Day one: why I'm doing this in public

I already have a CCIE — Collaboration. I know what the grind looks like from the inside: the early mornings, the lab that falls over at 11 p.m., the topic you swear you understood until the practice question proves you didn’t.

This time I’m going for CCIE Automation, and I’m doing it where people can see it.

Why out loud

Two reasons.

First, accountability. A blueprint checklist on a website that other people can look at is a much harder thing to quietly ignore than one in a notebook.

Second, the map. When I did Collaboration, the most useful things I found weren’t the official guides — they were the notes from people a few steps ahead of me who wrote down what actually tripped them up. I want this site to be that for somebody.

The track

The core is 350-901 AUTOCOR v2.0 — Designing, Deploying and Managing Network Automation Systems. It’s the shared core exam for CCNP Automation and CCIE Automation, and then the lab comes after. The blueprint is four domains: Network Automation, Infrastructure as Code, Operations, and — new — AI in Automation, which includes building MCP servers and LLM agents for the network. Ansible, Terraform, Python, RESTCONF and YANG, GitLab CI, CML, pyATS, model-driven telemetry.

It’s a long way from dial plans and SIP trunks. That’s the point.

What’s here

• Journey — this log. Dated, honest, including the days that go badly.
• Notes — study notes published straight from my vault, each one tagged to the blueprint objectives it covers.
• Progress — every objective on the blueprint and where I actually stand.

Today I started the ccie-automation.com CCNP Automation course. Day one on the counter. Let’s go.