The DevNet Developer Experience and Evangelism team is a group of developers, builders, makers, tinkerers, coders, communicators, teachers, designers and engineers who are working together to create a community around Cisco's APIs and platforms, and we are hiring! We are a team who is creating change: change toward more automation and programmability change toward more community driven and open source code creation, change across a broad scope of technologies such as Security, Networking, Data Center, IoT, Collaboration and Cloud We are also working to create change in the world. We are team who has a social responsibility interest, and we actively look for opportunities where technology and Cisco can give back.  We often do this through hackathons, and education programs such as our hackathon to help save the bees, and our involvement in Women in Tech events and Cisco Networking Academy. Our team is growing, and we are looking for developers and network engineers who want to help us do great work, build great things, and grow the community of Cisco DevNet developers. We are currently hiring for several positions (see full list) which include: Developer Evangelists & Advocates DevNet is expanding our team of developer evangelists. In this role you will be responsible for winning the hearts and minds of developers as well as acting as the "voice" of the developer and influencing technology roadmaps. Our developer evangelists are first and foremost technical leaders and coders.  They are hands-on engineers and coders who also like to speak, teach, and share technology with others. The DevNet developer community includes developers working in all Cisco technology areas - Networking, Data Center, Internet of Things, Data & Analytics, Collaboration, Cloud, and Security, and we are hiring in all of these areas. We have a specific focus on our loyal CCIE/CCNA networking community.  If you are a network engineer who wants to help lead the change for network programmability with Cisco, please reach out to us. DevNet Sandbox Engineering Manager The DevNet Sandbox is our playground for developers.  The Sandbox offers remote hosted live infrastructure for developers.  This infrastructure includes virtual and hardware networking kit and devices and full installations of Cisco platforms. The DevNet Sandbox offers environments to help support all Cisco technology areas - Networking, Data Center, Internet of Things, Collaboration, Cloud, and Security. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow our DevNet Sandbox offerings.  If you are interested in working in a start-up like environment that has the potential and scale to help an organization with the reach of Cisco, and you would like to lead an exceptional technical team, please reach out.  Developer Experience Engineer The DevNet Developer Experience team is focused on creating an industry leading experience for developers using Cisco platforms.  We are working to make each step of the journey from discovering APIs, to using documentation and sample code, to coding and testing applications as low friction and as productive as possible . If you are a developer who can write sample code in several languages, who is passionate about REST API design, and can rant about good or bad developer docs for days, then you should join this team. If any of these positions intrigue you, please reach out to us.  We would love to help you get to know us, our work and our team. Have fun and keep coding! Mandy Whaley @mandywhaley @CiscoDevNet developer.cisco.com ... View more

As we prepare to host our second DevNet Women-in-Tech (DevNet WiT) Do-er’s event in Las Vegas at Cisco Live, I have been talking to many people who work in technical fields as developers and engineers about their careers -- What inspires and drives them to work in technology?  What is frustrating? What do they find motivating and rewarding? A common theme that has emerged is a core belief that technology can solve problems and make things better. Solving problems and ... coffee also rated highly in the motivations category.  Innovation is a word that comes up often in these conversations. Whether it is using technology to track bee colonies, or connect smart cities, there is optimism and hope tied to the the idea that we can use innovative, fresh ideas to solve important problems. In our Cisco DevNet team, we feel strongly that innovation and developers go hand and hand. Innovation fuels our developers and inspires our community.  So we wanted to create some moments and space to focus on innovation with our developer community at Cisco Live US in the DevNet Zone. We are hosting two amazing speakers who will spark your thoughts around innovation.  These speakers will plant ideas that will stretch, challenge, and inspire you.  You will leave with a challenge to disrupt yourself and to go create something new. I am excited to attend these sessions, and to see how they shape my thinking.  You can register for these sessions in advance, and add them to your online schedule. From Vision to Prototype: Practical Strategies to Drive Innovation Adriana Gascoigne will be speaking in the DevNet Zone on Monday July 10.  Adriana is the Founder & CEO of Girls in Tech, and she knows what it takes to push a new business idea from the ideation phase to devising a true product concept. Adriana has held many executive positions at Silicon Valley startups and now shares her product development and branding insights as an advisor to early stage companies. In this session, Adriana will guide you through the critical steps to innovating your idea into a viable product, including defining your problem statement, your ideal customer and practical ways to test your concepts. She will cover common hurdles, such as building versus buying, creative ways to quickly iterate and how far to take your first prototype. Adriana will also touch on practical tools that enable and empower entrepreneurs to drive innovation within their industry, such as Slack, Basecamp and Asana and more. Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work Whitney Johnson the author of "Disrupt Yourself" will be speaking in the DevNet Zone on Tuesday Jul 12 on disruptive innovation. The idea is simple, but powerful: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different – they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled, and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist. An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson will demonstrate how you can put the power of disruptive innovation to work. To help your company in unexpected ways, dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself.  In this session, Whitney Johnson will share stories of disruption and will teach you how powerful disruption can be in your organization’s evolving reinvention. Johnson builds on her investment background as co-founder of two early stage venture firms, and an award –winning equity analyst to provide a fresh perspective on innovation and change. In addition to these sessions, we have a whole week of coding classes, hackathon activities, mentoring sessions, meetups and more planned to help you get hands-on with Cisco platforms and connect with other Cisco developers. The full schedule of DevNet Zone activities includes: Sunday, July 10, 2016: The DevNet Women In Tech Do'ers workshop is two half-day sessions on Sunday July 10 (the day before Cisco Live, Las Vegas) where you can get hands-on with hardware and software in a supported environment. We are focusing on the Internet of Things for this workshop, so you will be playing with hardware and software. The DevNet Women in Tech Do'ers workshop is free! We are also offering mentoring sessions through out the week. Saturday-Sunday, July 10: A DevNet hackathon – focusing on Cloud Collaboration technologies, and a DevNet Springboard event – focusing on network programmability.    We will have some DevNet Women there for you to talk to and work with. (How awesome would it be to have a couple DevNet Women in Tech teams in the hackathon!) Both the hackathon and Springboard event are free, though you must pre-register. Find out more and register for the free Hackathon Find out more and register for the free Springboard event Monday-Thurs., July 11 - 14, 2016: Participate in all DevNet Zone activities including coding classes, API deep dives, and workshops. Attending the DevNet Zone activities requires registering for the Cisco Live Explorer Pass for $69. Find out more and register for Cisco Live. I hope to see you there! Mandy Whaley @mandywhaley ... View more

