, we can do it. It was not, it was a strange environment because we would do alone everything from building a small data center in a.

[00:09:19] Simone: 1300, uh, old, you know, because it's pretty old. So we have these old palaces, uh, you can't dig because you will find some Roman things. That was us like pirates doing stuff. We want, uh, a small data center here just for that. And let us do it. So all the cabling and, uh, yeah, I remember these years like, uh, being very, very fun.

[00:09:48] Simone: Nice. With a lot of things to, to learn and a lot of exposure to your users. Right. It comes again at that point in time, the, the, the network was not the real service for us. If the, if, if, if you can't send emails for an hour, nobody would complain. It was 2002, 2003. But if you cut the telephone lines, everything is, is gone.

[00:10:11] Simone: stuck. And so you are there like a, you know, a little hero coming there. Let me see, there is a board that I need to reseat or these kinds of things. It was really, really fun. And, uh, yeah, also completely unstructured, like, like most of my life. 

[00:10:30] Chris: Nice. So I guess my question then is, is, is why, why get into tech?

[00:10:34] Chris: Why, why go down that path at all? I mean, what, what attracted you to that kind of work or that job? Or how did you end up in that job even? 

[00:10:41] Simone: It was partially deliberate and partially accidental. So I studied telecommunication engineering, convinced that the internet would free us all. And, uh, so that was my deliberate part.

[00:10:56] Simone: And then, and then. Like after the first year I started studying, I got this job at the same university and was really, was just fun. And also I had some money to, to, to be independent and, uh, and say, bye bye mom, which is, which was a good thing, at least for me. And, uh, yeah, luck I would say, but, but I'm happy I stayed.

[00:11:21] Simone: I mean, 

[00:11:22] Chris: yes, you got, you got into it and really enjoyed it. It sounds like, 

[00:11:25] Simone: yeah. And I tend to say to everyone that some people in tech, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle, so you just have it in you. No, you can't, you can't help yourself. Do you just have to explore and test and home lab being and do these kinds of things.

[00:11:44] Simone: Which is weird. Now for my, for my family, I'm the computer guy that that's it, but I managed to not fix printers. Nice. That's, that's an achievement. That's my, that's my, my boundary. 

[00:11:57] Chris: Nice. So, um, fast forward back to kind of where you are now. You, I mean, most of the titles I think across your career have been network engineering.

[00:12:05] Chris: I assume that was mostly kind of individual contributor. You're in there, you're just kind of working on things, fixing things, building things. Um, and now you said you're, you're kind of leading a team on the project. Have you, have you been a team lead throughout most of your career? Is that something fairly new?

[00:12:19] Simone: It's, uh, yeah, a formal team lead. No, not really. I always have people around me and I like to talk and I like to. Um, to push for my ideas. So that thing came natural, but no, this is, I would say this is my first formal, uh, uh, let's say leadership position, but it really depends. For example, I'm a big fan of the pair setup.

[00:12:50] Simone: So give a problem to a couple of people and they will solve it. Just close them in a room, give them a room on a whiteboard. Yeah. And sooner or later you will get the result. 

[00:13:01] Chris: So one of the reasons I ask is I think, you know, some of the people we talked to on the show, you know, obviously there's multiple different paths.

[00:13:07] Chris: I mean, that's one of the one of the points of this podcast is to kind of highlight that there's these different paths in technology, even even within just the infrastructure side of things. And even inside the networking side of things. There's all these different paths you can take. And obviously one of them is, you know, kind of going down formal management path and a lot of people, I think technologists for whatever reason we go that way, it's a big change, right?

[00:13:26] Chris: It's a, it's a jarring change. It sounds like for you, it's been more kind of a gradual thing. You've kind of worked on teams and been a little bit of an, you know, informal leader, kind of pushing things forward. And so now in that formal role, it's kind of just. An evolution, more of the same versus something totally different.

[00:13:41] Simone: Yeah, it's just, uh, how to say I start from the principle that there is no magic. No. So you have to understand technology. If you are unable to tell me where the packet is going or how the pocket is kind of formed. Then you didn't understand the problem. Right. And this is for me, it's true for everything.

[00:13:58] Simone: No, but there is a difference in my mind between people who can and not that who can, who are willing to do the next step. So I, how do I. Make something new or build something around the fact that I understand this problem and the people that are just, uh, happy to solve that to fix things. 

