DevCentral's Featured Member for December - Dario Garrido

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 active folks.

First year DevCentral MVP member Dario Garrido is our Featured Member for December 2020! Find out more about Dario!

 

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

Dario: Hi everyone! I am Dario Garrido, a Security Engineer who is passionate about new technologies and in love with F5 solutions. I live in Spain, where I studied telecommunications engineering to end up working in the IT Security sector.
In the community I am mainly help members in the Q&A section, although I have also dabbled in the CodeShare section by posting some iRules and cheat sheets. As well as my contributions to DevCentral, I also have a GitHub repository that I use as a knowledge base store where I usually upload scripts, iRules and other things that I work on in my spare time.
My hobbies include playing the bass and hiking, although what really fascinates me the most is the world of mycology, since I have a thousand books and I love going out to the mountains to look for mushrooms. Some members of the community can vouch for this :-).

 

DevCentral: You're an active contributor to the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

Dario: DevCentral is one of the most active vendor communities, making knowledge spread more widely and in which members are more often asking increasingly challenging questions. Helping people to solve their doubts is a very good way to keep up to date with the concerns that companies have, and answering their questions serves to put your skills to the test, which is also a very good way of learning. Furthermore, the CodeShare section has great resources that have aided me more than once in my daily work.

 

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

Dario: Although I began in the industry as a Software Developer, I quickly saw that my future was in the world of networking, more specifically in the world of IT Security. I quickly specialized in handling the main standards (TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, DNS) and it didn't take long for me to focus on topics related to web integration (NTLM, SAML, OAUTH). Regarding F5, I can manage rather well with practically every module it offers, although without a doubt the ones I master the most are LTM, APM, ASM, DNS and VCMP. Besides main solutions, I also like working with iRules, iCalls, iControlREST and Python SDK. I am currently focusing my efforts learning tools like Ansible and Terraform, and who knows, perhaps AS3 further on.

 

DevCentral: You are a Security Engineer at ElevenPaths. Can you describe your typical workday & how you manage work/life balance?

Dario: At ElevenPaths I help our clients carry out the ideas they have in mind. So, I spend most of my time planning and developing projects for them. More specifically, I am part of the group of specialists in charge of ADC, WAF, VPNSSL, NAC and web integration technologies. Thanks to my work I have been able to focus on handling the following BIG-IP modules: LTM / APM / ASM / DNS / iRules, although nowadays many of our clients are beginning to be interested in topics related to Continuous Integration (CI/CD), which also forces us to keep up to date in handling tools such as Ansible, Terraform or Kubernetes.

Despite all this, the day has many hours, and there is always time to help other colleagues in the DevCentral community.

 

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

Dario: I do not have any certifications, but I can see that they are becoming more and more important for my work and without a doubt it is at the top of my to-do list for next year.

 

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

Dario: There are many, although most of them are related to APM topics: Complex app integrations, VPN SSL portals with special requirements or rewriting profiles that require iRules to be viable. Despite this, one of the ones I remember the most was one in which the client asked us to set a load balancing condition that depended on an external server response. Initially, we decided to use an iRule with HSSR, but over time we ended up using a much more complex solution by means of iRulesLX. Without a doubt, without the help of DevCentral and F5CloudDocs this would have been a much more tedious job.

 

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?

Dario: Honestly, I think I am an incredibly lucky guy because I am a person who likes to continuously develop and always put myself to the test. Working at IT Security is like being at school for life where you never stop learning, and I love that. Despite this, if I hadn't have chosen this job, I would have loved to be a bass player or a mycologist.

 

---Thanks Dario! We really appreciate your willingness to share. Stay connected with Dario & Eleven Paths on social media:

• Dario's LinkedIn
• Dario's Github Repo
• ElevenPaths
• ElevenPaths Twitter