The Fresh Eyes We Need: What Network Automation Looks Like to a Beginner
Summarizing Emre Cinar's junior engineer perspective from AutoCon3
"It's kind of weird to be here," admitted Emre Cinar as he opened his talk, "because just last year around this time I was writing my bachelor thesis... I never expected to be here just one year later with a speaker role."
But perhaps that's exactly why his perspective was so valuable. In an industry where experience is often measured in decades, Cinar offered something rare: the unfiltered view of someone just eight months into their network automation journey.
The View from the Beginning
Cinar's story began with a simple request from his boss: prepare a service provisioning use case using customer tools. His first reaction? "What do I need to cover for that? What do I need to know?"
The answer, he discovered, wasn't simple. After conversations with colleagues who asked themselves "If you could start over, what would be the first thing you'd learn?", Cinar identified three essential pillars:
Network Infrastructure Knowledge: Hardware fundamentals, operating systems, CLI, network architecture, and protocols. ("I remember finishing my first Nokia IGP certificate thinking I finally knew what LSP meant—Link State Packet. They were like, 'No Emre, you're totally on the wrong track.'")
Cloud Native Technology: Containerization, Kubernetes, and CI/CD methodologies that have become ubiquitous in modern network operations.
Software Engineering: Python and Go dominate, along with packages like Netmiko and PyTest, plus the crucial skill of data formatting—"basically, how do I translate everything I get into JSON?"
The Tooling Bottleneck
Here's where Cinar's perspective becomes particularly valuable. Imagine being a junior trying to learn IGP concepts, spending two days just to set up and configure a test network. "In that moment, the actual deployment of the network through that tool becomes your bottleneck, because you spent more time trying to figure out that tool than actually learning these three pillars."
This led him to a crucial insight: consumable tooling is critical for juniors because it enables faster learning of fundamental concepts.
What Makes Tools "Consumable"
Cinar identified four key characteristics of tools that actually help beginners:
Minimal Dependencies: He shared a painful story of spending two weeks trying to install a monitoring solution in an offline network, fighting dependency issues when all he wanted to do was monitor.
Documentation: "Nobody likes to reverse engineer how the tool works just to get it up and running."
Real-World Examples: "I enjoyed physics more than math because you actually knew how to use these equations in the field. The same concept applies to tooling—if you show a junior how to use that tool in the field, they're much more likely to be able to use it."
Supportive Community: "It doesn't matter whether you're an expert or a junior, you always need some help."
Tools That Actually Helped
Two tools stood out in Cinar's journey:
ContainerLab: "When you try to configure your first networks, it's handy to get them up and running and work on it right away without needing to spend a couple days setting up VMs or other hardware."
NetBox: While inventory management might seem mundane ("nobody wants to sit there and write serial numbers down"), it provides juniors with a structured way to understand the technology they're working with. The manual work eventually creates the motivation to automate.
A Real-World Use Case
Cinar walked through his actual project: creating visibility for customer edges in a Layer 3 VPN service that was previously tracked manually in Excel. The solution involved:
ContainerLab for network setup
Nokia NSP discovering PE devices via NETCONF
NetBox as data source for other devices
Python scripts with Nokia SDK for API queries
NSP workflows based on OpenStack Mistral
What made this meaningful wasn't the technical complexity—it was how it naturally incorporated all three learning pillars while solving a real business problem.
Hard-Earned Lessons
After eight months, Cinar shared refreshingly honest insights:
"Striving for perfection can keep you from achieving results." He spent hours fixing errors when different approaches would have worked fine.
"Thorough preparation and research is key." He spent half a day trying to solve something himself, then found a quick-start guide that accomplished it in five minutes.
Maintainability is harder than it looks: "Scripting is something you learn in university, but it's difficult to write stuff that is actually maintainable afterwards."
Lasting impact matters: "We want to do something meaningful, not just something that gets shelved afterwards."
The Community Challenge
When asked what the community could do better, Cinar's answer was telling: "Some people assume everybody knows things, and the one person who doesn't is afraid to ask... there are a lot of assumptions. I've had talks where people suddenly went off with all kinds of abbreviations, and I feel afraid to ask because I don't want to be questioned."
His suggestion? Actively check understanding and create space for questions, even when it seems obvious that everyone should know something.
The Bigger Picture
Cinar's presentation wasn't just about his personal journey—it highlighted systemic issues. When asked about making network engineering more attractive to young people, he pointed out: "I don't see a lot of university courses on network automation. At my university we just did basic 'what is a router, what is a computer' and that's all."
For most computer science students, "the network is just something that is there and we don't really care how it works as long as it works."
Why This Matters
Cinar's perspective is valuable precisely because it's unpolished by years of industry experience. He sees barriers that veterans have forgotten exist, struggles with tools that experts take for granted, and asks questions that reveal assumptions we didn't know we were making.
His conclusion after eight months? "There's no right way to learn all of this. My approach is to learn the basics of all three pillars, then based on my use cases, deep dive into each topic I need for daily work."
It's a pragmatic approach that prioritizes progress over perfection—something the network automation community might learn from as it works to welcome the next generation of practitioners.
After all, as Cinar proved, sometimes fresh eyes see exactly what we need to improve.
Watch the full presentation: Making Network Automation Consumable: A Junior Engineer's Perspective
