DevCentral's Featured Member for February - Amine Kadimi

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.

First time DevCentral MVP, Amine Kadimi , is our Featured Member for February!
Let's learn more about Amine!

DevCentral: Please share a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important.

Amine: First, I really appreciate the focus and support placed by F5 into its community and I am very pleased and honored to join the DC featured members group.

My work career started 15 years ago with a basic IT administration job not dealing with security nor with F5, however I already had a hobby back between the late 90s and the early 2000s which was trying to hack into vulnerable websites, network shares, and IRC accounts (just for fun nothing else).

Back in 2009, I started working for an F5 distributor (if you asked me that time what is F5 I probably had answered that it is a fighting aircraft), but never had the chance to have hands-on experience except during the labs of a customer training, and that training was the starting point of my relation with F5 because it was the training I have appreciated the most during my whole career at that time both for the quality of the material and the skills of the trainer.

In 2012, I joined the major F5 reseller in Morocco, where I have been actively working on F5 projects for the largest customers here in Morocco, but also on other technologies like Juniper and Fortinet.

Since 2019, I started my own company which is now the unique one in the region having two F5 401 certified engineers and we are offering service for customers across French speaking Africa and the middle east.

Except that, I like to go fishing, especially for sea bass and largemouth bass.

 

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

Amine: DevCentral is a priceless and invaluable source of knowledge. Whether you are a seasonal visitor trying to find a solution to a specific problem or an expert willing to help others you will enjoy an interesting experience and a very high level of collaboration. So, what keeps me involved is both learning from the DC experts and helping others with the little knowledge I acquired throughout my F5 journey.

 

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

Amine: Basically, I am helping customers implementing and maintaining the best level of security and getting a visibility into what happens on their systems. This includes working with the right tools and the right processes.

And when it comes to high availability and web application security, F5 is one of my preferred solutions. I deployed many GTMs, LTMs, ASMs, APMs. The BIG-IP APM by the way is one of my favorite products due to the myriad of features and the great granularity it offers.

I also work with many open-source solutions including free NGINX, and I am eager to learn and work with the enterprise version of NGINX in a modern API deployment with Kubernetes.

 

DevCentral: You are a IT Infrastructure & Security Consultant at NG Data. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work?

Amine: Struggling to balance a new business you have started, and a family is a reality. However, when you keep in mind that your business or your job are just means for you and your family living and a way for having fun when you love what you do, then I think there will be no problem insuring this balance.

As for my typical workday, I think I don’t have one as I adapt to each client circumstances and needs, and this became more evident since the pandemic started as customers took different approaches to guarantee business continuity while dealing with lockdowns and social distancing requirements.

With that said, most of the time you’ll find me either auditing security configurations or implementing them for a customer or training people on that or helping the sales team. And I particularly try to leave a spare time for learning and keeping up to date with the industry qualifications.

 

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

Amine: Yes, I do have F5 CSE 401 and all the CTS ones, and honestly it helped a lot. I passed a dozen of certifications from many vendors, and I can tell that F5 is doing a very good job protecting its certifications value and ensuring a genuine assessment of the candidate knowledge and experience.

 

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

Amine: I owe a lot to the F5 community -and to other ones too. There have been many customer challenges I solved using shares from DevCentral, including for example iRules snippets for extracting information from a client certificate and pushing it to the end server, ready to use iApps…

 

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?

Amine: Someone who fixes something. Actually, when I was a kid, I was always broking and trying to fix different objects so when I broke a clock, I dreamed to be a watchmaker, when it was a tape Walkman, I dreamed to be an electronics engineer and so on.

 

---Thanks Amine! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. To stay connected with Amine on other social media channels:

• Amine on LinkedIn
• NG Data on LinkedIn
• NG Data on the Web