It’s been a great week at Interop in Las Vegas.  I’m sitting here at the airport, sipping a frosty beverage and recalling the events from the past few days, and I have to say it’s been worth the last-minute trip.

Each day I gave an iRules talk at the F5 booth. I got to do my song and dance in front of a crowd of people and try to express why iRules are so amazing to them, and why they should be using them.  That’s pretty much a description of every day for me, it seems. The twist this time was that I only had five minutes per session.  Five minutes?!? How am I supposed to express the limitless amount of hawesome contained in iRules, let alone F5 gear as a whole, in a mere five minutes?  This was new for me, and it was quite a fun exercise.

I think I managed to pack in a fair amount of content and, more importantly, pique peoples’ interest enough for them to swing by afterwards for deeper conversations.  I was, as I mentioned more than once, “armed with a white-board and markers, and not afraid to use them”.  These one on one (or sometimes one on a few) conversations at the booth were very cool. The people I talked to ranged from the completely uninitiated to the F5 veteran. It was great seeing a diverse mix of people and watching all of them get the “A ha!” moment at one point or another. There’s no denying that the stuff we’re doing as a whole, including my beloved iRules, are amazingly useful. Once people understand the things we can do, there isn’t one of them that doesn’t seem somewhere from intrigued to desperate for our help.

One of the major benefits that I hadn’t thought about before coming down here was the chance to connect with fellow F5ers that I don’t see on a daily basis. There were great conversations, some impromptu meeting type discussions and some brain-storming for what should come next.  It’s always good to get together with like minded folks and riff. If you were following me(or #F5Interop) on twitter you know most of this, though, as I tweeted plenty while at the show, as did many of the other F5 folks.

If you were at Interop this year and I got the chance to chat with you, thanks for swinging by. I know at least a handful of people I talked to were fully DevCentral aware. Heck, one person even said he listened to our podcast every week. Good stuff.

Were you there? Have you been previous years but missed out this time? What were your impressions. Let me know what you thought; from favorite gimmicks to booth impressions to coolest swag, I’d love to know what your experience was. I’ll be back in Seattle late tonight and catching up on email and the like tomorrow, so expect a Top5, and then plenty more chatter next week.

#Colin

Read the original blog entry...