OK yesterday was a very different day than the previous ones. The Conference Program starts on Wednesday. The tutorials and workshops are largely over and it's time to hear from the people doing research or presenting invited talks on the whole gamet of our work. I got to listen to the opening and the keynote speech by Ken Patchett, a sysadmin at Facebook (They let a SYSADMIN talk in PUBLIC!!). He gave an animated and colorful account of the evolution of the Facebook datacenter standards and the efforts that have gone into making their work efficient in a number of dimensions.
I have a problem. Well, several. But specifically, I’m not trained as an engineer. That’s a bad thing, because the further I go in my career in IT Operations and software development, the more like an engineer I’m expected to be.
To be honest, I’m not actually trained as an IT Ops person, either. Like most people, I sort of backed into the job. I was a tech support agent who knew Linux, got taken under an admin’s wing, brought onto the team, learned and grew, and gradually got more responsibility.
This is going to be a shorter lightning post than my earlier ones. I got very into what I was doing and the people I was with yesterday and didn't spend as much time (any time really) taking notes. It's 30 minutes to deadline so here goes.
Morning: Improv workshop
Workshops are my bread and butter at LISA these days. I start the day with a workshop. Typical, right? Wade Minter's "Improv: Think, React, Go" (not golang) workshop turned out to be very different and a lot of fun (I think there was some subversive learning in there too).
My morning was spent in the Devops in the Workplace workshop run by Mandi Walls and Dominica Degrandis. Since it was a relatively small group, we started out by introducing ourselves and talking about what we wanted to learn or discuss about devops, then figured out what were the most common themes and which topics more people wanted to touch on. It was agreat mix of people in the room, with folks from large and small organizations in both industry and academia.
