DevCentral's Featured Member for January - Daniel Wolf
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 and newly minted MVP Daniel Wolf is our Featured Member to kick off 2022! Let's catch up with Daniel! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Daniel: I’m an enthusiast. When I was younger, I was a passionate handball player. Later I also became a passionate handball coach for children. Recently I became an avid cook. Almost ten years ago I moved to the Balkans, to the city of Skopje. I fell in love with the region, the people, and the Balkan way of life. I even found my wife there. Almost three years ago my family and I moved back to my hometown, a small city close to Frankfurt in Germany. And I have always been a tech enthusiast. DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Daniel: I find it interesting to read what challenges others from the community are facing. In case I know an answer to their question, I will reply. In case I don’t know the answer, but I think I can figure it out with a reasonable effort, I will try to. It helps me to broaden my knowledge but even more important to share the answers with others. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Daniel: First time I touched a computer was an Intel 286 with DOS 5.0. After a couple of weeks, I deleted a couple of seemingly useless file to install Monkey Island. Since then, I became pretty good at solving computer problems. Nowadays they are called projects and the problems are often much more complex. The last technology I was responsible before I decided to become an F5 consultant was Microsoft SharePoint and other .NET web apps. Roughly 7 years ago, there was a project to protect an online banking application with a WAF. So, unlike many other F5 specialists, I am not a network specialist but a web server dude. DevCentral: You are a Senior Network Professional at Controlware GmbH. 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? Daniel: I appreciate that there is not a typical workday. I enjoy a challenging mix between projects, presales activities and occasional L3 support. Most fun for me are projects where I can help my customers to protect their apps and APIs. In the past two years we also had a lot of projects building, improving, or scaling out identity-aware access solutions. So, on a typical day, I’d say I am still solving computer problems. The pandemic has improved my work/life balance, I don’t have to drive to the office anymore and I can have a walk in the field during lunchtime or enjoy a coffee with my wife (she’s also working from home). DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Daniel: I have the 401 since last year. The 401 was a very good exam, passing it required an understanding of many F5 solutions but also of broader security concepts. My employer is promoting to get certified and allowed me to prepare during working hours. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Daniel: I’d say that this is one of my current projects. We are migrating from an end-of-life proxy platform to BIG-IP and we are building a lot of the content switching and rewrite features with iRules. Devcentral is a goldmine if you are looking for iRule documentation and code snippets. DevCentral: Lastly, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing – what would be your dream career? Like, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up? Daniel: I always wanted to be some sort of IT guy. I think I am fine where I am now, I enjoy my work. If I was granted a wish, carpenter would be an alternative. I like the idea that, at the end of each day, you can see what you have built with your own hands. The things I build, they are meaningful as long as there is a browser available. ---Thanks Dan! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Daniel and Controlware on social media: Controlware GmbH on LinkedIn Daniel on LinkedIn Controlware GmbH on the WebDevCentral's Featured Member for August - Tim Riker
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 MVP Tim Riker is our Featured Member for August! Let's catch up with Tim! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Tim: I have been doing software development and systems administration for many years. I’ve spent many years doing Linux development from embedded systems using BusyBox and ucLinux to large computing clusters. DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Tim: When I started in my current position, there were 34 different BIG-IP nodes to administer and no central tool to view all of them. BigIPReport was a great solution for this. On report view that includes all the virtual servers, pools, nodes, data groups, etc. all searchable in one interface. DevCentral has helped to find solid answers to real world issues. This has saved time and increased flexibility of our solutions. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Tim: I have a deep understanding of networking, systems, and software development. Development in everything from Linux kernel development in C, Android apps in Java, to web apps in PHP. I have also been a Linux user and proponent for almost 30 years. DevCentral: How is the DevCentral MVP experience? Tim: The contact with peers has been great. I’ve enjoyed working with Patrik and others in the DevCentral community. The wealth of information from the community on DevCentral has made working with F5 systems easier and more productive. DevCentral: You are a Sr. Software Engineer and Linux Technologist. