The #DevNet Zone is only a couple of weeks away, and we're hard at work finalizing all of the content, schedules, and, um, beer [1]! If you didn't know already, I manage the DevNet Learning Labs system , and so wanted to update you on the new and updated learning tools that we're rolling out for CLUS. New learning tracks: * Cloud Native Applications : You can learn about how to use Shipped and Mantl to build apps designed for the cloud. * UCS Compute Programmability : Learn about UCS PowerTool and Python SDK for automating infrastructure tasks. * Expose, Compose and Govern Digital Assets with REST APIs : Learn about the Cisco Automation and Integration Platform enables organizations to expose, compose, and govern digital assets quickly and with simplicity to integrate and automate their business processes for both internal and partner use. New tutorials: * Finesse: Learn the basic Finesse User REST APIs and with XMPP Events * Mantl: Learn the details of how to deploy an app into Mantl infrastructure. * Meraki: The purpose of this learning lab is to build a splash page with authentication * Networking 102: Learn about the various network topologies, cabling and communication models. * Networking 103: Learn about IPv4 addresses, models, subnets and subnetting * UCS PowerTool Introduction: Learn to use UCS PowerTool to automate compute infrastructure tasks with this introduction labs * UCS Python SDK Introduction: Learn to use UCS Python SDK to automate compute infrastructure tasks with this introduction labs * YANG 103 (YDK): Learn the basics of how YDK simplifies leveraging a NETCONF API modeled in YANG We've also updated many other tutorials: * APIC-EM Basics * APIC-EM Policy * NETCONF 101, 102, 103 * pxGrid * RESTCONF 101, 102, 103 * Shipped * YANG 101 & 102 Also, we haven't advertised this widely, but a lot of this content is in our GitHub repo.   You're welcome submit a pull request if you find errors or want to make enhancements that. We hope you enjoy all of these new learning materials.  If you're attending CLUS-Vegas, please flag me down to say "Hi"!  I'd love to talk with you. 1. Happy Hour Monday-Wednesday at 4PM; including dualing pianos! ... View more

Over the last year or so, I've been working a lot with AngularJS and Node.  One of the biggest challenges when I started learning Angular in particular, and to a lesser extent Node poses the same challenge, is how to structure your app. A tool that I learned about to help create apps that are structured using "best practices" is called yeoman.  After using it for some time, I liked it so much, I wanted to create a yeoman generator for our free DevNet Learning Labs to make it easier for people creating them.  The idea behind yeoman is to scaffold an app from a template.  For the longest time, I just had a sample project, and the user would just have to copy it, rename a bunch of files (including properties inside), and usually something wouldn't turn out right.  Automation to the rescue! While you can certainly create a yeoman generator for scratch, conveniently (and not surprisingly) the folks from yeoman created a generator for creating a generator.  It's called generator-generator! The basic steps are as follows: Download and install node (I suggest you use nvm if you don't know about it) Download and install yo, which is actually yeoman, but just the alias you type on the command line ( npm install -g yo) . Finally, you should be able to run generator-generator.  (Note that you prefix your generator with generator-).  Hence my generator was named generator-devnet-learninglabs.  Kind of a keyboard full, but alas, I wanted it to be descriptive. You can get pretty fancy, but I stuck to a basic set of questions to generate the scaffolded Learning Lab.  You can find the end result on GitHub. Keep coding! ... View more