If you are attending the Coding 101 class at the Kickoff event on April 22, and if you want to do the hands-on coding exercises in Python, please install these items on your system before the workshop. Install Postman https://www.getpostman.com/ Install Python Install Python 3.4.2 for your operating system. Download the installer here: https://www.python.org/downloads/ After you finish the install, you can check to see if you have python3 installed, by typing python3 at your command line. If python3 works, you will see ">>>" prompt, you can then quit out of it by typing "quit()" at command line. Install the Requests Library You can read more about the Requests Library here To install Requests for Python 3 on Mac OS, use this command line command: Go to the command line prmpt Type "pip3 install requests" To install Requests on Windows: Pip comes with Python 3.4 Windows Check to see if Pip is in your python 3 path C:\>pip –V pip 1.5.6 from C:\Python34\lib\site-packages If pip is in the Python34 path, the execute pip install requests You will also need access to an APIC-EM controller. You can use the the DevNet Sandbox Always-On APIC-EM Lab: https://sandboxapic.cisco.com:9443. Be sure to accept the SSL Certificate Clone Git Repo Clone the coding skills sample code git clone https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/coding-skills-sample-code Feel free to ask questions here about the setup. Thanks, Amanda Whaley ... View more

Marie Curie has been a hero for me ever since I wrote a 3rd grade research paper on her work, so I am always excited when there is a new book about her. Recently, my Dad gave me Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information.,   by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén a new book that focuses on the intellectual property aspects of the Curie's work. I was expecting a nice read mostly about facts I already knew. I was not expecting to find a fascinating number of similarities between the Curie's treatment of their work in the early 1900's and today's tech industry. Open Sourcing Radium In the early 1900's in France, married women did not have the right to own property.  This law extended to intellectual property. So when Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium and the process to isolate radium, Marie could not legally be a patent holder on her own discovery.  A patent on this process had the potential to be extremely lucrative, and companies in all countries were clamoring for the information.   So the Curie's faced a quandary.  Place the patent only in Pierre's name? or freely publish so Marie could have credit as an author? Their solution has strong parallels with the software world.  T hey open sourced the knowledge and the process and they patented the tools and provided consulting services.  Sounds familar, right? Pierre had developed a very advanced set of scales and instruments that were very necessary for the process of isolating radium, and he did patent these tools, and the Curie's income was largely from these patents and from consulting on how to use the process. The Curie's had a strong fundamental belief that scientific knowledge should be shared and they wanted to create a community around the possibilities that radium presented.  Openly publishing the process allowed for the creation of the Radium Institute which was the cornerstone of this community. Member of this community used Pierre's patented tools, but they also extended the Curie's work and created new tools and processes.  It was in essence a thriving open source community with contributors and companies who profited by creating tools to enable the work, and who also gave back to the community. Marie's Kickstarter Campaign After Pierre's death, Marie faced many hurdles in continuing her work, but one of the biggest was that she and her laboratory could not afford to buy any radium for her to use in experiments. In 1921, radium was the most valuable material on earth -- 1 gram cost $100,000. An American journalist and New York socialite, Missy Brown Meloney, organized a crowdsourced campaign in which women in America donated money and raised $100,000 to buy Marie Curie one gram of radium. To add perspective to the sheer awesomeness of this effort, the author compares it to a "crowd sourcing campaign succeeding in raising the equivalent of the 2013 Nobel Prize award  - 1.1 million dollars for a worthy scientist."  Wow!  "In 1921, U.S. women scraped together 3 times the amount Einstein received for that year's Nobel Prize in Physics".   Unbelievable! The other amazing part of this story is that Missy Brown Meloney initially envisioned raising the money from a few wealthy New York friends, but the money actually ended up coming from "ordinary" women all over the U.S. who scraped together small sums to contribute. Women in Tech Marie's success as a scientist and her clever move to publish her work openly and retain credit for her work presented many challenges to the French Academic establishment. The author of this book does a great job of walking through the various hurdles, roadblocks and negative attitudes that Curie had to navigate to succeed in her time and place. Sadly, many of the attitudes toward women in science in the 1900's seem strikingly familiar today, and there are some interesting parallels highlighted in the book.  Many things are open and better today, but sadly much is still the same. After Pierre died, Marie suddenly had property rights and as a widow was recognized "as a person" under the law.  This actually caused more issues for Marie because suddenly the establishment could not conveniently pretend that she was just her husband's assistant. Much of the public abuse she suffered is striking similar to the #gamergate sentiment of today. Marie did have many male scientist supporters who cared more about the work that was done that who did the work.  Through their support and through support of the public she was able to make great strides, and I think all of us women in tech owe her some gratitude for being an early trailblazer. I really enjoyed this book, and if any of the parallels intrigue you or if you just like reading about Marie Cure, I think you would like it too!  I love to hear your thoughts and comments also. Have fun and keep coding - Mandy Whaley @mandywhaley ... View more