O'Reilly SysAdmin

Oreillynet.com ’da çeşitli konularda blog grupları mevcut. Bunlardan bir tanesi de çıkan yazıları sürekli takip ettiğim System Admin’ler ile ilgili olan : http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/

Bu blogda çok güzel konular tartışılıyor. Vakit bulduğunuzda 2007’den itibaren yayınlanmış bloglara (çok uzun değiller) mutlaka bir göz atın. İlginizi çekeceğini düşündüğüm birkaç yazıdan alıntı yaptım.

Better tools make us more powerful

Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many sysadmins fall in love with the tedium of knowing all the little bits of all the systems they manage and not worry so much about understanding the higher-level nature of their jobs. I think this is part of why there are so few good, new tools being developed in this space, why sysadmins generally provide such poor service to their employers (e.g., slow deployments, lack of metrics, lack of transparency), and why they’re so afraid of using better tools.

To those sysadmins who are afraid of automating themselves out of a job, you should ask yourself where your value is: Is it the tedious parts, or is it the understanding behind the job?

Why Isn't System Administration Evolving?

I’ve heard all of the standard excuses — we don’t have enough time, we can’t risk it, we spend all day doing computers and don’t want to do it at night, my company won’t let me, etc. Every software project that has ever evolved out of an internal project has exactly these same excuses, and yet they have somehow succeeded. Why have so few sysadmin tools evolved this way? Why are sysadmins so willing to believe their excuses?

What Sysadmins Can Learn From Developers

Developers have done a great job in the last couple of decades of evolving their practice, so that development looks very different now than it did a couple of years ago. There’s a lot of competition for tools and methodologies, lots of publishing on these differences, and plenty of opportunity for new ideas to gain mindshare. This competition is really important to evolution: Unless there is opportunity and reward for better ideas and products, these better ideas don’t develop very quickly.

Sysadmins, on the other hand, have very little competition, in either ideas or products, and in the few areas where there is competition there generally isn’t much to differentiate the competitors.

Fighting Specialization

I’m lucky to be in a position where I am not forced to specialize on a single technology. I have always made a habit of keeping up with the job market, and it seems the trend is that the bigger the company you wind up at, the more likely you are to be staring at the same thing day in and day out.