[Aromasin]

I wasn't at all, to be honest. I joined a multidisciplinary team and they were short an Ethernet SME. I said I'd be happy to just in feet first and learn, as I was desperate to get into anything and everything FPGAs at the time, having become bored by the CPU world I resided before. Mostly I learnt everything through building stuff using our User Guides. Everything else was just reading; the Ethernet spec, random Cisco stuff online, Wikipedia, etc. I just searched for any word or acronym I didn't understand, and read up on it (meaning of 64/66b encoding, PCS vs PHY vs MAC, PTP, OTN, FlexE, FEC, ANLT, and so on). Once you get passed the TLAs, it's actually pretty simple (except for PTP - that's the bane or my working life at the moment).