2024 DevCentral MVP Announcement
Congratulations to the 2024 DevCentral MVPs! TheDevCentral MVP Award is given annually to the outstanding group of experts in the technical F5 user community who go out of their way to engage with the user community. The award is our way of recognizing their significant contributions, because while all of our users collectively make DevCentral one of the top community sites around and a valuable resource for everyone, MVPs regularly go above and beyond in assisting fellow F5 practitioners by sharing their deep technical experience and knowledge. MVPs get badges in their DevCentral and Reddit profiles so everyone can see that they are recognized experts. They also receive MVP swag, and invitations to regular exclusive webinars and behind-the-scenes looks at things like roadmaps, new product sneak-previews, and innovative concepts in development at F5. DevCentral is grateful for and proud to recognisethe technical knowledge and exemplary community engagement of these 43 outstanding community members: Amine_Kadimi Amr_Ali Austin_Geraci boneyard Bryan_T_ CA_Valli Daniel_Wolf Dario_Garrido Enes_Afsin_Al F5_Design_Engineer jaikumar_f5 Jim_Schwartzme1 JoseLabra JoshBecigneul Juergen_Mang Kai_Wilke KeesvandenBos Kevin_Davies Lidev lnxgeek LouisK Mayur_Sutare Michael_Saleem mihaic Mike757 Mohamed_Ahmed_Kansoh Mohamed_Salah_ Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P_Kueppers Patrik_Jonsson Paulius PhatANhappy Philip_Jonsson PSFletchTheTek Rodolfo_Nützmann Samir ScottE Sebastian_Mani1 Sebastiansierra StephanManthey Tofunmi Whisperer2023 DevCentral MVP Announcement
Congratulations to the 2023 DevCentral MVPs! Without users who take time from their busy days to share their experience and knowledge for others, DevCentral couldn't be the helpfuluser community that it is today. To that end, the DevCentral MVP Award is given annually to the outstanding group of experts in the technical F5 user community who go out of their way to engage with the user community. The award is our way of recognizing their significant contributions, because while all of our users collectively make DevCentral one of the top community sites around and a valuable resource for everyone, MVPs regularly go above and beyond in assisting fellow F5 users.2022 was tough in a lot of ways, and we are extra-grateful to this year's MVPs for taking the time and making the effort to help others. MVPs get badges in their DevCentral and Reddit profiles so everyone can see that they are recognized experts. This year’s MVPs will receive thank-you gifts, and invitations to regular exclusive webinars and behind-the-scenes looks at things like roadmaps, new product sneak-previews, and innovative concepts in development. The 2023 DevCentral MVPs are: AlexBCT Amine_Kadimi Austin_Geraci boneyard Bryan_T_ CA_Valli Dario_Garrido Donald_J_Ross Edouard Enes_Afsin_Al F5_Design_Engineer iaine jaikumar_f5 Jim_Schwartzme1 JoshBecigneul Juergen_Mang Kai_Wilke KeesvandenBos Kevin_Davies Lidev lnxgeek LouisK Mayur_Sutare mihaic Mike757 Mohamed_Ahmed_Kansoh Mohamed_Salah_ neeeewbie Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P_Kueppers Patrik_Jonsson Paulius Philip_Jonsson PSFletchTheTek Rodolfo_Nützmann Rodrigo_Albuque Samir spalande ScottE Sebastian_Maniak Sebastiansierra StephanManthey Tofunmi xuwenOn Badges
Hello DevCentral Community. Today I am launching our main community badge schema. 📛 I have been sitting on this for a while waiting - I can wait no longer. I hope this is a fun way for you to see what you have been up to on DevCentral, forothers to see how many places you've been on DevCentral, and forus all to be digitally recognized for just how much we are helping each other; everyday. You can see badges you have earned by navigating to your ownMy Profile. At launch (today) - I have set the default email notification to be in a daily-digest. Tomorrow (July 19) I will set the notification back to immediately so you may be notified about badges as you earn them. Many are earned as you engage on the site but some can be earned while you are away. If you want to change the default you can do so inMy Settings > Subscriptions & Notifications > Notification Settings. (linked for convenience) Some details. The badges follow a basic pattern with 8 achievement levels for each category. Levels 1 and 2 are visible whether you have achieved them or not, for each of the 10 initial categories. Each category has a different measure. For example, the count of comments to achieve level 4 (Comment-licious) will be different from the count of Kudos given to achieve level 4 (Kudo-licious) and the higher the level, in each category, the harder "the bosses" get. 