Cisco Systems Inc. is doing its share to speed up the application-development spin cycle. Its DevNet community projects have hundreds of thousands of developers and infrastructure pros writing, tweaking and sharing code. They’re contributing code back into Cisco’s community, to open source, and putting it in production at their companies.

Over 75% of the content at the DevNetCreate 2019 conference came from the community, according to Mandy Whaley (pictured), senior director of developer experiences at Cisco DevNet. “It’s great to see people who started with us maybe five years ago who have made their first [application program interface] call, started down this path, and now they’re building full applications, and they’re here sharing that information by presenting with the community and giving back,” Whaley said.

Whaley spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. They discussed Cisco’s growing development community and how its code is making it into the real world (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

What’s cooking in Cisco’s code kitchen?

What’s special about DevNetCreate is the bridge it builds from application developers to infrastructure, automation, and developer operations teams. The Cisco DevNet community allows them to exchange knowledge about their domains; developers understand infrastructure better; and infrastructure admins get better at developing. For example, at this week’s event they explored Wi-Fi 6. Developers and networking admins discussed how it could enable them or help them build new things.

The DevNet community now has 585,000 members. It offers online and real-world training and holds events and workshops in 49 countries. For example, Camp Create is a “buildathon” that challenges participants to build technology solutions for real use cases. 

Announced at DevNetCreate last year, Code Exchange is where the community can share their projects. They can share any open-source code with their GitHub link. Then DevNet curates it into a Cisco-relevant catalog of sorts. So far, there are 400 projects. “If you’re looking for a sample to use [Cisco] DNA Center, and you want to see it in Python, you can go search for exactly that and get back some projects that the community have submitted,” Whaley said. 

Cisco handed out the DevNet Creator Awards to notable innovators at the conference. “Those are awards for people who contribute to the community, and a lot of those are people who have come and learned skills, taken it back to their organizations, and been able to scale that out to their organizations,” Whaley concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevNet Create event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DevNet Create event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

 Photo: SiliconANGLE