Senior Workonline Communications engineer, Michelle Opiyo, gives us the lowdown on the recent Advanced Routing Workshop that Workonline offered in conjunction with Tespok early in November.

During the advanced routing workshop, the participants had an opportunity to gain practical skills and gain in-depth understanding of Internet interconnection, explore IPv6 and most importantly build their networks and become part of a community of engineers. Indeed, some attendees got to solve operational issues on the spot just from being in the room with someone who had dealt with a similar issue before, and sharing experiences with one another. This is exactly why we host these training sessions, not because we have all the answers but because when we come together everyone’s contribution adds to the whole.

The four-day course set out to equip network engineers with the skills required to configure and operate large scale networks using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) according to the current industry best practices. This is important because the Internet relies on individual interconnected networks to act for their own good as well as the good of their directly connected networks to achieve end-to-end connectivity and enhance security.

Workshops like these give engineers the opportunity to practise complex concepts in a safe lab environment and empower trainees with practical skills that are immediately transferrable onto their own networks. Participants were able to relate their day-to-day activities to the course content and better understand how to build scalable networks and leverage their peering and transit relationships. This helps them improve network performance and user experience as well as drive down their cost of operations by efficiently utilising available resources.

Not only was the recent workshop attended equally by men and women, it was led and organised by a female team. A clear sign that women are stepping up and showing up to the proverbial table within the community.

From here, we’ll continue to build the community of network engineers through programs such as these, as well as Beers for Engineers to encourage growth of the peering community within the region. We also have plans to run the same course purely from an IPv6 perspective to catalyse deployment of IPv6 within the service provider networks, so watch this space…