😄 A very few members, notably JRahm, PSilva, and a few MVP's (who have been around and very active for many years) have reached level 7 or 8 in just a couple of categories but, for the most part, levels 5, 6, 7, and 8 are still wide open. There for the taking. Enjoy, have fun, and the last thing I'll say is I'm not done with badges; special badges, one-offs, and maybe even a whole new category (or three) will come later. Thanks for being part of our community. Lief * "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!"Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hi everyone, welcome to the new DevCentral! If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you have noticed some big changes to the site. This article will go over some of the changes, get you started, and introduce some of our new features. Another platform change? Why? Those of you who've been around a while know that the last major site change didn’t work out as we’d hoped for a variety of reasons. It has taken a while for us to prepare a solid fix, and we appreciate your patience and assistance in the process. In our ongoing effort to serve the DevCentral community as best we can, we’re proud to announce the launch of our new and improved site. What does this mean for me? For most users, you’ll simply need to adjust to the renovation and have fun exploring the new features we’re all excited about. A few of you may want to make some changes to your username or profile. OK, so what changed? TL;dr - you can skip on over to the Getting Started guide if you don't want to read through the changes listed below. Usernames: Spaces in usernames are not available going forward, and existing spaces in usernames have all been converted to underscores. For example, my old username “Leslie Hubertus” is now “Leslie_Hubertus” – and while everyone now has the option of changing their username, please note that spaces are no longer allowed. Additionally, if you had a really long handle (16+ characters), it has automatically been truncated to 15 characters. The system will automatically prompt you to update your username the first time you log in. You can leave it truncated if you wish, or change it at that time. If you decide to change your username , you can do so at any time by clicking on your profile picture in the top right of your screen, and clicking on My Settings. This will change the username associated with your profile and all your posts. Ranks: Our ranking schema has gone cloudy and we have added a few levels. You'll see everyone's rank next to their username. A quick note: 2 ranks override point-based ranking: MVP, and F5 employee. Do you have what it takes to get to Bespin? More info to come. Where did everything go? TL;dr Questions is now FORUMS Articles is now TECHNICAL ARTICLES CodeShare is now under the CrowdSRC umbrella Article Series can now be found by searching for "series," and we will be publishing an article with more information in days to come (and update this and the Getting Started articles accordingly). Questions has now become FORUMS: Technical Forum This is where you’ll post any technical questions or observations, just like you would have in the old Questions section. Water Cooler This is a new feature where the community can post about anything else (within the community guidelines). Want to talk about a particular Agility session, or general trending non-political news topics? Brag about your sweet home rig, or get advice on building one? This is the place to do that. Note: Posts, kudos, and comments in the Water Cooler do not count towards your rank – but good content is good content. When really good stuff happens around the Water Cooler we may move it to make it more prominent. Articles: Technical Articles This is where you will find, well, technical articles...go figure! These articles are written by F5ers, just like before. CrowdSRC This is dedicated to community-created and -contributed technical articles and code. It is a new and improved version of the old CodeShare. Code is of course still welcome and encouraged, but you can now also write free-form insights and solutions to share with the community. Note that the DevCentral team will review submissions prior to publishing, and all are subject to the community guidelines. DevCentral News This is a new featured section where you’ll find announcements, and other non-technical information from the team. Check here for Agility updates, contest announcements, team updates, and swag giveaways. Groups: This is a new feature we are excited about! Groups is a place for special groups to have conversations. The inaugural group is the MVP group, which is an invite-only place for our MVP cohort to converse with each other. We will be opening this feature to other groups slowly as we come to understand whether it serves the community well, For example, there may be potential for usergroups to have their own space in the community. We would love to hear what you think about the Groups feature. Events: This is another new feature we are excited about! This is