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and how has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Tim: As most of the systems I administer are remote anyway I am blessed in that my work has not been drastically impacted by the pandemic. I work remotely from home now instead of remotely from the office. Video conferencing tools have been very helpful in team communication. Agility being all online was somewhat of a disappointment last year, but the online sessions have been great. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Tim: I don’t have any F5 Certifications, but I have attended F5 technical training in person and online. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Tim: We have many different teams utilizing the F5s in our organization. Each of them has their own customers and needs. Granting such a large group read/write/admin access was difficult to manage. Using BigIPReport to expose current configuration and status to a large group has worked well. This has allowed us to limit read/write access and make change tickets more specific to the current configuration. *Tim has written a central http logging rule in use across the organization that tracks usage as well as performance data. It is available at https://www.devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/logging-irule-1180 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? Tim: I love solving problems and fixing things. There are so many opportunities to build solutions, and so little time. However, if money were not an issue, I’d be hiking, camping, boating, and other outdoor activities with family and friends, instead of spending as much time working with technology. ---Thanks Tim! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Tim on social media: Tim on LinkedIn Tim on Twitter Tim's WebsiteDevCentral's Featured Member for October - Stephan Manthey
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. You might remember him from being an F5er from back in the day, DevCentral MVP member Stephan Manthey is our Featured Member for October 2020! Let's learn more about Stephan! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Stephan: I´m married with two grown up sons and work self-employed with a 100% focus on F5 technology. It´s my business to help clients to operate, maintain and configure their F5 BIG-IPs, to provide training on the job and workshops, to support network automation, develop iRules and do proof-of-concepts. This way I participate in the F5 ecosystem and I like it a lot. DevCentral: You’re a former F5er and you’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community over the years. What keeps you involved? Stephan: I worked as an F5 employee for 11 years. Starting in 2002 as a Systems Engineer, I was involved into the transition of load balancers from pure packet sprayers to sophisticated proxies. Due to the several proxy functionalities of these devices, an engineer faces lots of challenges to get them deployed in the most efficient way for his clients. Staying up to date with protocols like SSL/TLS, http, DNS and others is a must and this literally saves your job. The load balancer stands between the network and the servers and applications. Due to it´s capabilities it might easily help to provide workarounds for problems on server and application level and is able to optimize and secure them. Supporting clients with their F5 gear was the plan when starting to work self-employed in 2013 and I´m pretty sure it'll keep me busy for the next couple of years. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Stephan: After studying information technology and electrical engineering at university I worked in several technical positions in data networking environments. With F5 I gained additional experience and knowledge in the upper layers of the OSI reference model. And this continues to this day; in my job I learn something new each day. It´s about the protocols handled but as well about automation tools, scripting and so on. DevCentral: You are the Consultant / Owner at LB-Net GmbH. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Stephan: After leaving F5 7+ years ago I started my own business based on F5 technology. It´s consulting, knowledge transfer in customer workshops, operation support, troubleshooting, automation, and solution development. With 2020 a lot of things changed. Due to a grown base of clients there is actually a lot of work to do and fortunately a lot of projects allow remote work. This gives me way more room to spend spare time with running, long-distance hiking, cycling and other physical activities instead of travelling in Germany. