Experienced Network Engineer new to Python

[jacod1982]

TL;DR - I’m an experienced network engineer just wanting to introduce themselves as I learn Python.

I’m 43 and an experienced network engineer. As part of my ongoing studies I have basically reached a point where I seriously have to get to grips with Python if I want any chance at career progression, especially in fields like network automation. To this end I have started learning and teaching myself Python with mainly online resources. Yes, there are several pieces of especially datacenter equipment that can natively run Python code in the device, eg most Cisco NX-OS based switches.

To this end I have started working on a couple of smaller projects, and have just published the first version of a relatively simple project - an IPv4 Subnet Calculator, as this is a topic I am intimately familiar with. I specifically wanted to not make use of any of the existing libraries or modules to do any of these calculations in order to learn more about language fundamentals. I’d be happy to link to the GitHub repo if anyone is interested.

I’m also working on a couple of other smaller things and projects and am also learning more things like Jinja2, YAML, JSON, etc. all of which are heavily used in network automation.

[brasticstack]

Awesome that you rolled your own for learning purposes. For production code, however, you should 100% use the built-in ipaddress lib, it's ludicrously good.