In part 1, we showed you we enabled our coding skills Learning Lab sample code to be testable.  The next step is to show you how we enabled that code to be tested whenever we check in our code.  To do this, we used a continuous integration (aka build) system. Although there are many to choose from, based on it's popularity alone, we decided to try out travis-ci.org.  With Travis CI, like many of the public build systems, you use an OAuth2 flow to authorize Travis CI to interact with GitHub.  What that means is Travis CI has registered itself with GitHub, so GitHub knows it's really Travis CI asking as opposed to some other system.  You then have to give the OK to GitHub.com to allow Travis CI to interact with GitHub.  Once you're through that, you have the opportunity to enable a web hook for a particular repository.  A web hook is a mechanism for one web service to make an API call to another service b ased upon an event.  In this case, the event is a check-in to your repository in GitHub.com.  When you enable the web hook, Travis CI will establish itself as a place to notify when a checkin has occurred. In Travis-CI, we just had to enable the web hook for our sample code repo. Now that we've enabled the webook.  We need to create a special .travis.yml file in our repository.  While the .travis.yml has a bunch of stuff that it enables, we kept it really simple.  This file tells travis-ci how to set up the test environment. language: python python:   - "2.7" # command to install dependencies, e.g. pip install -r requirements.txt --use-mirrors install: pip install -r requirements.txt --use-mirrors # command to run tests, e.g. python setup.py test script: python coding102-REST-python/test_coding102.py branches:   only:   - clus-updates We defined five things.  The first was the language of the application we're testing, in our case python. The second was what version of python we're testing.  The third is the install command.  Since we used the requests library in our code, we have to install it after the build system grabs the code.  We haven't mentioned this previously, but you need to keep in mind that the web hook only notifies Travis CI that a change has occurred.  Travis CI will subsequently check out your code from GitHub.  So, it's just your source code, no dependencies have been downloaded.  In python, this is where the requirements.txt file comes in.  We used the pip freeze method to save the dependencies to the requirements.txt file.  On the command line in our source directory, you execute pip freeze > requirements.txt . The fourth is the command to execute our tests. The fifth is the branch that we want to whitelist.  We only used this because we weren't implementing this in the master branch. We check-in and push the .travis.yml file to github, and boom a build will now start in Travis CI. The observant reader might ask, well, why is it build #5 you're showing?  Good question!  Turns out it took us 5 builds to get all the configuration right.  See, we all make mistakes! The last thing we did was to advertise the build status on our GitHub README.md (it could be any markdown file).  To accomplish that, we just had to copy some markdown (travis-ci generates that for you) that you get from your Travis CI project into your README.md. In fact, I've embedded it here, just using HTML.  I hope we don't break the build! Happy coding & hope to see you at the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live US this year! ... View more

Here are the important links from today's webinar! amwhaley Learning Labs: https://learninglabs.cisco.com APIC-EM Sandbox: https://sandboxapic.cisco.com/login Github: https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/coding-skills-sample-code Postman Collection: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/d439f0c236f88ac9425e CiscoLive DevNet Zone: http://www.ciscolive.com/us/activities/devnet-zone/ ... View more

We're excited to announce pxGrid!  The Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid) allows you to integrate your application into the pxGrid, a multivendor, cross-platform network system that pulls together different parts of an IT infrastructure such as security monitoring and detection systems, network policy platforms, asset and configuration management, identity and access management platforms, to name a few.  Look for more posts about pxGrid soon! ... View more

Welcome to the pxGrid forums!  You can learn more about pxGrid here: https://developer.cisco.com/site/security/pxgrid ... View more

Create a middleware app that pushes/pulls config via APIC-EM and stores them in git A bigger version of this could be: Could we set it up so that Enterprises / Partners could upload their router configs into our system, and they could validate those configs, get sign off, etc, before pushing them live (or at least to a staging env’t).  The network gear could get more tightly integrated with this by checking with the repo, and apply updates as appropriate.  To a certain extent, this is what Puppet does, but not sure about the version control of configs and whatnot. From Nathan: This has been suggested before, and I have an example of this using onePK also with Maven unit tests driving configuration testing. ... View more

This isn't as much of a sample app, but more an integration.  But, it'd be interesting to do an integration with Atlassian's On-Demand Marketplace. Perhaps a Bamboo (CI) plug-in to the VIRL for developer / sandbox? Maybe there are some notifications that can be sent into HipChat from APIC-EM / other controllers? https://marketplace.atlassian.com/ ... View more