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Stephan: A long term client asked me about supporting an automation project. The quick rollout of new services required automated deployment of infrastructure components, servers and applications. F5 BIG-IP already was a key component in their infrastructure and using the iControl API was just a logical step. In this project I provided an Ansible-based solution by using native API calls for complete device onboarding, clustering and service rollout. Building everything from scratch was a big challenge. Without the API documentation on DevCentral, the Ansible docs, help from other users and from platforms like stackoverflow this project would never have been completed. Now we have got AS3 and F5-provided Ansible modules covering most requirements and the results are kind of obsolete. Anyway, the knowledge and experience you build in a project like this helps a lot in the next one. So keep coding! 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? Stephan: The things I´m doing help turning the wheel faster. Way to go? As I like to analyze, fix and develop things the engineering career was probably the right choice for me. Doing things that last longer might be even more satisfying. ---Thanks Stephan! We really appreciate your willingness to share. Stay connected with Stephan on social media: LinkedIn LB-Net GmbHDevCentral's Featured Member for September - Philip Jönsson
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. You might remember him from the F5 Certification Study Guides, DevCentral MVP Philip Jönsson is our Featured Member for September 2020! Let's learn more about Philip. DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Philip: I work as a Security consultant where I’m assisting customers with implementing, maintaining, and developing their environments based on a variety of security products with the goal of securing their applications and infrastructure. My main focus is F5, but I also work with other vendors who specialize in VPN and Next-Generation Firewalls. I was first introduced to F5 on the customer side but didn’t get to work with it much. My first real hands-on experience was back in 2013, about a month after being hired at Orange. We had an internal class introducing LTM after which my manager wanted me to write the 101 certification exam. Since then I have been working with F5 both from an operational standpoint and consultancy assignments. On my spare time I like to nerd into different technologies to learn something new or write on our F5 books that I co-write with a fellow DC MVP Steven Iveson. I also enjoy spending time with friends and family, play video-games or my quite newly found interest, vinyl collecting. I’m an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) enthusiast, so my collection is mostly based on that genre. DevCentral: You’ve been active contributor in the DevCentral community over the years. What keeps you involved? Philip: DevCentral is a great tool to develop your own knowledge and get assistance with finding solutions, building iRules and solve bugs. There are truly brilliant minds in this community, and they are extremely keen on helping others. As I have benefited a lot from this community, I want to pay it forward and if I know something that I can share with the community I will gladly do it. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Philip: I started my career in the Network Operations Center working with pretty much every major vendor out there which gave me a wide range of expertise. After a while you stop focusing on the GUI and only on the underlying protocols which all vendors rely on. But my main focus has always been F5 which has given me the opportunity to work with BIG-IP LTM, APM, ASM, DNS, AFM, SWG, SSLO, VIPRION and vCMP. As I have always been more on the NetOps side, I have started my journey of going more towards the DevOps side and learning more about automation and container based environments. DevCentral: You are a Security Specialist with Orange Cyberdefense . Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Philip: My typical workday involves jumping between multiple customers where I’m sometimes booked for 2-3 days per week for a particular project or 1 day per week where I assist customers in their daily operations. A project could be installing a new vCMP cluster, building/designing a new datacenter or building a new environment in cloud. Balancing life and work are tough at the moment being a father of two small children and the strong wish of continuing to develop books. Since I’m writing only on my spare time. When there just aren’t enough hours on a day you start to remove activities that is beneficial for your health. First, I stopped playing video games then I stopped exercising, and going to the gym and finally cut down on my hours of sleep. When we were developing the 201 book, I had the goal to release it before my daughter was born because I knew my available time would be even less than what I had and I wanted to focus on her. At that time I put my son to sleep at 8PM and then immediately went to work on the book until around 1AM, head to bed and up at 5AM to get ready for work and get my son to preschool. This was my routine every day from November 2017 until 10th of March 2018 when the book was released, one day before my daughter was born. Nowadays I try my best to balance between life and work and as my daughter’s sleep and routines improve, so does my hours of writing. My strong support for F5 originates from that first class I took back in 2013. I enjoyed the product from start, and I saw the capabilities and potential it could have for its customers. The best is to see it in action and showing customers the swiss army knife, they have actually bought. That has not changed, in fact, it has only gotten stronger as I see how F5 as a company adapts to current trends and keep giving value to both new and existing infrastructure. In the beginning the pandemic resulted in doubling in work where I sometimes had to work 70h in one week in order to rapidly expand customers’ VPN capabilities. Now all our work is being done from home and if a customer needs us on-site, they have to request it and it needs to be approved by a manager at Orange. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Philip: I recently re-certified for the 401 certification and currently need to redo the DNS (GTM) exam. The certifications have helped me expand my knowledge as they are designed to gradually add more knowledge starting from basic networking, to administrating an LTM and finally specializing in each major module and becoming a solution expert. DevCentral: Do you have any more books or study guides coming along soon? Philip: Right now, we are working on updating our old 101 Application Delivery Fundamentals Study Guide because much has happened with that exam since we released it back in 2014. We are doing a complete remake of it, refreshing all its diagrams and expanding the Solutions chapter, covering all F5 modules. We have received feedback from people wanting to have that chapter expanded because as a complete rookie to F5, understanding what each module do and assist with can be quite overwhelming seeing each individual module is to be considered a product by itself. Learning about a new product can be quite tough because sales pitches do not really relate to specific customer scenarios and just contain fancy buzz words whereas technical papers could be too advanced and only focus on one particular subject without customer scenarios in question. We try to combine these two by providing technical explanations of solutions connected to customer scenarios. They should simply explain how it is done on a technical level and how that can be useful to a customer. I hope the reader will enjoy that. For that chapter alone we have added around a 100 pages. Once that is complete, we still have to add quite a lot of topics to align with the new exam, but that process will be much quicker I hope. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Philip: I worked with a customer that used Secure Web Gateway (SWG) as a transparent forward proxy for their employees. They allowed social media applications like Facebook and Instagram inside their company network but that traffic ran through their transparent proxy. After Facebook updated their app to only support TLS 1.3 the app stopped to work since the BIG-IP did not support that at that time. Theoretically we could simply exclude SSL interception of Facebook addresses inside SWG but if I remember correctly, the cipher mismatch happened before policy evaluation inside SWG so it did not work. I decided to solve it by creating an iRule that checked the TLS version and if it was version 1.3 I would simply forward the traffic to the Original Content Server (OCS) without trying to modify or interfere with the traffic. With a big help from MVP (and F5 Consultant) Stanislas Piron who created an amazing iRule that completely breaks down the SSL Handshake, I managed to create an iRule for the purpose. The iRule looks at both the destination IP address and SNI and if it matches, it disables the HTTP and SSL profiles, evidently degrading the VS to operate on L4 with no intelligence. For easy use, I created data-group lists so the customer could easily add and remove applications as they needed to. What’s funny is that this iRule was used by a different customer to solve the same problem in Bluecoat ProxySG’s that was being load-balanced by F5 LTM’s. Since Bluecoat proxies do not have iRules, they had no solution to that problem at that time which goes to show the type of strength F5 has. 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? Philip: My dream job as a kid was actually to become a pilot but when it was time to choose schools, I had developed a fear of flying. And becoming a pilot that was afraid of flying didn’t seem like a good idea haha. I think that was a result of watching too many episodes of ‘Mayday’. ---Thanks Philip ! We really appreciate your willingness to share. To stay connected with Philip on other social media channels: LinkedIn Twitter Orange CyberdefenseDevCentral'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 TwitterDevCentral's Featured Member for April - Mayur Sutare
