Caskey L. Dickson

LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.

Caskey Dickson is a Site Reliability Engineer/Software Engineer at Google, where he works on writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale." Before coming to Google he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at Loyola Marymount University. He has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an MBA from Loyola Marymount.

Linked Presentation: 
while (true) do; How hard can it be to keep running?