I was trolling around LinkedIn tonight and I saw many ads for various positions. For some reason, my mind drifted to see if DICE had any listings for jobs requiring iRule programming skills (iRules is a scripting language/event engine inside of the F5 Networks’ BigIP device). For those that don’t know, the BigIP could be considered an SSL accelerator and LoadBalancer. If you only used it for that, you would be seriously missing something. Back to DICE… When I searched for iRule, I discovered three Network Engineer positions. That is it! In my experience, many network engineers are not true coders (two different disciplines). As a developer for many years, I think we tend to see how we can make the world better through our software. I also believe that many network engineers and sys admins want to keep the world the same–after all stabiity means uptime. While this is partially true, truly innovative solutions come from looking at the tools available and determining how to better the environment with the tools. Using proper service management procedures such as ITIL can minimize the risk, but innovation is why services exist.