[00:14:19] Chris: Yeah, 

[00:14:20] Simone: right. So the difference I make is between fixing things.

[00:14:26] Simone: So applying patches and rethinking. something because it, it, it needs a different design. It needs a different approach. So for me, being a team leader means just. work with my team and say, okay, guys, this is a fix, but we actually have to re to rethink it. Yeah, we actually have to challenge what we did until now and find a better way, right?

[00:14:52] Simone: Because we all agree that maybe, I don't know, sending emails by hand sucks. Let's, let's think it through. How can we make it better? How can we make it faster? How can we make it, uh, nicer? No, there is also like, uh, a side of, um, aesthetic things has to be, has to be nice to see and to use. So that, that's, that's my goal.

[00:15:17] Simone: And I tend to surround myself to people who think the same, and that's how I met Chris and Peter and all these people around the workflow orchestrator. 

[00:15:28] Chris: Yeah, I like that. And I think, you know, on the aesthetics bit, I think. I don't know who, somebody said something like, you know, a, if, if a solution is beautiful, it doesn't make it, you know, necessarily correct.

[00:15:39] Chris: But if it's not beautiful, it's probably not correct. Something like that. I think it was Edison or somebody said something like that. I think. 

[00:15:45] Simone: I don't know, but I totally, I totally agree. You know, if it's ugly, yeah, something is wrong for sure. So we have to aim for beauty. 

[00:15:55] Chris: Yeah. I think so. And I also think, you know, a little bit earlier than that, you said something around, you know, well, just this idea of kind of fixing versus rebuilding.

[00:16:04] Chris: I like that a lot. I hadn't thought about things in those terms before, right? But there is this level of to put a different spin on or maybe this is something totally different. But, you know, looking at things and saying, Okay, I figured out how it works. This is how it works. And then, you know, either like sticking to that or just kind of, you know, really being formal about, okay, this is how that thing works.

[00:16:21] Chris: Instead of thinking about, okay, but could it work better? Right? That aspect to it, which is adding some creativity there. Instead of just saying, okay, well, this is how the SMTP protocol works. We're done over, you know, finding creative ways to adapt that, right? Kind of almost like that hacker mindset of taking something and using it for something else.

[00:16:37] Simone: You could call it like this. For me, it's just, uh, understanding things is a tool. It's a tool for your higher goals now. And you see this a lot when you talk about network automation, where people are obsessed with the configuration that goes on the device, right? Yes, that might be correct in that specific case.

[00:16:57] Simone: But how do you generalize? How do you make it better? How do you Abstract from the config to the service, to your goal, to your intent, and that's a completely different bag of problems and, uh, and, uh, and challenges. So, yeah, understanding how things work is just a tool to make them better. And you can call it hacking, but yeah, 

[00:17:21] Chris: yeah, no, that makes sense to me.

[00:17:23] Chris: I like that kind of toolbox approach. I tend to think that way in a lot of things, right. Is, is as you learn these different bits and pieces, you could, you take them as tools and then can recombine them in different ways, use them in the right place to, uh, to do something new. Yeah. I like that. 

[00:17:36] Simone: Yeah. But you can only do it if you really understood all the bits and pieces, all the things that compose your problem.

[00:17:43] Simone: So 

[00:17:44] Chris: yeah, exactly. 

[00:17:45] Chris: And there's, cause I've talked about this before with other folks on the show. The idea that in order to like teach something to someone else, you have to really, really understand it. But I think it's also true that in order to improve something, um, you have to really, really understand it, right?

[00:17:59] Chris: The deeper your understanding, I think the more elegant, the solution you can come up with. 

[00:18:03] Simone: Someone I recently heard, I can't remember if it was maybe a confidence. Told us if you, if you really understand something, you're able to explain it to, to my mom or to, uh, 40 years old. No. And, and that's, yeah, that's a concept that is, in my opinion, very powerful, right?

[00:18:21] Simone: You need to understand things and technologies in a way that you can kind of cut and, and, um, adapt your explanation to your audience. And once you are able to do this, then you, then you really get it, then you can really decompose it and then bend it to, to, to, to your goals. But it's a, it's a real, how to say, it's real deep understanding of problems that makes you able to do this and, uh, it's not for granted.

