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Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech?

In 2011, taught a classroom of about 120 people IPv6 Fundamentals in Denver. Participants ranged from private companies / service providers to government bodies that came from NASA, NIST, DOJ to name a few. Class was written 100% by me, which took roughly 3 months to write.

The class covered a very broad range of topics, that covered IPv6 protocol stuff, Subnetting, IPv6 Multicast, Routing Protocols, and troubleshooting to name a few sections. Class ran about 7 hours of solid classroom theory.

Class also included hands on labs at the end of the class, was pretty awesome to see people able to turn on IPv6 and make it work with a few clicks. It was exciting for me, because they were able to do this after my class.

The most memorable part of the whole class was me standing out front before the class started, and just meeting the attendees. I had the Mohawk up all the way. People would walk by and pass judgement pretty quickly, which I found really interesting.

The best part of the whole thing, was when I was introduced by one of the guys, as he was explaining my credentials, what I’ve accomplished, the things I’ve done with IPv6, my extensive knowledge of integrating IPv6 with DOCSIS. As I walked by all the people who were pretty quick to judge as they walked by me earlier, it started dawning on them pretty quickly, that they maybe were too quick to draw a conclusion so quickly.

As I took the podium, and when class began, as I started to speak, I could tell by the look of their faces they were shocked. As we started to dive deeper and deeper into the class, those people who made those quick judgements were impressed with the class.

Afterwards at the end of the class, I hung around the classroom for over 2 hours answering questions 1 on 1 with the attendees. Got several kudos about the class, even had a few people straight up tell me that they didn’t expect the level of a “Fundamentals” class that was so detailed. A few of them even offered up that they would have never expected a class from someone with a big Mohawk, and big gauges. Scott Hogg from Cisco was laughing pretty hard when they said that. It felt good being able to write a class from the ground up, teach the theory, answer every question to the best of my ability, and show them with hands on how to make it work.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.