where you’ll find links to things like Agility, webinars, trivia games, SME office hours, Livestream after-hour shows, and other events we’re planning for the community. Suggestions: Code syntax highlighting is now supported! Thanks to @MVP Kevin Davies for suggesting this feature! Whether you are creating an article or making a comment, here’s how to insert code: Click on the three dots to expand the toolbar: Click on Insert/Edit code sample, and you will see the following popup: OK, but what happened to my Follows, Bookmarks, and Private Messages? Unfortunately, we weren’t able to migrate this information on your behalf. Please read this article for more information. If you didn’t get notification about this ahead of time, and really need the name of that one article you rely on, please reach out to us at DevCentralFeedback@f5.com and someone on the team will reply directly to you. Unfortunately, while Private Messages continue to be a feature, we were not able to keep Private Message data across the migration. Follow is now Subscribe. How do I Subscribe to (formerly “Follow”) or Bookmark an article? Once you are in an article, you’ll see And At the top of each article, there are two options available to you. You can click on the small drop-down arrow or use the Options link with the three vertical dots. Once you do, you will see the menus as shown, where you can Bookmark (saved to a list on your profile) and Subscribe (get notified of article updates). How do I manage Bookmarks and Subscriptions? Click on your avatar in the top right of the page, then click on My Subscriptions, and it’ll take you directly to the relevant part of your My Settings page where you can Customize All The Things (related to your notification settings): Customize your experience! How do I find that article I really liked? Labels and Tags on this platform: Labelsare enforced on new content and represent a very small set-list of high-level organization defined by us: Security, DevOps, Application Delivery etc. Tagsare those free-form pieces that the author may contribute to their own post. You can interact with these components like this: (added tags are clickable/sortable too) You can subscribe to changes for any label (when you click on it) And you can see articles sorted by tags by clicking on them too. The red bar at the left of a post marks UNREAD. Important note on subscribing to tags: Subscribing to a tag is board specific, so if you want to see (for example) irules in articles and technical forum, you need to subscribe in both places. Fine, fine, but... How do I post a question, comment, or code? Please read this article for a primer on posting to the new DevCentral. Besides the editor being fairly intuitive, consistent, and easy to use, one new thing we’re happy about is that copying and pasting from into the text editor should no longer result in failarious formatting issues. You should also be able to write in multiple coding syntaxes now, including GO, ApacheConf, TCL, and nginx Guideslines and EULA, oh my Here are the DevCentral Community Guidelines, and this is our updated EULA. I’m still reading this. What's next, and where’s my cookie? We’re glad you stuck with us this long, and really hope you are happy with the changes. We do have more incremental changes planned, will be making further improvements as we go, and hope you will leave us a comment below or use the Suggestions page to share your input! As for cookies, well… that’s between you and your browser history.A Makeover for DevCentral.
UPDATE: This maintenance has been moved to Jan 24th starting at approximately 8AM Pacific time. --- DevCentral Community, TL;DR - I am announcing some updates coming to the DevCentral community website in a few days - January 17th.24th. This is a mid-sized reboot, some upgrades that we expect will make our online environment a bit nicer to use now and enable more epic-ness to come. ***This update WILL include a maintenance downtime of up to 6 hours starting around 8AM PT (-8 UTC).*** A huge shoutout. I speak for everyone on our team when I say the DevCentral community rocks! We on the DevCentral team are inspired and motivated by your creativity and willingness to share. The depth of your capabilities and the mutual respect you have for individual learning never ceases to amaze. Asyou, collectively, work through increasingly complex problem-spaces we are always working to support your progress. Our recent observations and your suggestions have been buzzing in our ears for several months and so the changes you'll see soon represent next steps for what we think will make your DevCentral community truly exceptional. An updated UI is just the start. Interface updates will be the most obvious, but these are evolutionary rather than revolutionary - a paint job and some new tech. The new tech includes a simpler set of stylesheets, more