I've been thinking about what makes up our network engineering community. After years of banging away at the CLI, playing with the latest network troubleshooting tool or spending countless hours learning about protocols, I've come to realize that the most valuable asset we have isn't the latest ASIC or the coolest automation framework. It's each other. This realization first hit me during the pandemic years. Remember when all our events went virtual? When the hallway conversations, you know, the ones where the real knowledge transfer happens, they just disappeared? That's when a bunch of us looked at each other and said "We need to fix this."
And that's how the US Networking User Association (USNUA) was born. Here's the thing about network engineering: it's evolving at breakneck pretty darn fast. One day you're working with BGP, the next you're diving into EVPN-VXLAN and before you know it, you're trying to figure out how AI fits into your network operations. How do we keep up? The simple answer is we don't do it alone.
What makes our community special is our commitment to keeping things real. No sales pitches. No vendor bias. Just engineers talking shop in a way that matters. When you show up to a local Network User Group meeting, you're not getting a polished marketing presentation, you're getting war stories from the trenches, lessons learned the hard way and insights you won't find in any documentation.
I've watched this community grow from a single Ohio chapter to over 30 groups across the country and what strikes me every time is the deep hunger for connection. Engineers drive hours to attend USNUA events and meet with one another. They stay late asking questions and catching up with one another. They exchange or update contact info and actually follow up.
Why? Because finding your tribe in this industry is invaluable.
The magic happens in those informal moments when someone mentions a problem they've been wrestling with and a bunch of other engineers chime in with different approaches they've tried. It's in the realization that the challenge you thought was unique to your environment is actually something half the room has dealt with. It's in discovering that the solution you cobbled together last week could save someone else weeks of troubleshooting.
But here's what really gets me stoked about this thing: the USNUA really is democratizing network engineering knowledge. You don't need to work for a Fortune 500 company or have a massive training budget to learn from the best in the industry. You just need to show up. Our events are free to attend (big thanks to our amazing sponsors, who get it) and the knowledge shared is priceless.
We're building something bigger than just meetups. We're creating a support network for generations of network engineers. We're ensuring that whether you're in a major tech hub or a smaller market, you have access to a community that understands the challenges you face and celebrates the victories you achieve.
The future of networking isn't just about faster speeds or the new protocol standard, it's about the engineers who will design, build and troubleshoot these systems. And those engineers need more than technical skills. They need a community that challenges them, supports them and occasionally commiserates with them over a cold one.
After all, networking isn't just about connecting devices, it's about connecting people. And that's exactly what the USNUA is all about.