LISA ’11: Amy Rich on 25 Years of LISA

Amy Rich has been attending LISA since 1995. Formerly a columnist for Sys Admin magazine and the Senior UNIX Systems Administrator/Team Lead at Tufts University, Rich now works as Special Operations: RelEng Liaison at Mozilla Corporation. In 2006, Rich was on the LISA conference committee and was the IT co-chair in 2009 and 2010.

"Attendance at the conference has grown and shrunk with the economy over the years, but the conference has been consistently evolving to offer more and different kinds of material," Rich says. "Years ago, workshops were added, and more recently, there's been a greater focus on tutorials and co-hosting events like Storage Day, CHI-MIT, the Solaris program, etc."

Because the LISA schedule is jam-packed, Rich says it's impossible for one person to take it all in. "The topics have necessarily followed advances in the field, and each year the conference committee tries to find speakers who can talk to sysadmins about what the next big things in our field might be, as well as the most prevalent technologies used today," she says.

Rich says that one of the most memorable LISA talks for her was Bill LeFebvre's keynote address on how CNN handled the load put on their servers on 9/11/2001. (You can listen to the MP3 of LeFebvre's great talk on our site.) "Not only was it technically relevant, but it was a story with a great deal of human interest and emotion that helped us remember how people can pull together in a time of crisis," Rich recalls.

Rich has other fond memories of past LISA events. "Another great memory was being in the elevator with a bunch of other sysadmins at the 1999 LISA and coming up with the words to The C Days of Y2K (sung to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas), which was later sung during the closing session," she says.

Rich says that over the years, she's met a nice mix of people at LISA conferences, including several Bell Labs guys, lots of authors, and open source leaders. But she's also enthusiastic about the real-world sys admins she meets and says they've made a big impact on both her personal and professional life. Some of the people she's met include: Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike, Bill Cheswick, Wietse Venema, Eric Allman, Kirk McKusick, Radia Perlman, Paul Vixie, Tom Limoncelli, Evi Nemeth, Rob Kolstad, Tobi Oetiker, Curtis Preston, Jordan Hubbard, Gerry Carter, AEleen Frisch, Brent Chapman, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz, David Blank-Edelman, Ted Ts'o, Mark Burgess, Werner Vogels, Marcus Ranum, Bruce Schneier, Dan Kaminsky, Matt Blaze, Cory Doctorow, and Greg Bear.

"Wow, I'll stop there," Rich says. "Needless to say, I've met a lot of people."

Why Should YOU Attend LISA '11?

"The best thing about attending LISA is touching base with your fellow IT professionals and finding out what new and interesting challenges they're solving with inventive thinking," Rich explains. "I've gotten answers to a number of my own problems, given feedback on products I use — and found products I want to use — and heard about some of the latest technologies before they found their way into my workplace."

Rich says that LISA is both a technical event with a wealth of knowledge, and a close knit community of people in which even the most vaulted names in the business are both approachable and friendly. "I've made a lot of contacts and a lot of good friends there over the years," she says, "and I can't imagine what my career would have been like without getting involved."