configurable page templates, some advanced features in the editors, and an overall reductive approach to some historical bloat. One of my design tenets is best summarized as comfortably information dense. DevCentral is a functional website, mostly used during your workweek, and we are looking to strike a balance between engaging with the content quickly and easily (e.g., less scrolling and more filters) without getting eyestrain or needing to know where you are on the site. I'll get into a bit more detail next week and after we launch, I expect to produce some guided walkthroughs you can use to discover some gems. If you are coming to AppWorld in San Jose in February - be sure to stop by our booth and look me up - I can give you a personalized tour.Mention this article and I'll be forced to find some special swag for you too!😎 Wait. Did you say "reductive"? Yes. In a world where everyone backs up everything a subtractive mindset seems nutty. I'm no expert (case-in-point, the length of this announcement) but I embrace the subtractive sentiment and as such I have been ruthless about driving this upgrade for a host of reasons and that *may* have come at the expense of some existing features. Some things won't be present at launch (like Badges and Event calendars) but on-balance I'm sure we will be better off. That said, if something you love disappears - let me know in a comment, in a DM, or on the Suggestions page. I can't promise everything, butI do promise my level-best and that everything is done with intent: sharing valuable and useful technical information with you. Temporary Outage Most important, for now, is to plan for a short outage the morning of Jan 17th approximately 8AM Pacific Time (-8H UTC) for up to about 6 hours. Next: A reminder on Monday, Jan 15th 🚀Community at F5 - Evolving Patterns and New Structures
Community at F5 has a new home. It is faster, more searchable, has more discussion styles, and enables us to begin delivering benefits and features we think you will like. Sign In, or Register for a free account, and join thousands of your technical peersdedicated to supporting learning, exchanging ideas, and solving problems - together.Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month!
Oct. 3-7: All About Access Oct. 10-14: Helpers Behind the Scenes Oct. 17-21: Security Certifications Oct. 24-28: Scary Hack Stories Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month from all of us at DevCentral! Cybersecurity Awareness Monthis in October and is dedicated to helping individuals protect themselves online as threats to technology and confidential data become more commonplace. In honor of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we've got some security content on the docket for October broken up into four weekly themes: Oct. 3-7: All About Access We're always on the lookout for content about APM, OAuth, Zero Trust, SSO and all other things access related. Keep an eye our for auser authentication APM use case fromScheffandbowlermj. Andmomahdywalks us through how toselect Conditional Access Policies created at Azure AD. You want Modern Auth … for an app or client that’s stuck in the 2010s Zero Trust - Making use of a Powerful Identity Aware Proxy (Hands on lab) Leverage F5 BIG-IP APM and Azure AD Conditional Access Easy button Oct. 10-14: Helpers Behind the Scenes Keeping the internet safe from hackers and bad actors is hard work but somebody's gotta do it. This week we will profile people who work in security behind the scenes, including folks from the F5 SIRT team and F5 Labs. A Day in the Life of a Security Engineer from Tel Aviv Security Operations Center - Helpers Behind the Scenes F5 Labs - Helpers Behind the Scenes F5 Threat Intelligence - Helpers Behind the Scenes Oct. 17-21: Security Certifications Continuous learning is important but can also be difficult and time consuming.JRahmwill take you on his Security+certification journey as he goes through the course and takes the test. AndAaronJBshares his thoughts on security certifications. Certifications for security professionals Oct. 24-28: Scary Hack Stories In the spirit of Halloween we're using this week to tell scary hack stories instead of scary ghost stories! Keep an eye out for our scary hack short stories on the DevCentral Youtube channel, brought to you byAubreyKingF5. And Dan Woods joins our weekly DevCentral Connects livestream on Tuesday, October 25. WorldTech IT - Who Ya Gonna Call? Scary Hack Story Scary Hack Stories presented by DevCentral Be sure to check out these F5 webinars as well: F5 Cybersecurity SummitOctober 20, 2022 (On-demand) It’s Fall: Time to Bundle Up and Secure Your Distributed ArchitectureOctober 26, 2022 (On-demand) We're hope you enjoy everything we've got coming your way in October. Happy Cybersecurity Month and Happy Spooky Season (to all who celebrate)!The return of DevCentral CodeShare.
