Dan Wade is a Network and Infrastructure Automation Practice Lead at BlueAlly. As part of the Solutions Strategy team at BlueAlly, he is responsible for developing network and infrastructure automation solutions and enabling the sales and consulting teams on delivery of the developed solutions. Solutions may include infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, network source of truth, network observability, and, of course, automated testing and validation. Previous to this role, Dan worked as a consulting engineer with a focus on network automation.
Dan has more than seven years of experience in network automation, having worked with automation tooling and frameworks such as Ansible and Terraform, and Python libraries, including Nornir, Netmiko, NAPALM, Scrapli, and Python SDKs. Dan has been working with pyATS and the pyATS library (Genie) for the past four to five years, which has inspired him to embrace automated network testing. In 2021, Dan contributed to the genieparser library with a new IOS XE parser. He also enjoys creating his own open-source projects focused on network automation. Dan holds two professional-level certifications from Cisco: Cisco DevNet Professional and CCNP Enterprise. He is also a member of the Cisco DevNet 500 and Cisco Champions program.
Dan enjoys sharing knowledge and experience on social media with blog posts and YouTube videos as well as participating in podcast episodes. He’s passionate about helping others explore network automation and advocating how network automation can empower, not replace, network engineers. You can find him on social media @devnetdan.