About DevNet Academy

Telecom Apprentice

I completed my apprenticeship at a national telecom provider here in Switzerland. It was cool, but I quickly noticed that some of the other students at school knew a lot more than me. Most of them worked at smaller companies, where they had real responsibilities and learned fast. In my case, I had very specific roles during the apprenticeship. So early on, I knew I wanted to work at a small company after.

After the apprenticeship, I went to HSR to get a bachelor’s degree in computer science. We did a lot of coding during the BSc, which gave me a strong foundation. I also realized I enjoyed teaching and liked the idea of e-learning. Funny enough, my bachelor’s thesis was to build a complete e-learning platform. That was back in 2019. I didn’t know at the time how relevant that would become later.

Network Automation at onway

After graduating, I joined onway. You probably never heard of onway before. That’s because it’s small company :)

Our office is in Zurich and we have around 30 employees. Our main focus is mobile networks for public transportation. Right now, we manage about 6’000 mobile routers across buses, trams, and trains. The cool part? Everything is fully automated. For example, the largest fleet we manage is 450 vehicles. If I want to roll out a change, like a new SSID, I can push that change across the entire fleet in under 15 minutes.

But we don’t stop there. We also manage around 500 VMs that are fully automated using Ansible. When we onboard a new customer, we need to create a lot of data in NetBox. That’s automated too! We just specify the customer name and desired use cases, and our automation generates everything: VMs, interfaces, prefixes, VLANs, you name it. Based on that data, we also configure the core network automatically. What used to take hours or days now takes just a few minutes.

So yeah, I’ve been working with automation every day for the last several years. And I’ve written a lot of code along the way.

My DevNet Expert Journey

In 2022, Cisco released the DevNet Expert certification (soon called CCIE Automation). My boss encouraged me to go for it. He said I already had the experience automating our own infrastructure. And he was right. I had worked with some of the technologies for years. Some topics were still new to me, but overall, I had a solid foundation.

At the time, my girlfriend was studying for her psychology degree. On weekends, we went to the office together. She studied for her psychology exams, and I studied for the DevNet Expert. Actually I didn’t start with the DevNet Professional (DEVCOR). I knew I wanted to aim directly for the Expert level. So I only did DEVCOR later on, and only because it’s a prerequisite for taking the lab exam.

I printed out the DevNet Expert blueprint and studied topic by topic. For example, I bought Terraform: Up and Running, read it cover to cover, did some exercises, and then moved on to the next subject. It was an intense but exciting time, and I learned a lot of interesting things. The only frustrating part was the lack of structured learning material. It makes sense though. Back then when I was studying, no one had passed the exam yet. I’ve always found e-learning to be the best way to learn. But there weren’t any resources for that available.

In November 2022, I had my first exam attempt… and failed. I tried again a second time in January and was sure I would pass… but I failed again. But then, on the third attempt, I finally passed!

After passing, I thought: Why don’t I build the course I wish had existed? After all I’m a DevNet Expert, I know what I’m talking about. And I already had experience from my bachelor’s thesis in creating e-learning platforms.

Building DevNet Academy

So I got to work. I spent months turning my study notes into something more structured. I focused on explaining things clearly and making the topics easy to understand. I recorded videos, created quizzes and exercises, and built a complete learning platform.

The funny thing is, I thought I knew the topics well. But while creating the content, I learned even more. Teaching forces you to really understand things…

The course is now live, and a lot of people have started learning with it. So far, more than 300 people used my courses to study. And I’ve supported several students all the way through to the lab exam. To this day, I still get nervous when someone tells me they’re about to take the exam. But when they pass, it’s an amazing feeling. They did the work, but knowing I played a small part in their success means a lot to me.

And that’s what makes this so special. It’s not just a product I sell to a company. It’s something far more personal. I built this website for individuals who want to pass this challenging exam. And getting the CCIE Automation certification is a huge milestone in someones career.

I realized that I really enjoy creating this kind of content and teaching others. And I still spend a lot of time improving the course, reviewing lessons, adding new features like an AI chatbot, and updating the material to keep it relevant. The latest feature is an AI chatbot for example. You should see it at the bottom right. Go ahead and give it a try!

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