Hey DevCentral Community, a quick update on progress. By request, (Bring Back Codeshare)I spent some recent cycles planning out and finally executing the move to restore the well-liked CodeShare section while also retaining the ability for all users to contribute more freeform content. All users will now see a new top navigational section we are still calling CrowdSRC (crowd-source) but it now has two separate sections; Codeshare and Community Articles. CodeShare - where all historical Codeshare content can be found. Members are encouraged to use the pre-determined codeshare template to guide sharing of some code (big or small) that you have found to be useful in your environment. No strings attached - and as always "Use at your own risk". If you see something in CodeShare that you think should be moved to the Community Articles section - ContactUsand let us know. Community Articles - on the other hand is a net-new feature since our new tools went live in Jan 2022. In this section any registered member may write any freeform content they feel will help others understand a process, tool, or abstract concept. Some early contributions include: Knowledge sharing: High CPU/Memory/Swap investigation/troubleshootingbyNikoolayy1 02 - Visualization of F5 BIG-IP metrics on Grafana using Prometheus and Telemetry Streaming serviceby Nishal_Rai Demystifying Time-based OTPbyDario_Garrido and several more In both of these cases new and edited content has been historically placed in a Waiting For Approval state while our Content Management Teamreviews and publishes the content. But that step seems too restrictive for our community. Very soon, perhaps by the time you read this, I will change the rules allowing all registered members to publish CodeShare and Community Articles without delay. Thanks for your amazing contributions to DevCentral and our community. Lastly - a short note on Events. Events as a function were, for us, rather uneventful (nyuk nyuk) and so I'm taking them off the navigation menu and back to the drawing board for some review. Until we can come back to the table with some proper content and/or features they will stay hidden. As always - let me know what you think either in the comments here, in a private message, on our Suggestions board. All smoke signals will be lost to the haze of the wildfire season here in western washington.Game: National Coding Week Escape Room Is Live!
National Coding Week starts Wednesday, but kick this week off right! If you like puzzles, check outJRahm's National Coding Week Escape Room, which is live now. It works like this: Sign up on the escape room site for access to game play. They have some public games there as well that you can play beforehand to get the feel of how the game interaction works, this will help you on time! You'll click around on objects to find clues that will unlock other objects until you escape! This adventure might require coding and will whisk you away to DevCentral and F5 Labs to gather clues. Are you up to the challenge? If you escape, post your time below for bragging rights! We hope you have fun with this escape room during National Coding Week! We definitely had fun making it. If you get stuck, shoot a DM toJRahm. GAME PLAY FEEDBACK THAT WILL HELP YOU A couple of the shortURL hyperlinks have extra characters that break. One has a trailing bracket and one has a trailing period. Remove those and you're good to go. When you escape, the message says to post your results at <dc thread>, which was created before this thread existed and I forgot to update it before publishing the game. The thread is right here, just make a coment below with your escape time.DevCentral Community Ranking Explained
What is that little cloud icon for? What does it mean? I've heard this question a handful of times since we launched and finally grabbed some time to describe it for you all.TL;DR, that icon signifies a members' level of engagement on DevCentral. and we decided to play with the cloud motif because it was fun. Rankings in Greater Detail Ranks (and clouds for that matter) are derived from a semi-fluid arrangement of factorssuch as time, contributions, reactions, and interactions with the content of the site (or environment). As of this writing, outside of employees and MVPs, the highest rank for active members is Nacreous achieved only bySamirandcjunior. In the end, this means that if you see someone with a rank icon with a lightning bolt or star in it, that user has established credibility with the rest of our community! These ranks do NOT imply accuracy of a given piece of advice. Nor do they illuminate skill or knowledge generally; those things are earned from innumerable places well beyond our virtual walls, but we hope this rank designation is one simple way we might help you, at a glance, understand just who you a member is with respect to their energies at DevCentral. As you can see in this chart, we have room for growth. By way of comparison, I checked onJRahm, and he *would be* at that level right above Nacreous. For the sake of intrigue, I have left off the names we provided for the next four ranks. It'll be fun to see those ranks get exposed. 😄 I should note that during the recent migration we were unable to translate any of the kudos/upvotes users may have earned or given between 2005 & 2019. This is a softspot that primarily affects really long-term members (like JRahm) but once kudos and solutions begin piling up in our new system I would expect to see increased movement up the ranks. Next time, I'll review our incoming badging system. Cheers!
