Why the CCDE (and Why now?)
It's May 25th, 2026, Memorial Day, and I'm sitting at a table at my local wine bar in Downtown Phoenix with a glass of house red and my MacBook in front of me and this blank page in my Obsidian waiting to be filled. Six years ago we were in the initial months of a global pandemic which caused me to be out of work as a swim instructor, sitting behind a similar laptop with a real question circulating in my head. "I'm nearly 30 and doing odd jobs, how am I going to make a living for the rest of my life?" I had no college degree and no IT experience, so I did what the internet recommended and pursued a CompTIA A+ and a help desk job. Almost serendipitously, one night a good friend from high school called me out of the blue and asked me what I was up to. I told him I was applying for IT jobs, to which he recommended a network engineering training program he had tried to break into a few years prior. I applied and got the job. Fast forward six years to today. I'm now a consultant with Deloitte, a Big Four firm, with a CCNP: Enterprise under my belt looking for my next move, which I've decided is to pursue my Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE).
Why me?
When looking into what the CCDE is and what you have to know to approach it there's a common theme: why? Network design demands you know the why behind the technology and the why behind the requirements. It's something that aligns with my personality and how I've approached learning since my early days doing staff aug contracting. It's never been good enough for something to just work — I have a deep need to understand why, and I'm not afraid to keep asking until I do. Seeing the big picture is important to me, and I've been fortunate to work at businesses and with clients where I have, at the very least, read access to virtually all the devices involved in end-to-end connectivity. Another symptom of this personality trait is my penchant for making network diagrams, something you likely know me for if you've worked with me anywhere. This is all to say: the puzzle that is the network has always been my favorite part, which makes the CCDE a perfect fit.
Why now?
Do I have enough experience to begin a CCDE journey? Am I a strong enough engineer? Have I been exposed enough to the business side of networking to even pursue this? These are all questions I've been asking myself when pondering if I should go for this or just look at another vendor certificate. Truthfully, I've always been a "go big or go home" kind of person — and I have something to prove. I don't have a college degree. What I have is a career I built from scratch, starting from a pandemic with no IT background, and a CCNP I earned less than three years from the point I learned what a subnet mask was. The CCDE is one of the most respected and least held certifications in networking. Chasing the big prize is how I'm wired, and this is the biggest prize I can think of.
What to expect
I created network-chadmin.com (shout out Sub-Zero for the chadmin username) as a living resume when I knew I was at a disadvantage with my relatively low years of raw experience, and after creating the Shrimp Co lab set the rest of the website went unused. After deciding on the CCDE, the purpose of the blog became perfectly clear. I'll use this as a diary of the journey, a place to post my thoughts, my design scenarios, and my experiences from start to finish. This is likely a multi-year journey for me, but that's how I prefer it. Whether you're reading this years down the line after I've already received my CCDE (this is me manifesting), or somewhere during, I hope you get something valuable from it. See you in the next post!