Today I am excited to share an exciting update on the recently established NetBox Plugin Bounty Program. NetBox Labs has awarded the first bounty – a $2,000 reward for the creation of the datacenter floor plan plugin – to Tony Nealon. The plugin is available in GitHub for all NetBox users now.
The datacenter floor plan plugin enables NetBox users to document and manage datacenter floor plans natively in NetBox. These datacenter floor plans can comprise of racks as well as other common objects, such as air handler, power equipment, and support structures. The floorplan renders as a two-dimensional grid, showing the position, orientation, name, and facility ID of each rack. The plugin includes a directional compass indicating real-world orientation of racks, which can be repositioned using drag-and-drop functionality.
The vibrant ecosystem of plugins that extend the functionality of NetBox is a critical factor in the popularity and success of NetBox as the most popular network source of truth. NetBox Cloud customers benefit from always-on validation by NetBox Labs of the security and reliability of key plugins, ensuring consistency and safety for mission-critical use cases.
I recently asked Tony, who was awarded this first NetBox Plugin Bounty, a few questions to learn a little bit more about him and what drew him to work on this plugin. You can read more about him below.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a big nerd having spent my entire career working in telecommunications across operations, engineering, development, and architecture. I spend my days helping telcos make their customers’ lives better through software development, customisation & implementation.
I’ve been using NetBox for almost a year now, and I’ve always been impressed with its flexibility and extensibility. I saw the plugin bounty program as an opportunity to give back to the community and help make NetBox even better.
What excited you about working on this plugin?
I was excited to work on this plugin because it seemed like a challenging problem. I’ve always been drawn to hard problems, and I find them to be the most rewarding to solve. I knew that this plugin would require me to learn new things and push myself outside of my comfort zone, and this is where i find most satisfaction
What is one NetBox trick or best practice you always pass along?
When developing for NetBox, the community is massive and with it being open source when you get stuck on something you can just ask someone or dive into the large amount of existing codebases in the ecosystem.
Care to share any big plans for the bounty?
I’m going to use the bounty to head over to NetDevOps Days to come and learn more about the NetDevOps scene.
Thank you again, Tony, for your great work and contributions to the community. For anyone looking to connect with Tony, you can follow him on X/Twitter @tbotnz.
I encourage everyone to visit the Plugin Idea Board and upvote NetBox plugins, suggest new ones, or check out the Drag-and-drop Rack Elevations plugin whose $1,500 bounty is still up for grabs.
