DevCentral's Featured Member for September - Pascal Küppers

Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. DevCentral Member Pascal Küppers is our Featured Member for September! He's been helping many other members with some great tips so let's catch up with Pascal!

DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important.

Pascal: I started my own small hosting business while still in school, offering web services. After that I did a training as an IT specialist in a small media company where I administered mostly Linux webservers. And since nearly 6 years I am a network professional for a local public service provider working with F5, Cisco and other network vendors. Mostly BigIP and Firewall.

DevCentral: You’ve been an active contributor in the DevCentral community.  What keeps you involved?

Pascal: A community lives from the input and output of its users. And it's great when experts meet in one place to help each other. At the beginning with our BigIP, many questions came up about workflows, best practice configurations and of course, as always, problems that were absolutely not understandable. Here in DevCentral you search for 1-2 keywords and usually you find someone who had the same problem and a corresponding solution. If that's not the case, you quickly made a post and often get a qualified answer in a short time. I think that's what makes a good community.

DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have.

Pascal: Since I started as a system administrator, I had the opportunity to pick up a little bit of everything. From clients to various server services to the network, where I finally stayed. So for more than six years now, I’ve been a network professional, managing a network with over 15.000 Users, several hundred servers and and processing data for over 1.4million people.

DevCentral: You are a Network Engineer at a local service Provider. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the pandemic impacted your work?

Pascal: Since we are in the public sector and have flextime, I am not in a hurry to get the day started. But its important that our team covers the service hours so with a bit of coordinate everyone can start when it fits best. The work-life balance is wonderful at a 9to5 job. Maintenance work is then pushed into the late evening, which we can live with. The pandemic forced almost everyone into home office, which was completely new for us and we first had to manage this from the technically side. And with all the remote access, F5 was one of our ways to go with.

DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?

Pascal: With the answer I am probably one of the first. Unfortunately, not yet. I have attended some training courses of F5 and I'm therefore trained on the devices and services but I have not yet obtained the certificates. However, this is still on the ToDo’s.

DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation.

Pascal: One of the first projects where we needed the help of the community was probably to put Exchange behind the F5 APM. The initial setup was well documented thanks to F5 and MS but Skype could no longer communicate with Exchange externally and a good bypass iRule came out of DevCentral (thanks to that).

DevCentral: Lastly, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing, what would be your dream career? Or better, when you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?

Pascal: I think the question is hard for me to answer. I'm 30 and as a kid, the analog/digital transition was the thing. The first computer, the first time soldering something, understanding electrical engineering. I think that this were my hobby’s all over my childhood and out of this there were nothing to imaging what I could do else.

---Thanks Pascal! The DevCentral Community really appreciate your willingness to share with our Members.