Hi there!
I’m Chris Parker, a network engineer living in London, England, UK, Earth. That’s my full address, in case you want to post me love letters.
More specifically, I’m an instructor and courseware developer for Juniper Networks. If you’ve attended the instructor-led Junos MPLS Fundamentals (JMF) or Junos Layer 2 MPLS VPNs (JL2V) courses since the start of 2022, you’ve got a student guide (that’s the book with the slides and the written explanations) that was all created by me. I also made the hands-on labs for the MPLS Fundamentals course, too.
(However, this website is 100% completely my own. More on that in a bit.)
I started this blog in the late 2010, as I was studying for various certs, and noticed that there was a serious lack of interesting content out there. There’s plenty of blogs, plenty of books, but so many of them sent me to sleep. I wanted to try to create something different – a website that teaches networking, but has some fun along the way.
Networking is fascinating, and near-magical. Far from being dull and boring, I think networking educational material should inspire and delight people. Through this website, I’m making the kind of posts that I wish there was more of. And with any luck, maybe I’ll even inspire you to start your own blog, too.
Since starting this website I’m delighted to have achieved various vendor certs, including the Juniper JNCIP-SP, and also the Juniper Instructor cert.
Before joining Juniper I’ve worked in the ISP sector since around 2007, but it was only in the late 2010s that I truly fell in love with networking – and it’s probably not a coincidence that it was around the same time that I started to use Junos!
Before joining Juniper as an employee I had the incredible privilege of being invited to become one of just 25 worldwide Juniper Ambassadors. It means I get to be involved in cool projects and get direct access to Juniper engineers, in exchange for sharing the knowledge and the passion that I have for Junos, and for networking at large.
For example, I contributed chapters to the Juniper Ambassadors’ Cookbook 2019. It’s a collection of “recipes” showing you how to solve specific problems. And guess what – like almost all Juniper books, it’s completely free! My chapters were all about MPLS. Give it a read!
More recently I wrote chapter 2 of the Beginners Guide To Junos, a completely free book that will help you get started on your own journey.
By the way, rest assured: although I am an employee of Juniper, this blog is entirely my own. It’s written in my spare time, I don’t ask anyone’s permission or clearance about any of the content I write, and it’s entirely free, by me, for the community.
Of course, if you want to support me and help me to pay my web hosting, I definitely won’t say no! Believe me when I say that this is a loss-making project. If you like my posts, I’ll always be grateful to anyone who helps me to break even.
CONTACT
I’m on twitter dot com, but I rarely use it nowadays since ol’ Musky made it even worse than it previously was. https://twitter.com/networkfuntimes
I’m experimenting with Mastodon but I don’t find it very satisfying: https://noc.social/@NetworkFunTimes
And, as of the time of writing, I just signed up to Spoutible, and have zero followers. Here’s hoping one of these sites ends up being our collective Twitter replacement. https://spoutible.com/NetworkFunTimes
Yo, you should get in touch with me if you’re nice: chris@networkfuntimes.com