Forum Discussion
Don_MacVittie_1
Jun 16, 2008Historic F5 Account
Hey Mark,
I am an F5 employee, specifically one assigned full time to DevCentral, so interpret that as you will in the context of this response.
All of us on the DevCentral team are dedicated to getting answers to questions out here, and much of F5 lends a hand. But we do have a policy that if the community is resolving your issues, we let them - these gentlemen are doing what you do every day, it gives them the perspective to help you, and saves our time for writing articles, etc to help you maximize your use of the BIG-IP. They are the equivalent of what military strategists call a "force multiplier", able to help you on most topics as well or better than us, and they make the team look a lot bigger than it actually is. So "links from your peers" may well be the best answers you could get, and we're grateful to the crowd that helps you out just because they can.
With that said, we are aware of some of the things that appear to have frustrated you, and are addressing them. Deb Allen, a team-member of mine, with an astounding amount of help from the community, is fleshing out the Wikis so that they are more complete. This being the primary iRules documentation, we feel this is an important job, and are glad it's in Deb's capable hands and there are people willing to help her. We've also set up a system that gives SEs and SAs more peers to access when trying to resolve a problem they're stumped on. Note when I say "we", I refer generically to F5. I am pleased to see these things happening, but I didn't have a hand in arranging them in any way. Finally, we're working up short tutorial sessions that will go in order to help get new users up to speed - with both video and text portions to help facilitate knowledge acquisition.
The point of this thread appears to have been the developers thanking the customers and saying that they're watching DC and will help as they can. Considering that their role is not to support DevCentral but to continue to produce the excellent products that make F5 great, that's a commitment they didn't have to make. We're glad they're willing to help out.
So we're taking steps to relieve the problems you struggled with - steps that are largely complete - and we've got a great community of people helping out. So I can see why the negative reaction to your post. Bear with us, we were the first ones to do this, so speed bumps were inevitable. As we continue to stretch the boundaries, we'll certainly hit some more. But we really do understand that the customers are what's important. We hope that you've resolved your issues, but if not, feel free to post back. Each of the DevCentral team-members' email addresses are available on this site, feel free to write one of us if you're not getting help solving an iRules or iControl problem here on the forums.
Regards,
Don.