The beginning of something cool (maybe) :-)

Welcome to my Blog!  I've been looking to start a blog and today is the day...I'm actually gonna do it.  My name is Matthias Buchholz and I'm a father of two, a husband of one, a music lover, and architect of all things having to do with networking and connectivity.  

I've been doing networking for 18 or so years now.  I remember rolling out my first Frame Relay network many moons ago, mapping DLCIs, layering OSPF on top of that, getting broadcast to work over Frame relay, etc.  All the fun stuff ;-)  Not shortly after that we started down the MPLS path, so my Frame days were short lived as "new" network designs and transport methodologies were sweeping the nation.  Seems like so long ago now that I type about it...

I've worked in several verticals including manufacturing, health care, public utility, finance, as well as in the partner ecosystem.  I even had a very brief episode working for Cisco, but that was rather short lived.  Maybe I'll blog about it one day...  

I've racked up a laundry list of certs through my career, but really the only one worth mentioning these days is my CCIE R/S picked up in 2011.  Number 28445!!  Man, what a time that was.  I studied for 5 months straight, basically putting my life on hold for that certification.  I was working for our local (Charlotte, NC) gas company as a network architect at the time and it seemed that my only goal in life at the time was to get that IE...oh how priorities shift over time.  That was roughly two years before my wife and I had our first child, and boy am I glad I was able to knock that out before we started a family.  Trying to juggle that much studying with raising a family would be a real challenge...at least to me.

So what am I gonna blog about in here?  I'm gonna try to keep it technical for the most part.  I may interleave a little about music or family every now and again, but the main topic will be Datacenter, LAN/WAN, and Cloud network architecture concepts, tips/tricks, caveats, etc.  I have several topics I want to blog about already, so we'll see how that goes. Hopefully after the first few posts I'll iron the kinks out of the process.   At the end of the day, hopefully someone finds the topics helpful and it saves them some time troubleshooting or gives them some ideas related to architectures related to the topics up for discussion.  

So, that being said, I hope you fine folks find these topics interesting and relevant.  I appreciate you taking the time to read my thoughts out on a page, and look forward to any feedback you may have.  

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

-"oh the places you'll go" - Dr Seuss