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 a courseware developer (and occasional instructor) for HPE Juniper Networking, previously Juniper Networks. However, this website is 100% completely owned and written by me, and is totally independent of any vendor. It’s written entirely 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 for you and the community.
If you’ve attended any of the Juniper Networks courses below in recent years, then you’ve attended my version of these courses, all of which I either rewrote on my own, or co-wrote with my great colleague and pal Bianca Lolea:
- Junos MPLS Fundamentals
- Junos Layer 2 MPLS VPNs
- Junos Segment Routing with SR-MPLS
- Junos Segment Routing with SRv6 Micro-SIDs
- Introduction to the Junos OS (co-written with Bianca Lolea)
When you attend these courses, you’ll also get access to an entire book on each of these topics, most of which are somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 words long.
I started this blog in 2018, when I was studying for various certs, and I noticed that (in my personal opinion) there was a serious lack of interesting content out there on the topics I was studying for. 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 I’d had access to when I was studying for these topics. 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 JNCIE-SP, and also the Juniper Instructor cert. Also, I’m the proud owner of the award for the “Most Handsome Man in Networking” – although, please bear in mind that I did give that award to myself. Still, I think it’s quite impressive. After all, the award did come from me, the official Most Handsome Man in Networking.
I must confess that I don’t get time nowadays to write many new posts. Nevertheless, I still pay to keep this website up, because I hope that my many historical posts will help you (that’s you, the person reading these words now!) on your networking journey. I’ll never paywall any of this content – but 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. I’m not making any profit from this website. So, if you like my posts, I’ll always be grateful to anyone who helps me to break even.
A QUICK BIT OF HISTORY
I’ve previously worked in the ISP sector since around 2005, 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! Along the way I slowly rose the ranks from 1st line support for home users, up to Principal Network Architect of a UK ISP.
Before joining Juniper Networks 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.
CONTACT
Historically, I have used Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. Nowadays I tend to only use Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/networkfuntimes.bsky.social). I only post occasionally, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the links and opinions that I share.
If you’d like to contact me directly, drop me an email address at chris@networkfuntimes.com. I might be slow to reply sometimes, but I promise i will do my best to reply to you.