I turn opaque networks into something you can query, plan around, and build against.

Make the client itself the discovery tool. Seed one address, crawl outward on CDP and LLDP, and let the resulting topology be the session tree — click a node and you're on it. The same crawl feeds inventory and config capture with deduplicated history, and exports to draw.io so the diagram is a build artifact instead of a chore. Credentials sit in an OS-backed vault; jump hosts, serial, and legacy KEX are first-class because real networks still have all three.

Build the crawl engine once in Go, expose it across a narrow C ABI, and let a C++/Qt application and a headless CLI be two front ends over the same core — so discovery is a library, not a feature of one binary. SSH and SNMP collect side by side, with OIDs already validated against Junos, IOS and EOS. The map JSON schema is treated as a contract, because other tools consume it; the viewer is a separate, loosely coupled executable, and export and merge are first-class.

The device itself is the most accurate source of truth — so work it inside-out. SSH into each device, read its own forwarding tables, and ask four questions at every hop: is there a route, is it in the FIB, is the next-hop resolved, is the link healthy. Build a directed graph of every path a packet can actually take, then diff a before against an after and get path count, ECMP width, and edge churn as numbers you can gate a change on.

Make any CLI output a first-class record. Define a template and it's collected, parsed, versioned, and semantically diffed — a peer dropping to Idle, not a timer ticking. Every parse is scored on records, fields, population and consistency, so the platform tells you whether its own data is even true, with a template lab for fixing the ones that aren't. All of it API-addressable, so it becomes the source of truth other automation reads.

Build both to be automated from the first packet. Authored intent lives in git, but the decisions get made on state — machine state in SQLite, and DNS derived directly from live lease state. Split-horizon views, forwarders and cache are all config surfaces, not file edits. Two processes joined by one narrow, well-defined interface that degrades gracefully instead of ever failing a lease. Validated end to end on real Cisco gear, across a relay.