Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team

Last year's LISA09 was a rousing success, and this year's LISA10 is coming up sooner than you think! If you're unfamiliar with the event, LISA is the Large Installation System Administration conference, although it's open (and valuable) to administrators of all sizes. Essentially, it's the largest gathering of system administrators in the world, and it's a week full of classes and talks about the current and future state of the profession of system administration.

In order to share the experiences of the LISA conference with the sysadmin community at large, a group of individuals are designated as conference bloggers. My name is Matt Simmons, and I feel very fortunate to have been selected as the leader of the group this year. I want to take this moment to introduce you to my team.

Several years ago, a gentleman named Matthew Sacks went to LISA and changed the way it was looked at. He founded the LISA blog team, but lets hear it in his own words:

My passion for technical writing and appreciation for the works of the USENIX association writing brought me to come up with the idea for the USENIX / LISA Blog program. The history is as follows.

I was at a LISA conference covering the event for the USENIX blog as an individual. I was having the time of my life and truly learning more than I’ve ever learned at a technical conference because I had to absorb the information and present it to the readers of the USENIX blog at a later time. There was something quite rewarding about sharing the information and bringing some aspect of the conference to readers who were unable to attend (although nothing is like being present at the conference).

The following year, I proposed to the USENIX team that we found a blog program, and bring on some talented individuals to assist covering the event, and bringing in fresh perspectives, articles, and interviews for the USENIX blog on coverage of the event.

The blog program immediately resulted in a 300% increase in page views to the USENIX blog. The feeling of sharing the excitement and prestige of covering one of the most reputable computing association’s events with other bloggers and the community at large was a humbling experience. I was glad to play some small part in evangelizing excellent technical information with other individuals in the technical community.

I am most excited to bring in Matt Simmons and his experience and leadership in the technical blogging community. His services on the USENIX blog program last year were indispensable, and he raised the bar on the quality of content on the USENIX blog, making it a new valuable resource for systems administrators to read about the activities at USENIX conferences and comment on the articles.

I want to thank Matthew for his kind words, and for the opportunities that he has given me. He has done an amazing job both on the LISA blog and as the Executive Editor and Founder of TheBitsource.com, and I know he'll continue to be involved for a long time to come.

New to the blogging team this year are a pair of sysadmin bloggers who may be familiar to you. The first is Ben Cotton, who blogs at FunnelFiasco.com, but lets hear it from him:

I'm a Systems Research Engineer in the Research Systems Group at Purdue University. My primary responsibilities are grid computing systems, including our multi-kilocore Condor pool. Although my degree is in Synoptic Meteorology, I've spent nearly a decade in various IT roles, both student and professional. Outside of work, I've begun writing a regular weather blog for the Lafayette Journal and Courier, along with an open-topic blog on my personal website. When I'm not writing a blog post, I'm probably writing documentation for the Fedora Project or bombarding Twitter with posts related to the Mario Marathon or whatever Purdue sport is in season.

Since I don't have a formal technology background, I've had to learn relevant skills as they're needed. The wide variety of topics at LISA gives me exposure to aspects of system administration that I might never otherwise receive. Being able to meet, learn from, and interact with other professionals in the field will provide a great experience personally and professionally. The most enjoyable part of being a sysadmin has been the ability to combine technical and personal relationships.

Of course, my trip to LISA '10 isn't just for my own benefit. As a LISA10 blogger, I'm here to share information with attendees and those who can't make the trip to San Jose. Most of my free time seems to be spent documenting information to share with others, so the opportunity to do this for a wide audience is exciting. I look forward to sharing the information I learn with the wider sysadmin community.

I've followed Ben's blog for years, and I'm really looking forward to meeting up with him in person. I really respect his love for learning and documentation, and I can't wait to see what he thinks of being in the same room as almost a thousand other system administrators!

The other new face to the blogging team is Marius Ducea, who has maintained his blog, MDLog:/sysadmin for over 4 years. Let's listen as he discusses his background:

My name is Marius Ducea and I have more than 10 years in Linux and Unix system administration experience. During the last five years, I've been working as a freelancer, offering consulting for various companies around the world from 2-person startups to large companies with thousands of servers. I enjoy working on projects such as configuration management implementation (chef, puppet or bcfg2), LAMP scalability and performance tuning/optimization, and virtualization and cloud computing. I'm currently working for Promet Solutions, and involved in various consulting projects for companies like Admob or Episodic.

LISA '10 will be my first LISA conference that I will be able to attend live, and I'm very excited about it. Previously, I was only able to watch online videos of keynotes, and catch up from various blog posts. But now, after I moved to the States a few months ago, November 7–12, 2010 is marked in my calendar as busy. I know there are many people that are unable to attend such an event live for various reasons (such as me, and previously being overseas), and this is why I want to help them by blogging about it, and describe any new and interesting things that will be presented.

After several years where things were not moving very fast for sysadmins, now with the fast adoption of cloud computing it's obvious that things are changing for us. I'm looking forward to attend presentations on very interesting topics like configuration management and automation, cloud computing, performance and optimization, monitoring and trending, but also to be able to meet and interview some great sysadmins that are doing some cool stuff that can be inspirational for all of us.

I enjoy Marius's writing very much, and I'm absolutely looking forward to working with him on this project. His technical background will be put to great use, and it's going to be exciting to read his thoughts on the new cutting edge techniques presented at the conference.

As for myself, I've been a system administrator for almost a decade, and I've been blogging for just over two years at Standalone Sysadmin. I work for a risk management firm in New Jersey, and I love sharing my experiences with my readers, and I constantly try to grow the community of sysadmins.

I was involved in last year's LISA blogging effort, and I was amazed and enthralled by the spectacle. It was my first conference of any kind, and it really opened my eyes to a world that I hadn't imagined. Nearly a thousand system administrators from all over the world converged on Baltimore. I was surrounded by people who's names I only knew because they adorned books on my shelves. It was hard to get over the shock of just "being there", but I tried my best to blog about what was going on around me.

I still have, and refer to, the notebook that I took with me to the conference. I nearly filed it with notes from the training and other sessions, so I'm bringing another to this year's event, and I have no doubt that it'll be filled again. If you're considering coming, stop considering and start making it happen, because it's one of the most valuable things I've ever done for my career as a sysadmin.

I am thoroughly excited about this year's blogging team, and I can't wait for us to start churning things out for you. In the future, watch this space for more LISA10 information, and in the mean time, here is a grid with the new blogging team, and how you can get in touch with them on social media:

I know that I speak for all of my fellow bloggers when I say thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you more information soon. The LISA 2010 blogging team is excited to get the word out about the conference and to help people learn what happens at the conference that makes it so special!