Tag: sysadminday

Happy SysAdmin Day

One more SysAdmin Day. I don’t have any war story to share, so I will copy-paste a comment I posted on LinkedIn:


Let me tell you a story that involves a real (brick & mortar) Architect:

– Sir, I need to fill you in on the latest details on the construction of the mansion and to ask for a favor?
– What is it?
– Sir, can you please ask your wife to not change her mind every two days? We tear down walls and raise them and we will never finish that way
– Look, I pay you a ton of money to deal with my wife’s expectations. Otherwise I’d be doing it

Forget the crudeness of the client. The moral of the story is that you are being paid to operate in a volatile environment with changing requirements outside your control. You need to accept the fact and learn to navigate it.

Happy SysAdmin Day

I’m into this for so many years, I cannot even remember when I started. root, IT guy, system administrator, goto person, SRE, DevOps, whatever acronym life brings next. And all that, because at some point in time while still an undergraduate, I told my friend Panos:

“You see those guys? One day, we’ll be doing their work.”
“Nah”, he said, “they’re gods”.

Because that’s what they looked to us. They still do to me. Because at least one of them, with whom I’ve kept contact, is a moving CS encyclopedia. And then it struck me. They did not really want to do the work. They needed a platform to test all the cool things they read about, in production. They were architects before it was cool.

And that is what their “divine” power was: to know about all things CS. We did end up doing their work.

Somehow, that’s what drives me. I drop things off along the way (“I will not invest in learning this”) but still, I do not drop as many as the typical 9to5er. And that takes its toll, it is painful and once in a while rewarding.

Happy Sysadmin Day.

Happy Sysadmin Day.

Well, it is that day of the year again. I remembered that I used to run a greek translation of the site once upon a time. And I just saw that someone else has picked up the torch. Good.

I did some Rancher2 work today. Somewhat fulfilling I can say. That magic when things you do fall into place and you keep your people happy.

We work on top of layers, on top of layer, on top of yet more layers of abstraction. The machine is so far away that we may not even need to know the details of it to make it work (“The line is a dot to you” like Joey said). Nor do our horror stories look like this. Yet while they are equally epic, they’re not just as legendary.

[Each year I keep saying to myself I won’t write a blog post, but always the next day I do, I write one and change the date to match the Day… ]