[00:18:51] Simone: I think 

[00:18:52] Chris: right. Not at all. Not at all. And I that also has reflected, um, that same kind of thought pattern anyway, right? Of kind of being able to understand the details, but then also the big picture maybe helps not just in the solutions, but also in understanding what's important. I noticed, I think it was on, uh, on your LinkedIn page or something.

[00:19:10] Chris: I found a place where you wrote something about developing a strong capacity to maintain a global vision while at the same time taking care of the details. And that that makes you able to effectively prioritize tasks, which I think is related to this a little bit. Just that thought process, no? 

[00:19:24] Simone: Yeah, yes.

[00:19:27] Simone: I think every choice matters, right? Strategies will tell us, well, if I decide to do this instead of that, that's a strategic choice, right? Because I'm making, I'm taking a big decision, right? But also how you, how you decide to do it. This problem just needs a fix because I can postpone it or I can refine it later.

[00:19:50] Simone: I don't know, or this thing is really fundamental for the entire, you know, castle, right? 

[00:19:58] Chris: Yeah. 

[00:19:58] Simone: So for me, it's, it's kind of important that when you do things, even in your, in your specific field, you never forget. What are the implications for the rest of the teams for the rest of your business or organization now, because you have an impact, even if you are doing something that you think it's stupid, not everything as a, as a consequence, uh, uh, an impact with in the global thing.

[00:20:24] Simone: So I try to be conscious that small things can, can ripple and generate big waves. Right. And then, um, yeah, I try to, I try to be good at that. 

[00:20:39] Chris: Um, so let me ask you a question then on the other side of that, you know, obviously for, for most of us anyway, that doesn't always work out. I wonder if there's ever been a time that you are willing to talk about where you've just kind of failed completely.

[00:20:51] Simone: Oh yeah. I mean, many, many, many times. And then, uh, 

[00:20:56] Chris: is there one in particular that you think of that might be worth sharing as a, as a story? 

[00:21:00] Simone: Oh, well, I don't know if I can talk about that, but for a certain time in my life, for a certain period, I was a CPE tester. And I approved the firmware that would, uh, that would reset the device to factory default.

[00:21:14] Simone: So you upgrade and you, and you lose all your settings. And we rolled it out and half of the network was, uh, was flopped. And, uh, yeah, I, I, these things happen. And that's why you, and that's why you should remember why are you doing what you're doing? And that, and also why I'm a big fan of working in pairs, because if I wasn't alone, someone would have said, man, didn't you see the, the, the, the thing is completely decided.

[00:21:48] Simone: But I would say big failures like this that are, in my opinion, are part of normal life. You have to go through this. You have to fail. You have to, yeah, feel the shame. 

[00:21:59] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. If we're lucky, we can learn from other people's mistakes also, but I agree if you don't throw a few of your own in there where you actually feel that, that, that, that shame, that guilt, whatever that is.

[00:22:10] Chris: It's like touching a hot stove, right? Once you do it, you feel it. It hurts. You want to avoid it. But if you never do it, you know, you might, might be curious and end up touching it eventually, right? 

[00:22:19] Simone: I know it's so kind of, again, makes you understand the, the, the consequence of your actions. And unfortunately, I think for human nature, it's bad.

[00:22:30] Simone: It's most, most powerful to learn from mistakes than from success. We are really bad at celebrating our success, but very good in blaming ourselves for the mistakes we make. So, and just embrace it. I mean, I think nobody can, can say I never made any mistakes. So just, uh, 

[00:22:50] Chris: yeah. Yeah. And I like that too. Uh, we had a guest on not too long ago, uh, Maxie Reynolds, who, who talked about that a little bit about, I think the way she put it was that people who are often find themselves in trouble, they tend to give themselves credit.

[00:23:03] Chris: for their wins, thinking like how skilled they are, and then they blame everything else for their failures. And she's like, you know, what she's seen is successful people more often actually, you know, blame themselves for their failures. They look around and see what could I have done better. And when they, when they win, they kind of attribute that to luck.

[00:23:20] Chris: And they're like, okay, I got lucky that time versus the other way around. 

[00:23:24] Simone: And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so happy to be here because That's me now. If it's, if it's a success, guys, we did a great job. If it's a failure. Yeah. I take it on me because yeah, I should have done it differently. I don't know.

