About

I'm Antonio McCarver — United States Marine Corps veteran, fourteen years at Cisco (Leader, Customer Delivery), CCIE Collaboration, and, on the side, a real estate agent and a builder of things. This site is the second CCIE, done in public.

Why "Grind"

Because that's what it is. Nobody stumbles into a CCIE. It's early mornings, labs that break at 11 p.m., and re-reading the same RFC until it finally clicks. I'd rather show that honestly than pretend it's a highlight reel.

What you'll find here

• Journey — the dated log: what I studied, what went wrong, what I'd do differently.
• Notes — topic write-ups published directly from my study vault, tagged to the exam blueprint.
• Progress — every 350-901 AUTOCOR objective and where I stand on it.

The track

350-901 AUTOCOR v2.0 (Designing, Deploying and Managing Network Automation Systems) is the shared core for CCNP Automation and CCIE Automation. The lab comes after. Ansible, Terraform, Python, RESTCONF/YANG, GitLab CI, CML, pyATS, telemetry, and now AI agents and MCP servers on the blueprint — it's a different animal from Collaboration, and that's the point.

Say hello

Studying for the same thing? Building the same things? Find me on GitHub. Corrections to anything I've written are always welcome — being wrong in public is how you get right faster.