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Declan Durcan

DeclanDurcan

I take pictures of things that won’t hold still — and, for a living, building AI-Driven networks that just work

  • Los Angeles
  • Photographer
  • Network architect
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Photographs Instagram Where most of them end up. Since 2011 The Blog Fifteen years of half-finished thoughts. Still up. The day job LinkedIn Twenty-eight years of networks, in reverse order. Direct Email Fastest way to reach me. I actually answer.

Contact sheet

The part I’d rather show you first.

Cameras have been the constant since long before any of the networking. Cathedrals, rodeos, the Pacific at the end of the day, and small animals that would very much rather not be photographed.

Light through the stained glass of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona
Sagrada FamíliaBarcelona
A red-eyed tree frog gripping a stem at night
Red-eyed tree frogAfter dark
A stingless bee in flight beside the wax entrance tube of its hive
Hive entranceMid-flight
A rider carrying the American flag at a gallop across a rodeo arena
Grand entryFull gallop
A lifeguard tower silhouetted against the setting sun over the Pacific
Last lightPacific
The lit Ferris wheel and roller coaster of Santa Monica Pier against a blue-hour sky
Santa Monica PierBlue hour

Six frames Canon & Sony More on Instagram ↗

Off the clock

What I’d rather be talking about.

At home

Penny & Poppy

Two Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Large, stubborn, and entirely convinced the couch was purchased for their benefit. They are correct.

Loud rooms

Live music

Front of house if I can help it. A soft spot for Irish music that I make no apology for, and a camera that comes along whether or not the venue approves.

Elsewhere

Travel

Barcelona for the Gaudí, the tropics for whatever is sitting on a leaf at 2 a.m. I walk cities early, before anyone’s awake — the best light, and the only time they’re quiet.

Nights and weekends

The homelab

Proxmox, a stack of Docker services, and more monitoring than the house strictly requires. Occupational hazard.

The day job

Twenty-eight years of keeping packets moving.

I’m a solution architect. In practice that means I get handed a network that is on fire, or a network that is about to be built, and I figure out which one I’m dealing with before anyone else in the room does.

These days I’m a Consulting Sales Engineer at HPE Networking, covering state, local government and education accounts across Los Angeles. The interesting part right now is AI-driven network operations — using wireless assurance, anomaly detection and telemetry correlation to cut the time it takes to find a fault from days down to something reasonable.

Before that: twelve years at Juniper, the broadcast network at DIRECTV, the corporate backbone at Yahoo!, and employee number thirty-two at HotJobs. I’ve been the person on the 3 a.m. bridge call enough times to have opinions about it.

2025 —

Consulting Sales Engineer

HPE Networking

Technical strategy for public-sector accounts across Southern California — Aruba and Juniper Mist AI, wired, wireless, SD-WAN and security. Mostly: proving the AI actually finds the fault.

2013 – 2025

Sr. Systems Engineer → Consulting SE

Juniper Networks · 12 years

Covered the entire product line for Southern California — switching, routing, security, wireless. Designated security specialist. Twelve years is long enough to watch a whole architecture generation come and go.

2010 – 2013

Principal Engineer, Network Architect

DIRECTV

Architecture and security for the broadcast network. Scaled MPLS backbones and global load balancing for DIRECTV Everywhere and NFL Sunday Ticket — millions of subscribers, live, with no acceptable failure mode.

2002 – 2009

Sr. Network Engineer

Yahoo!

All of it — design, implementation, security, operations — for a corporate network that grew from 2,500 to 16,000 people across 108 offices while I was there. Also built the infrastructure behind the early cloud and data-mining work.

1998 – 2002

Manager of Network Operations

HotJobs.com · Employee #32

Joined at thirty-two people and helped run the network while it became six hundred across eleven offices. A useful education in what breaks when you grow that fast.

How I got here

I started at Syracuse as a pre-med biology major and worked out fairly quickly that it wasn’t mine. I switched to sociology with a focus on law enforcement — a lot of my family works in it, and for a while I thought I would too.

Then I noticed I had a knack for the technology side, added information management and technology as a second major, and have been pointed at networks ever since. The sociology turned out to be less of a detour than it looked: most of this job is people, and only some of it is packets.

Currently building

So I built a Tetris.

Lately I’ve been spending my evenings building things with AI tools and coding agents — browser games, 3D architectural visualizations in Three.js, and whatever else the homelab will tolerate.

This one runs right here. No install, no ads, no score to beat but your own.

←→ move   ↓ soft drop
↑ rotate   space hard drop   P pause

Tetris Clear lines. Do not stack to the ceiling.
Next
Score0
Lines0
Level1