Through the Lens Geekly: How SysAdmins Are Portrayed in Pop Culture
David N. Blank-Edelman, Author of O’Reilly’s "Automating System Administration with Perl" and Director of Technology, Northeastern University CCIS
People outside our profession think they know who we are and what we do for a living. They’ve formed assumptions about us and how we work even before they’ve met us, which in turn color their perceptions and shape their interactions with us.
To be effective we need to understand this context and its origins. A good portion of it comes from popular culture: movies, television, and other mass media. Movie clips and other source material will entertain you, and more important, give you new insight into just what ways much of the world views our profession.
Bio: David is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O’Reilly book Automating System Administration with Perl. He has spent the past 25 years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory.
Smooth Operations: Improving the profession of system administration.
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Author and System administrator, Google NYC
Using material from his unpublished, unannounced, fifth book, Tom will describe the top techniques for building a smooth operation: monitoring, automation, archtectures that "route around" problems, and building a community of peers for support.
After two decades of being a system administrator and writing 4 books, Tom has concluded that the best system administrators prevent the panicy, stress-filled emergencies and turn system administration into smooth operations. When we do this our jobs become more fulfilling, interesting, and exciting. Tom concludes with thoughts about how to "raise the bar" across the entire industry.
Bio: Tom is a New Jersey local, but an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His books include The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley) and Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly). He received the Usenix SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He lives in northern New Jersey, works at Google in NYC and blogs at http://EverythingSysadmin.com. He is a LOPSA and LOPSA-NJ member.
System Administrators in the Wild: What we’ve learned from watching you!
Eben M. Haber, Research Staff Member, IBM Research – Almaden
Since 2002, a group of IBM researchers has worked to learn more about system administration tools and practice. Inspired by Margaret Mead and Diane Fossey, we decided to start by observing sysadmins in their natural environment, following them around with video cameras, interviewing them in their offices, performing surveys, and even observing local LISA meetings. As outsiders, we were surprised by the scale and complexity of the environment, the deficiencies in the available administration tools, and the creativity and collaboration with which sysadmins cope. Working at a company that sells middleware, we also noticed that middleware designers were often ignorant of the complexity and constraints inherent in IT work, and often seemed to think that a GUI or Wizard might be a realistic solution to improving managability. To help bridge the gap of understanding between System Administrators and the people who need to understand them, we have been working on a book (tentatively titled, "Information Technology Work: Studies of Large-Scale System Administration".
In my talk I’ll be telling you what the world of System Administration looks like from the outside. I’ll discuss the findings from our studies, including issues of Social and Technological Complexity in the environment, coping methods embedded in Methods, Tools, and Organizations, and discuss how Creativity from the bottom-up interacts with Standards and Communities of Practice. And of course I’ll show lots of footage of administrators in the wild doing their best to cope with their environment. If you agree with what we found, I hope you buy the book when it’s available. And if you disagree, please tell us before we send it to the publisher!
Bio: I received an A.B. in Computer Science with Physics from Dartmouth College in 1988. Not ready to proceed on to graduate school, I spent the following year in England working with horses, eventually receiving the British Horse Society Intermediate Instructor certification. After a year of cleaning stalls and teaching little kids to ride, the transition to graduate student and TA was a smooth one. I spent the next 6 years getting a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I worked in the database group studying how formal data modelling could be applied to visualizing large, complex database schemas. Since joining IBM, I’ve worked on ethnographic studies of system administration, prototype end-user programming tools, and worked on several novel features for storage management.
Keynote talks are open to all conference attendees.