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 Mayur Sutare is our Featured Member for April! Let's learn more about Mayur! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Mayur: Hello everyone! I am Mayur. Currently working for ZS Associates. Because of the interest built up during my college days, I choose to work in the Network domain. I enjoy working with various Network & Security devices/platforms. I love to play around SSL/TLS, Ciphers, F5 iRules, policies & profiles. I am always eager to learn new things related to Network & Security domain and read blogs around it. In my free time, I like to watch movies, listening to music & spending time with family and friends. DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Mayur: As F5 DevCentral is one of the most active community, I joined it to learn new things, connect with people and grow. This keeps me engaged with the community. To be honest, I have learned a lot through the articles, code & questions and still learning. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Mayur: I started my career as a Core Network Engineer in 2015. Initially started with configuring the Cisco switches and handling issues around it, gradually I got chance to work on firewalls, web-proxy, wireless and F5s. I have been actively working on F5 devices, Palo Alto, Checkpoint firewalls, Cisco R&S. Currently I am learning APIs, Python to get expertise around it. DevCentral: You are a Senior Network & Security Administrator at ZS. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Mayur: Currently I am doing WFH since a year now and managing work as well as personal life well. I get decent amount of time to spend with family and friends post my office hours. In my current role, I am part of the team who manages the operations, troubleshooting and deployment part of Network and Security. I work upon the issues, tickets. Apart from that I also fulfills the new solutions, deployments depending upon the requirements/needs. Also managing the network & security devices upgrades, new improvements to be done in the security policies, threat management etc when required. During off time (mostly weekends), I also focus on my skills improvement, reading technical stuffs and setting up the firewall and F5 labs for testing the different scenarios. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Mayur: I do not have F5 certification but its in my to-do list this year. Last year, I had completed few other certifications related to other security products. Now this year, I am looking forward to F5 certification. Doing certifications gives me more confidence in particular technology and definitely it helps to expand knowledge about the solution/product. Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Mayur: Recently I was working on the project where we wanted to have a pair of F5 VE instances and Palo Alto firewalls on cloud. Being each instance in separate availability zone, initially we had few issues while building the F5 HA failover. I got few helpful articles on the community. Also few of our MVPs helped me to successfully build it. 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? Mayur: To be honest, I wanted to be a Chartered Accountant when I was in school. This is because I had seen few CA around me who were working on the computers and at that age, I was very fond of computers. At later stages, I got interest in engineering field and during my engineering, I found interest in Networking. ---Thanks Mayur! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Mayur and ZS Associates on social media: Mayur on LinkedIn ZS Associates on LinkedIn ZS Associates on TwitterDevCentral's Featured Member for June - Francis Daly
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 MVP Francis Daly is our Featured Member for June! Let's catch up with Francis! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Francis: Hi there; I'm some guy living in rural Ireland, who looks after a few animals as pets, and makes sure to leave out food for whatever other wildlife might visit or pass through the neighbourhood. It's important to me to make sure the squirrels, pheasants, and various small birds have a reliable food source, so that we can enjoy their chirpings and chatterings, and they can enjoy staying in the area. I've also been working in various technology support roles since before the millennium that started with a "2"; computing has made it possible for more companies to keep on top of more work, more efficiently and effectively. And the supporting role is important to ensure that those companies can do what they want to do, safe in the knowledge that their computer systems will do what they need, without getting (too much) in the way. DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community, particularly with NGINX. What keeps you involved? Francis: I sort of "fell in" to DevCentral after NGINX joined the F5 family. I've been a contributor to the nginx-users mailing list/forum over the years, which is probably still the main port of call for nginx-oss users who are looking for some information that was not easily-enough findable in whatever search options they had tried previously. (I'm still much more active there than on the DevCentral site directly; DevCentral does have good-and-growing nginx documentation and examples, and is one of the places to search; but the open-source-application user interactions are still mainly on the mailing list.) And generally, the questions are of the problem-solving variety, which is something I've always enjoyed addressing. There's a good feeling from helping someone do what they want (and confirmation that things did work as intended is always nice to read); but there are also learning opportunities where I can gain a better understanding of what the nginx application does, *because* I am now looking at it from someone else's perspective and trying something I probably would not have thought to try myself. It's also a low-pressure friendly environment where immediate responses are not expected; if as a user you want guaranteed response times, there's a company which can arrange to provide that. So it's a little bit of teaching, and a little bit of learning, and when I have the time and inclination, I'll answer an email or two. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Francis: I have spent most time working on unix-ish systems and network security and availability; so configuring firewalls and monitoring systems, and building whatever tools are needed using whatever facilities and languages are available. "Back in the day", that would have been perl and tcl when shell and awk were insufficient (with C when really needed); more recently that has been moving towards python and golang. But there's still a lot that can be done cleanly in the shell. It's also good to have a solid understanding of how things are supposed to work, so that you can recognise what part is acting unexpectedly. If there's something funny going on with the network traffic, never be afraid to stare at the output of tcpdump for a while! And in my current job, there's quite a bit of database work, involving each of relational, time series, graph, and nosql engines, to turn the incoming streams of data into automatable actions to address current or future possible problems. It helps to know what is going on, rather than being stuck at "computer says no" or "computer says yes". DevCentral: You’ve been a DevCentral MVP for a couple years now, how is the experience? Francis: It's fun. I'm a bit of an outsider on the detail front because I am not actively using the main F5 products in my day-to-day work; but the chats and meetings with technical experts are always educational -- hopefully in two directions! Face-to-face meetings at Agility would be even better; but that's been outside all of our control for a while now. And swag is always nice 😉 DevCentral: You are a consultant at Federos. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Francis: In common with a lot of people in similar lines of work, the pandemic shortened the commute dramatically, and pretty much eliminated in-person client- and colleague-contact. It's a different style of work, not having a shared space and direct personal interactions. But we all adapt to what is needed. Our clients and bases at Federos are spread across multiple time zones; even before the pandemic the work day was nominally local 9-to-5 but with significant flexibility. I'm now typically working between about 8:00am and 6:00pm, but with breaks for domestic tasks that are much easier to do from home than from an office -- it certainly helps to have more hands available to feed the horses in the daytime! In my rôle with Federos, our main product is our Service Assurance application, and my recent projects have tended to have Telcos or ISPs as clients. And they generally have seen their workloads increase during the pandemic, owing to the extra time people have had to spend with domestic internet access. So we're keeping pretty busy. The client networks tend to be of reasonable complexity, and the monitoring / alerting / topologies are almost never drop-in one-size-fits-all. A lot of the most interesting work is in the deployment-specific customisation/configuration, in order to make sure that all of the relevant information about this client's set of services are collected and modelled appropriately within the application; that comes back to problem-solving to integrate with whatever hardware and configuration they currently use. I think that the main part of the work/life balance is the discipline to stop working when things are done for the day; and to be comfortable taking breaks at times when they would not have been taken in the office. Go and enjoy the outdoors when possible! DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Francis: I don't -- I have not been working directly with F5 products, and my employers and our clients have not required those certifications. I have had some industry certifications in the past, and have seen that different companies have different attitudes towards their product certification processes. I was lucky enough to get some high-level insight in to what goes into an F5 Certification process, and I can say I was impressed. For anything that follows that process -- if you have the certification, you deserve it. I strongly suspect that anyone who has taken the exams, is already well aware of that. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Francis: I tend to do more "silent research" than I probably should when I find a challenge; and I'm thankful to the communities that have made their questions and answers available to search engines. And because there are many problems that have been seen before, often there will be a reference to an error message and the way to resolve it in a community space, on a personal blog, or occasionally in the source code. So it's lean on colleagues, build test cases, and Search The Fine Web, in the main. I do recall being very happy to find that someone had documented the change in the effective default value of rp_filter across a linux system upgrade, many years ago. When your snmp trap aggregator is now occasionally not receiving some incoming messages, even though tcpdump is seeing them and iptables is not blocking them, then it is very good to learn about this other setting that is mostly harmless unless you have multiple network interfaces... DevCentral: Finally, 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? Francis: I suspect that I found this career path because it was something I enjoyed doing, and it's something that others are willing to pay to have done well. The other ways of spending leisure time -- travelling the world, lying on beaches, reading, dancing -- are that much harder to get someone to pay to have done. So, let's say "astronaut". It's always astronaut, isn't it? ---Thanks Francis! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Francis and Federos on social media: Francis on DevCentral Federos on the Web Federos on Twitter Federos on LinkedInDevCentral's Featured Member for July - Kees van den Bos
