Everyone says network engineers need to automate. Learn Python. Learn Ansible. Build a source of truth. Learn Git. Test your changes. Stop doing everything manually.
There’s just one problem: when?
At AutoCon 5 in Munich, Andy Lapteff sat down with Dutch network automation consultants Bart Dorlandt and Bart Smeding for a conversation that starts with Python and eventually lands somewhere much more interesting: time.
Automation can turn three hours of work into three minutes. But getting there requires engineers to invest time they often don’t have, or don’t feel permitted to protect. Andy knows that firsthand — at one point in his career his manager gave him an entire day every week to learn automation, and he kept spending that day catching up on operational work instead.
That question opens a much bigger conversation about engineering culture, burnout, professional identity, European and American attitudes toward work, change freezes, technical debt, and the endless tension between keeping today’s network running and building a better way to operate it tomorrow.
Andy wrote up his side of it in a companion blog post: My Boss Gave Me Tuesdays. I Gave Them Back.
Host:
- Andy Lapteff — Host of The Art of Network Engineering
Guests:
- Bart Dorlandt — Freelance network automation solutions architect and CCIE (dreamnetworking.nl)
- Bart Smeding — Network automation consultant (netdevops.it)
Chapters:
- 0:00 — Intro
- 0:47 — Two Barts, one Munich hotel
- 3:53 — The easy button nobody gets
- 6:52 — Wi-Fi is solved; the LAN is not
- 8:16 — Eight months for the CLI, never eight for Python
- 12:23 — Five maintenance windows a week
- 26:04 — Read-only first
- 30:33 — Everything breaks; you own the failure handling
- 32:18 — The CLI is an API; you are the human regex
- 34:45 — Change freezes and the feeling of safety
- 39:26 — Source of truth, or Excel
- 41:37 — Maybe we are too Dutch
- 44:12 — Two priorities, pick one
- 46:00 — The Tuesday confession
- 48:32 — Unlimited PTO: we can, but we can’t
- 50:02 — Does Europe automate more?
- 52:21 — The first script that worked
- 53:54 — Where to find the Barts