One of the most difficult challenges we’ve faced with Ignition is what to present and how to organize everything. After many hours of brainstorming, we’ve settled on what we feel are important principles to guide Ignition content and organization for the long haul.
We don’t want to cover material that is commonly taught in certification training programs. For many of you, that would be mostly boring–material you’re already familiar enough with to do your job. And hey, if you want to review VLANs or routing protocol basics, there is a lot of material available to you in the form of books, classes, etc. You don’t need Ignition to reinvent that wheel.
We do want to cover technology that helps you develop your professional career. We’ll give you a practical perspective along with nuts-and-bolts instruction on a variety of network design techniques, new tools, and emerging protocols.
We’ll also cover industry happenings that we think are important for you to have an opinion on. The hope is that you’re well-informed when you’re helping business stakeholders make technology decisions.
To organize Ignition content, we’ve already got the Dashboard and Index pages. These pages help you keep up with the latest Ignition content or review the entire body of published work.
What if you want to research a specific topic instead? To help you research topics, we’re introducing the Ignition framework and collections.
Framework
The Ignition framework is a list of topical collections that we feel will help you advance your career. The topics we’ve selected meet one of two criteria.
1. Hard to understand. Some topics are difficult to get your head around, but are still important tools to have in your toolbox. We’ll attempt to make these topics easier to grasp. Quality of Service (QoS) is an example.
2. Emerging technology. Some topics are recent developments in networking. These topics are hard to find educational material about in the wide world, so we’ll cover them. Examples include SD-WAN, segment routing, and cloud networking.
Collections
The Ignition framework is made up of collections. Each collection will, once built, have a landing page where you’ll be able to find all the content we’ve got to offer in the collection. Collections will contain the following sorts of items.
Original content unique to Ignition. The content might be articles, videos, courses, or podcasts that were created specifically for Ignition, and can’t be found anywhere else.
Existing content we’ve curated for Ignition. For example, we have over 1,000 podcasts in the Packet Pushers audio library. We’ll take podcasts that belong in an Ignition collection, remove any ads, and create a time-stamped index of the show. That way, you can find exactly what you’re looking for quickly.
What’s Next?
The Ignition framework is published here. This framework page will serve as one way to jump into different collections as we publish collection pages. However, not all the collections will exist all at once. We’ve got to build them first! Therefore, think of the framework page as the roadmap that will reflect Ignition’s reality increasingly as we add content to the Ignition library.
The framework should also be viewed as a living document. The framework will change as networking changes and as Ignition members like you offer input.
If you’d like to contribute to any of the collections found in the Ignition framework, send an e-mail to drew@packetpushers.net. We are paying content creators to help the Ignition library grow.
