DevCentral's Featured Member for January - Claudio Junior

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 Claudio Junior is our Featured Member for January to kick off 2021! Let's learn more about Claudio! 

 

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

Claudio: I started working in IT in the late 1990's as a Clipper and Cobol developer in a XT/286 PC with its green screen charming monitor and its incredible kilobytes of available memory. Since then, I have been evolving in programming languages as a benefit to my job.

In 2013, I was challenged for the company to learn BIG-IP as they were forming a team to F5 products. I was curious about it and so I accepted the challenge. In that time, I had no idea that F5 products would be a game changer for my career.

Personally, I consider myself a simple guy contained in 1.66m tall. I believe that my importance to the people around, is that they can count on me to help in their daily.

 

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

Claudio: In the beginning, most of my knowledge was acquired from DevCentral. Indeed, I learned with questions and articles from the other members. It was certainly useful to me. If I was facing trouble, I could ask for help or find similar cases and then take shortcuts to a solution or at least help me to think out if my mind. In this way in my free time, I usually browse the forum to read the news and sometimes look at the oldest questions with no activity. I think the no activity questions may hide a new challenge for me and maybe someone is still waiting for help.

 

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

Claudio: As I started working as a System Developer. The logic was, my base to learn almost all about infrastructure and security layers, so F5 products felt like a glove to me. I really like command lines and these long years, I’ve helped on project designs and BIG-IP modules implementation or support for customers, including BIG-IQ and F5 Silverline. I still love when there is an iRule to write and implement.

 

DevCentral: You are a F5 Specialist at Compugraf. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work?

Claudio: Currently, I'm a F5 Specialist acting more as solution architect, working in the background and waiting for demand where I can act with my knowledge base to help my co-workers. In the meantime, I can improve my skills and I have been walking through the cloud architecture, I have been doing automations scripts to our products catalogue and helping the company in the market demands. I consider myself a lucky guy in regarding to the job and the recent pandemic situation. Thank God I can work at home so it can keep me away from the virus for somehow. Moreover, I can enjoy my family more, as we spend all day together at home.

 

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

Claudio: Yes, I do. But they all just expired this year. Some certifications are extremely important because they are prerequisites to keep our F5 partnership. Especially at the beginning of my career, these certifications guaranteed me the recognition of the effort on the challenge in becoming a F5 specialist. Also, to me, it is a way to know that you are up to date.

 

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

Claudio: Certainly, my biggest challenge was my first project ever. I should dedicate its success to the ASKF5 portal and F5 partnership channels who supported me that time. Almost 8 years ago, wow! That time, I was working alone at the most critical customer and I was fully supported by online training and deployment guides or SOL's available.

 

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?

Claudio: I believe I never really had a dream career, but I certainly dreamed of doing many things. When I was kid, I planned to build robots and planes. I used to take apart all toys and electronics to make my own Frankenstein. Later, as a teenager, I wished to be a rock star. Nowadays, I'm afraid of heights and flying but I still love playing my instruments and take apart of electronic circuits.

So, I probably would be a Brazilian Gyro Gearloose or why not, to be the guitar god Ritchie Blackmore!

 

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

• Claudio on LinkedIn
• Compugraf on LinkedIn
• Compugraf IT on Twitter