[chriscjcj]

25 years ago, I worked for a small ISP (back when there was such a thing.) When I started there, we had one upstream ISP. I was charged with getting us multihomed. I found some tutorials written by Avi Freedman (1). I don't know what I would have done without him. He made an intimidating topic approachable. Thanks to him, I got us a /20 from ARIN and advertised our routes to two different peers. It was fascinating to learn how it all worked. And the more I learned about it, the more amazed I was that it worked at all.

(1) http://avi.freedman.net/

Avi

[avifreedman]

Thanks!

Like the human body the more you study the Internet the more amazing it is not that it sometimes breaks, but that it works at all. Especially for video/phone/etc.

Glad the content was helpful, I have links to some of them at avi.net (tutorials and old Boardwatch articles).

I swear my motive was pure (frustration with the content out there) but it was easy to see back then that helping people out with good content yields rewards ("Can I buy a T1?") or ("Come run my big global network"). So I still encourage everyone to write about what's confusing and frustrating...

[chriscjcj]

I think I sent you an e-mail back then, but let me take this opportunity to heap a bunch of praise and gratitude upon you in front of God and everybody. I bought several books on BGP at the time and slogged through them, but it was intimidating and I had a lot of trouble putting the pieces together. Your tutorials were simple, straightforward and helped me an awful lot. And the other thing about the way you wrote them that I really appreciated was that you didn't make me feel inferior for not knowing WTF I was doing. Thanks Avi. From time to time, I think back on the challenges I had in my life/career and I'm grateful for the people who helped me. You're definitely on that list, sir.

[nickstinemates]

I used to work for Avi at Kentik. He is a smart, nice person and remembered writing these articles fondly to help people out!

[aspenmayer]

> Avi

Somewhat off-topic, I’ve noticed on HN that sometimes comments end with single word on a newline, like you have done here.

Did your comment get truncated somehow, or did you mess up a copy/paste, or what?

Has anyone else noticed this? Is this a telltale sign of generated comments, or other tool usage?

I’ve only noticed this on HN, and maybe Reddit once? It happens somewhat more regularly than I can attribute to mere coincidence or accident.

[chriscjcj]

Interesting. Not sure how that happened. I thought I ended the post with the URL. You may be on to something.

[aspenmayer]

I don’t mean to suggest you did anything wrong. If you’re on mobile, perhaps you meant to close the keyboard and hit an autocorrect suggestion instead and didn’t catch it before submission? That seems like the most likely explanation that comes to mind.