First Ever DevNet Creator Awards Recognize Community Contributions

Last month, at the second annual DevNet Create conference, we started a new tradition with the first ever DevNet Creator Awards. We wanted to recognize members of the DevNet community who have made significant contributions to community growth and member success in the past year. (If you could not make it to DevNet Create, you can watch the videos and download the presentations here.)

The people we recognized have done meaningful work across a broad spectrum of DevNet Community activities – technical education, outreach, support, troubleshooting, adoption, training, writing, illustrating. They have an attitude of doing whatever it takes to teach others about DevNet and help them discover and use Cisco APIs and platforms. They teach others and learn a lot naturally. They try new things and experiment with us. They meet others wherever they are in their journey, and build sturdy bridges for people to cross as they learn, code, connect, and innovate.

They make sure others in the community get help when they ask for it. They work side-by-side with their fellow community members, and figure out tough technical problems. They make sure people know there are “no dumb questions.” They frequently answer questions directly, or put people in touch with someone who can.

These community members have been energetic consumers of DevNet learning labs, docs, and sandboxes. They’ve found ways to make DevNet resources relevant to their business. They are doing real implementations in the enterprise world we work in, making a difference for their customers and for Cisco customers.

The Recipients of 2018 DevNet Creator Awards

Jose Bogarín Solano (center above) is the Chief Innovation Officer at Altus, a Cisco Partner in Costa Rica. We all know him well as an early adopter and loyal follower of DevNet and, wow, he learns quickly. Now he teaches others at DevNet Express events, plus he is active in our Spark room and answers questions from developers in the community. He has embraced automation and DevOps and applies both in his business with acumen and tenacity.

Lisa Leung is a student at Holberton School, which teaches students by giving them programming problems. Holberton School supports their students by not requiring payment for their education until they have a job in the industry. Lisa attended the first DevNet Create (2017, San Francisco), and she credits DevNet with helping her choose a career in DevOps. We are thankful for students who dive straight into new skill sets with enthusiasm and energy.

Jeff Levensailor is a senior consulting engineer at Presidio. You will definitely see him helping others in the Cisco Spark developer support space. He recently wrote a Node.js library that integrates with the Cisco Unified Communications AXL interface, with over a hundred downloads in its first week on npm. Check out his project on GitHub.

Sam Womack works at Cisco Partner WWT as a senior Cisco Unified Communications Systems Engineer. He was on a winning team at one of the first DevNet Hackathons that created a modern physical security solution using Cisco location-sensing technology. He’s also one of our top sandbox users, and also contributes to sample code. (He even submitted the first pull requests to Jeff’s Node JS library.)

Paul Giblin (at left above) works at Presidio as a Senior Solution Architect, putting together collaboration solutions for customers. How passionate is he? He’s a Cisco Champion AND Spark Master. You may find him as an instructor at a DevNet Express event and a presenter at DevNet Create, teaching multiple workshops with a load of packable gear you probably saw on your Twitter stream.

We are super grateful to these DevNet community members for doing so much work to help with our mission. As we work to make DevNet the best possible developer community, we look forward to recognizing many more of the outstanding individuals that make up our community. You are the heart and soul of DevNet. Thanks.