My absolute favorite part of working on DevCentral is meeting and spending time with community members. The number of thoughtful, interesting, and just plain cool people I’ve met actively involved with DevCentral are just astounding. A great example is Henrik Gyllkrans who we recently interviewed in Stockholm (check out those awesome boots!)

Of course, right up at the top of the cool list are our DevCentral MVPs. These guys simply go above and beyond to make this community great and we jump at any opportunity to hang out with them.

So, it was quite a treat to have lunch yesterday with Nathan Abbott (aka “naladar”) who was visiting Seattle to sharpen his skills with some F5 training classes. If you haven’t read Nathan’s “The F5 Guy” blog, you should. His posts, based on his real world experiences with F5 (and other technologies) are top notch and they clearly straight from the IT trenches.

Shortly before Nathan, Colin, Joe and I headed up the hill from F5’s offices to Buckley’s Pub, we gave him a sneak peek at a secret little project we’ve been working on. I can’t go into details but from Nathan’s initial response, I think we’re on the right track.

(Note: I recently learned of Buckley’s “Bluecy Lucy” burger that is flat-out awesome. When I first tried it a few weeks back, I was skeptical. But, when one of the kind servers said, “umm…  it was better than I expected.”, I had to try it. Yesterday? No question. I didn’t even crack the menu. If you’re in the area, you should try it. Also, quick trivia tidbit – the glass building (in the link) to the right of Buckley’s was the original F5 HQ building, according to Joe.)

Anyways, back to the point. We had a great conversation with Nathan and it was just fun chatting about a bunch of stuff. With this being Nathan’s first visit to Seattle, we talked about some must-see things including the Space Needle, the EMP/SciFi Museum, the Pike Place Market, and more. We also had a hilarious talk about consumer technology – specifically the Mac. We (sshhh.. don’t tell anyone…) all joked at how Colin and Joe spent much longer than they’ll EVER admit trying to figure out how to eject a DVD from the Mac Pro workstation we use for video editing… (“dude – I can’t find the eject button! What the….”) And, Nathan triggered a hilarious follow up on the obscure shortcut combinations in the OS. Colin even added, “I don’t even know what that diagonal slash underscore character is… where’s that key anyway???!” “Yeah – could I borrow a couple extra fingers for the Apple+C+<bizarre_backslash>+… shortcut to eject my damn DVD?” You get the picture. We were all rolling.

All in all, a great time shared with Nathan. Thanks – again – Nathan for all that you do to make DevCentral a very unique and collaborative community.  And, if anyone out there is ever in Seattle for training or other events, let us know – we’d always enjoy meeting members of the community.