[00:23:39] Simone: I, I maybe not the best way to be stress less in your life, but absolutely good. If you want to, if you want to, to, to learn and I would say I just, uh, learn to deal with this, uh, side of my psychology. 

[00:23:56] Chris: And I think that maybe leads to kind of some of the ways you approach things, right? I've heard you say that you give equal attention to planning, coordination, and communication as to the technical side of projects that you're working on.

[00:24:10] Chris: And I think that's really important and something that we can get lost in the technical details sometimes. And, and forget to like document stuff, plan stuff, tell people what we're doing, show our work to other people, you know, planning, coordination, communication that's up front so that by the time you're doing the technical work, it's actually a smaller portion of the work, but it's more successful because of all that other work.

[00:24:29] Simone: We go back to, to a couple of concepts we already talked about. So if you're unable to communicate what you're going to do and the why you're going to do it, maybe you didn't understand exactly what to do. So for me, being able to explain, justify and promote my work, let's say, it's very important because it's part of understanding why am I doing and, and, and, uh, um, understanding the problem.

[00:24:57] Simone: So being able to. Promote a decision, promote, um, a choice, not just to say, guys, this is, this is the future, but it's exactly to show that I own the problem and I take responsibility for this and I'm able to justify it and explain it to everybody in the room that that should be my goal. I'm not, I'm not sure I'm, I'm always able to do it.

[00:25:23] Simone: Sure. Yeah. And, and secondly, The point is that every action you make has consequences. So if you don't communicate it, if you don't make other people aware of what you're doing, there might be some problems, right? From you come up with something cool, but you don't communicate it. Tell it to people. People won't use it.

[00:25:45] Simone: Right. So you're, you're kind of wasting your time. Oh, I have this great thing that does this. If it stays in, in, in my team, if it's not shared, it lose values. It just lose value. And, and the third point is that you, you always might be wrong. So if you share what you're doing, maybe someone from the back of the room can say, Oh, did you consider this?

[00:26:10] Simone: Yeah. And you didn't, and you can get better. So communication, in my mind, is one of the key things to do work in tech. Because there is this, this, this idea that we, that we work in isolation, you know, like, uh, in the dark. On your screen, creating fantastic code, but no, no, actually, actually, that's not how it works, or at least that that's not how I think it works.

[00:26:37] Simone: It's, it's a lot of discussions. Would you do this? Would you do that? There are many ways to skin a cat. I think some people say, yeah, so you have to confront yourself. 

[00:26:49] Chris: I love it. Unfortunately, that's about all the time we have for today. Simone, do you have any, any projects or causes or, or anything you're working on, or you'd like to highlight for the Impostor Syndrome Network?

[00:27:00] Chris: Either something we have talked about or even something we haven't. 

[00:27:02] Simone: Well, uh, I think as a, as a personal project, I would like to be able to share more. So you, you asked me at the beginning if I have any blog or stuff. No, I don't. But I write a lot on our internal documentation. So one of my, uh, resolutions, let's say for this year that it well started is to, to, to share a little bit more about the work we are doing and, and for sure, the participation to AutoCon.

[00:27:34] Simone: It's part of that, so get in touch with more users and, uh, make them happy. 

[00:27:39] Chris: Awesome. I like that. I think that would be great for sure. Well, we'll keep an eye out for more, uh, public documentation from, uh, from Simone. Uh, well, thank you so much for, for being on and sharing your story with the Impostor Syndrome Network.

[00:27:52] Chris: This has been really great. And thank you to all of our listeners for your time, your attention, and your support. If you found this episode insightful or interesting or even just entertaining, please consider paying it forward by letting others know about this show and the great guests we have on.

[00:28:07] Chris: Before we close out, Simone, I do have kind of one last question. I wonder, you know, if you think back over all your years so far, is there anything you would call out as kind of the greatest success you've had in your career so far? And you can measure that in any way, right? What's the greatest achievement from your perspective?

[00:28:21] Chris: Of your career so far? 

[00:28:22] Simone: Mm. Yeah. I, I think I'm leaving it now. Yeah. So changing country, changing context, and still being able to find yourself and do something useful for a community. A community that I really feel part of it, it's my most, uh, fulfilling, um, thing. So, yeah. Very happy right now. 

[00:28:44] Chris: Excellent. I love to hear that.

[00:28:46] Chris: Thanks again. And we will be back next week.