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. DevCentral MVP Kees van den Bos is our Featured Member for July 2020! Let's learn more about Kees! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it’s important. Kees: I am a freelance Security Engineer/Consultant working for several different customers in the Netherlands. I started freelancing in 2013 and have been working mostly with F5/BIG-IP. I also became a F5 Partner. This helps me when engaging customers or selling LAB VE and normal licenses (to both individuals or companies). Started my IT career as a network (read windows) administrator and worked my way up to become a more security focused engineer/consultant. In my free time I like to go caving or canyoning. I started caving when I was 14 and over the years I visited caves in France, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Croatia and Greece. In 3 of those caves the bottom was at 1125 Meters, 1270 meters and 1355 meters (and I have been at the bottom). During holiday’s we go canyoning with the family, it is a great outdoor sport for all ages. DevCentral: You are a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Kees: Like in my daily work I like to help people with their “issues”. DevCentral is a great platform to share and help solving issues. I must admit that I was a big fan of the old platform/forum. Now I try to help the DC team by giving my input on what I see/miss within the current platform. But I must admit, it is getting better and better. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Kees: For the last 10 years I have been working with firewall’s, networking (routing and switching), virtualization, proxies (forward and reverse), wireless, remote access, authentication, but as a freelancer mainly on BIG-IP LTM, ASM, APM, GTM/LC, AFM. But the other knowledge helps me in my day to day job. DevCentral: You are the Owner of kees4IP . Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Kees: My day would normally start with driving to a client, now with Corona it's different. I start the day behind my laptop reading emails or chat conversations. Most of my clients allow me to work from home. Within a week I try to reserve one day where I can work for different customers during the day. (help them with small issues). The other 4 days I work for one or two clients full time. My strong support for F5 solutions was by accident, the second project I work on was a migration from Alteon to BIG-IP and from then on I mostly worked with BIG-IP (with some help of the Benelux F5 sales/tech team). In the evening or weekend I write quotations for new project or licenses/devices and invoices. But it is very important to take time off with the family. So I reserve a minimum of 5 weeks per year for holidays. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Kees: I am 401 CSE security and certified trainer for LTM, ASM and APM. Being certified helps me in getting new customer contacts, but I think that working posture and customer approach are just as important as certifications. They help me building strong relationships with my customers. Being certified in 401 also helps being a certified trainer. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest customer challenges and how the DevCentral community helped. It's not my biggest challenge but as the BIG-IP is a HTTP proxy it is nice to be able to read the HTTP headers that are traversing the box. There is a very nice iRule that I found on DC (made by I think Hoolio (Aaron Hooley) that helps me a lot when troubleshooting client HTTP issues (rewriting, etc). Link to the iRule on my webpage: https://www.kees4ip.nl/?Knowledge___HTTP_LOGGING_IRULE 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? Kees: I never had a real dream career. My uncle was working at the Delft University and was a “computer” expert. During holidays I spent a lot of time with my uncle and aunt and they had an old teletype connected to a small microprocessor. I was playing mastermind all day. So for me it was almost natural to become an IT expert. Thanks Kees! We really appreciate your willingness to share. To stay connected with Kees on other social media channels: LinkedIn TwitterDevCentral's Featured Member for November - Austin Geraci
