Hi! My name is Brandon James. I am a Data Center Network Engineer, currently working for Facebook¹ and living in Fort Worth, TX. My professional background includes enterprise and data center networking, automation, virtualization, storage, Windows servers, Linux servers and a bit of desktop support. I am a graduate of Texas Tech University where I studied Economics and minored in Computer Science. I am also slowly² working towards an MS in CS though Arizona State online. To this day, I maintain a strong interest in Computer Science which has a direct impact in the way I approach networking topics.

Outside of my professional life, I’m a father, husband, dog owner, trail runner and wannabe landscape/wildlife/family photographer. To see what else I'm up to, visit brandonsjames.com.

NTN

NTN runs on a custom backend written in Python using the Flask framework. I've released the code under GPLv3, so if you're curious check it out on my github. It's recently undergone a partial rewrite to improve reusability, simplify the UI and to improve the consistency of the rendered markdown files³.

I decided to write my own backend for a few reasons. 1) I wanted to build public facing server side network tools 2) I prefer using my text editor to write markdown files over using an in-browser editor like the one offered with ghost 3) I wanted to learn Flask and get better at web development.

On NTN you can expect to find technical articles related to computing. I say this because despite the domain name and what I do for a living, I'm interested in a wide variety of computing topics. That being said, as a consequence of what I do for a living, most of my posts will be network related.

NTN Tools

NTN Tools was created based on an idea I had during my days working in managed services. If I'm at a customer site, working on their web-facing infrastructure, but my laptop is using their internal DNS and sending requests from inside their network. It would be convenient to perform basic checks via a public facing web service. NTN Tools was written several years after I left the MSP, but I use it quite a bit and have a backlog of new tools that I'd like to write.