Kin Lane at API Evangelist wrote earlier this week about his vision for API Documentation.  It's a great compilation, and I'd like to add a couple of requirements to it.  Documentation Lifecycle Compatible: It seems like most API Documentation tools expect documentation to be added within your application source code.  I suppose if you use RAML and API Blueprint as design tools, you can externalize the documentation from the code, but I don't know that everyone can actually do that.  For example, this might not be feasible for existing projects.  I want to see a way for documentation content to be compatible with the needs of tech writers. Getting Started, Tutorials, etc: Like my colleague Paul Nerger likes to say, learning an API is like learning a foreign language.  The API Reference Manual is like a dictionary.  It's pretty hard to learn a foreign language using only a dictionary.  Additional tools are necessary in order to learn phrases, idioms -- phrase books, tutorials...  There needs to be a way to tie in API tutorials and getting started guides into the overall output for API documentation. Keep coding! Ashley ... View more

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a mind-controlled-drone?!  Yep, that happened at the API Strategy and Practice Conference in Chicago (http://www.apistrategyconference.com/2014Chicago/) last week.  You can check out the conference tweet traffic at #apistrat. As the API Architect on the DevNet team, I was really interested in learning about how other organizations work towards improving their API design. One theme that kept popping up was to ask yourself, Why?, before building your API.  Are you building it just to have an API?  Or, are you building it for some business (or other purpose)?  Netflix was held out as an example of transforming their API based on this self-reflection.  Netflix has transitioned from an open API that was geared towards mass adoption to a closed API that is tailored to consumption on devices.  As a result, their API has become very purpose-built for that goal, and enables mobile and device developers to minimize the number of API calls made into their datacenters. While it's been said that if you need a client library to use an API, it's broken, there are many good reasons to have helper libraries!  For one, they just sometimes make it easier to get going, and that's really important.  Keith Casey of Clarify (http://clarify.io) threw down the gauntlet, and claimed that while we all don't want to build libraries, we have to!  Then he went on to lay out a framework using the acronym: SPOIL •    Succinct •    Purposeful •    Open Source •    Idiomatic •    Logical A very thoughtful treatment to a topic that can evoke a lot of passion from developers.  Check out his blog post to read in detail: http://clarify.io/blog/spoil-your-users-with-great-helper-libraries-2/ Many sessions discussed how to optimize documentation and developer experience.  You should read more about those topics in my colleague, Mandy's, blog!  But before you go... There were some really interesting IoT projects and companies at the conference.  The mind-controlled drone was pretty crazy.  In a 20 minute session, Jim McKeeth (@JimMcKeeth) of Embarcadero Technologies had an audience member fly that drone controlled only by her thoughts!  She had to imagine an action of going up, and the electrical signals were recorded by the control software.  Next, she had to imagine an action of turning to the right.  After a little thinking effort, she was flying the drone to the ceiling of the conference hall! Even though that was really impressive, John Ellis from Ford did an awesome job conveying how they are turning their automobiles into software platforms.  I was amazed to learn that a Ford Mustang contains 50 million lines of code.  I'm glad I'm not on that QA team! Of course, spotting Cisco gear on the light posts outside our hotel, in preparation for the IoT World Forum next week, was also really cool.  You can see the CGR router Cisco 1552 Outdoor AP (Thanks Ravi for the correction!) is connected to a new LED light.  I bet some hackathon participants are going to have fun orchestrating those lights on Stetson Ave! Kudos to the conference organizers.  It was a very full and thought provoking two and a half days in Chicago.  Fortunately, in spite of the airport closures, I was able to make it home for my daughter's 7th birthday.  Now, go read about Mandy's API Strat experiences and adventure getting out of Chi-town! Keep coding, Ashley Roach P.S. Did you know that API spelled backwards is IPA? ... View more

If you've had a hankering to learn how to code, perhaps you've checked out my colleague amwhaley's post Coding 101, which she presented at Cisco Live US 2014. Perhaps you've gotten the itch from Amanda's post, and you want to explore and learn more.  This TED talk contains at least ten sites and resources for you!  (Disclaimer: Cisco doesn't endorse any particular one of these services.) I know that I've had fun (and learned some things along the way) running through some of the tutorials, and hope you enjoy them too!  ... View more