{"id":3690,"date":"2019-02-22T14:49:56","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T20:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=3690"},"modified":"2019-02-22T14:53:35","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T20:53:35","slug":"last-day-at-cisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=3690","title":{"rendered":"Last Day at Cisco"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My desk in the Cisco Lake Oswego office from May 31, 2011 to February 22, 2019. This photo taken in 2012. Doesn’t look too different \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Wednesday I attended the funeral of Brad Jackson<\/a>, a beloved former Cisco colleague.\u00a0 His story is not one for me to tell, but suffice to say we will all greatly miss him.\u00a0 The story I can tell is the outpouring of love and support shared by the greater Cisco community and how much that support has impacted me these last 7.5 years.\u00a0 When I first joined Cisco in 2011, Brad was the systems engineering manager for the local team of engineers based in the pacific northwest focused on the public sector: higher ed, school districts, and local state governments.\u00a0 I worked very closely with that team during my first few years here at the company. He and his wife used to host the Christmas parties at their house.\u00a0 One great tribute they said about him was: “Brad wasn’t just the life of the party, he started the party”.\u00a0 I loved that quote about him.\u00a0 People from Cisco flew in from Arizona, Utah, and other places to show support.\u00a0 It is a testament to not only the great person Brad was but also to the great culture he helped build in the northwest.\u00a0 That time period for me from 2011 to 2014 was very special.<\/p>\n

My life and the life of my family has been greatly enriched by the people I’ve met while working at Cisco. Everyone of my managers, team mates, and extended team members down in the trenches have been unbelievable.\u00a0 Cisco is the greatest company I have ever worked at.\u00a0 The work\/life balance, opportunities, excitement are unrivaled.<\/p>\n

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Our greatest talk we ever did!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Where am I going?<\/h3>\n

I’m now an employee at https:\/\/zenabidata.com<\/a>. (And yes, one of my todos will be to fix the website).\u00a0 Today the company does data analytics consulting jobs for large and small companies.\u00a0 We help people turn their data into dollars.\u00a0 There are about a dozen data scientists and I’ll be joining the handful of engineers working on our automated ingestion platform as well as the future products we will release.\u00a0 I will be writing code full time and architecting our solutions together with some really smart people.\u00a0 While I’m very sad to leave Cisco I am excited to be back to working on software design and I’m excited to be tackling AI and ML problems.<\/p>\n

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This kid brought me into this whole mess. Maybe I’ll follow him to future places? Hopefully that place is early retirement \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Tom’s Captain Cloud days were perhaps some of his darkest. But we, as good friends stood by him \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Talented Cloud Guru and Cartoonist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Wes and I worked closely at IBM for many years. I followed him to Cisco.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Tom and I became great friends. He now runs the whole DevNet Sandbox team and is doing amazing things!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Legends I get to work with<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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I had two interns Sana and Joud. Joud left last year but Sana is still at Cisco. She does great work and handled everything I threw her way!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Gabi and I went to two FC Barcelona games while we attended Cisco Live. Gabi did much better speaking than I did and got higher scores \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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I had some pretty amazing meals with some amazing people: Julio, Lara, Michael M., Chris, and Michael D.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Roger Dickinson is so talented! I got to work on him with tech, presentations, and strategy. Such a great guy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday I attended the funeral of Brad Jackson, a beloved former Cisco colleague.\u00a0 His story is not one for me to tell, but suffice to say we will all greatly miss him.\u00a0 The story I can tell is the outpouring of love and support shared by the greater Cisco community and how much that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[990],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3690"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3707,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3690\/revisions\/3707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}