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. You might remember him from the DC Connects A Certification Journey Episode, DevCentral member Austin Geraci is our Featured Member for November 2020! Let's learn more about Austin! DevCentral: Please explain to the DevCentral Community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Austin: Hi folks – I’m Austin Geraci, CTO at WorldTech IT which is an F5 Gold & GUARDIAN (at the highest level) partner company. I’m proud to say we’re the leading provider of third-party professional services for F5 solutions – including NGINX and SHAPE Security. We’re the only company to exclusively focus on F5 products the way we do. Though we also specialize in some complementary products like Ansible and Terraform, it’s all around F5. We are not your typical VAR, though we sell a ton of F5, we lead with our engineering expertise. DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community over the years. What keeps you involved? Austin: The community F5 has built, and of course the technology. These days I don’t have nearly as much time to participate publicly, but F5 has been very gracious to give me the opportunity to help out behind the scenes – and I’ve been very happy to. F5 has afforded me some great opportunities in life, and I try to give back whenever I can. Believing in the technology has been easy, F5 is always one step ahead, offering the best of the best around application delivery, security, and authentication. I was super pleased to see the acquisitions of NGINX and SHAPE – two technologies I’ve been a big believer in. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Austin: I was lucky enough to be exposed to computers at a very young age. When I was 10 years old my father bought a 486 dx2 66 from Gateway for his real estate business, and the rest is history. I started to learn Borland’s C++ and BASIC, but information was a lot harder to come by back then, so it was manuals and the library until I discovered Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) about a year or so after. That opened up a whole new world, and shortly after the Internet and IRC followed (which introduced me to my first taste of operating systems outside of DOS). As I got older, I gravitated more towards the network side and web applications. My F5 journey started off with LTM & GTM, and AFM / APM / ASM following soon after. DevCentral: You are the CTO at WorldTech IT . Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Austin: My wife is a saint 😉 Work-life balance is tough sometimes because I’m so dedicated to the cause, but I try to be good about “turning it off” when its time, tomorrow is another day. I’ve also been blessed (and cursed) with being a “super sleeper” — I typically only need 3-5 hours of sleep to feel 100%. I get a lot of my heads-down work complete in the morning before the emails, meetings, and calls start flying in. Above all, I couldn’t do anything I do without the great team working alongside me. Without all the rock stars we work with I would be hard-pressed to be where I am. Speaking of which... if you’re an F5 rock star and dream of only working with F5 solutions all day, every day, with a company that is focused on engineering – hit me up, as I also run our recruiting efforts, and we are hiring!! Though we sell a ton of F5 products, we’re not “salesy” or a sales-focused organization, which allows us to always do the right thing for our customers and engineers. We’re focused on career development and constantly advancing our internal knowledge base – also the bennies are great. As far as the Pandemic – Fortunately, we’ve been “ok” overall, I think that’s largely due to the fact that WorldTech IT was poised for some massive growth this year, so we’ve been able to maintain and grow – albeit at a slower pace. We have an office in Austin TX, and I really enjoyed going into the office – it provided a good “on/off” switch, so working from home took some adjusting. Luckily, I have an awesome wife and a couple of really cute Shiba-Inus. 😉 DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Austin: I currently have the 402 F5-CSE, Cloud certification valid – certs have been a big part of my F5 and personal growth. Certs force you to fill the knowledge gaps you have, I learned that when I originally passed CCNA as a 20-nothing year old Austin. I’m a big believer in the new F5 cert program, Ken has done some great work taking the program to the next level (including test integrity). As a 40-year-old Austin who’s not pushing the buttons anymore... my focus is more on our roadmap, and customer / partner relationships. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. (Does not necessarily have to be DevCentral) Austin: I can’t think of any single challenge in particular, but in general the community has helped me approach technical problems from different angles. All our brains work differently, and the way we formulate solutions is largely shaped by our past experiences. Taking the time to look at how others approach problems has most definitely expanded my perception and the way I approach problems. 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? Austin: Musician for sure, I grew up singing and playing guitar. I still play and have hopes of getting a hit song out there before I get too old and tired 😉 ---Thanks Austin! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DC Community. To stay connected with Austin on other social media channels: LinkedIn for Austin Twitter for Austin WorldTech IT on LinkedIn WorldTech IT on TwitterDevCentral'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
