Large Area Networks and Kanban for Fun and Profit

Thank you to Karl for an amazing tour of the CMU engineering space. So many interesting projects being built and learning experiences for students!

This month we are going to visit the world of networks. We all must interact with them and having a better understanding helps any dev, devop, security researcher, etc do their job.

The opening act will be a short presentation on expert use of a kanban board for better team work throughput and morale.

Kanban for fun and Profit - Boyd H

Kanban boards are common in engineering teams, but most use them as glorified todo lists. Kanban is a really a visualization of team health. Its effective use allows teams to understand flow, bottlenecks, etc. Most importantly, an effective daily status meeting allows teams to see problems by how tasks move on the board.

Beyond task movement, design of status (columns) and swim lanes (rows) allows a team to understand priority and tune status meeting, grooming sessions and retrospective meetings for maximum impact.

Building Large Networks: LAN, Data Center, and WAN - Allan W

Designing large-scale networks comes with challenges, especially when choosing the right architecture. Options like Core–Distribution–Access, Collapsed Core, and Spine–Leaf each have trade-offs in cost, complexity, scalability, and performance—particularly in LANs and data centers. Understanding where each fits best is key to building efficient, resilient infrastructure.

WANs in the Rocky Mountain region add another layer of difficulty. Sparse long-haul fiber routes make path diversity and low-latency connectivity harder to achieve, though the situation is gradually improving.

Allan is currently Director of Information Systems at Colorado Mesa University. Before that, he spent 24 years at SCL Health/Intermountain Health, helping evolve their network from 10 Mbps hubs and 100 Mbps FDDI to 10 Gbps campus networks and 40 Gbps data centers. Earlier, he co-founded Ruralnet, an ISP covering rural Utah and Colorado, transitioning from 128 Kbps satellite/frame relay to multi-10 Gbps DWDM fiber rings.

Agenda:
6:00pm - 6:15pm - Meet & great
6:20pm - 6:45pm - Kanban
6:50pm - 7:30pm - Building Lans
7:45pm - BeerOps!