Presented by:

Paul English

from Vaisala Inc, Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild, League of Professional System Administrators, Seattle Privacy Coalition, Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays, Emerald Onion Project

Paul is CEO of PreOS Security Inc and is a board member for the League of Professional System Administrator, a nonprofit professional association for the advancement of the practice of system administration from 2015 through 2017. Paul has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute obtained in 1998. He has been a UNIX & Linux system administrator and wearer of many other IT hats since 1996. More recently he has managed a few sysadmins while still racking the occasional server. In 2016, Paul ventured into a firmware security startup to help sysadmins keep their systems safe from new threats.

Alternate titles: * Career advice for the aspiring Linux sysadmin today or myself 10 years ago * "So you want to be a sysadmin?"

"It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future" - So is Attribution

Being a sysadmin is a career path which can be fun, lucrative and one of the best ways to get paid to work with and on open source software. In this presentation I share some of the mistakes I made so you don't need to repeat them. Why not make new and interesting mistakes?

It is a confusing time to enter this field. Why not be a DevOps instead of a Sysadmin? What is this Site Reliability Engineer thing? What if the whole world goes NoOps? Do I really have to carry a pager? I'll provide some answers, hints and raw speculation.

About the Presenter: Paul English is President of the Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild, Board Member for the League of Professional System Administrators, and multi-year organizer of the Cascadia IT Conference. Paul also works as a system administrator and manager at Vaisala Inc, creating weather forecasts for wind, solar and hydro power.

Date:
2015 October 23 - 14:00
Duration:
50 min
Room:
Room 3184
Conference:
SeaGL 2015
Language:
Track:
Difficulty:
Easy

Happening at the same time:

  1. Exhibitor Hall Day One
  2. Start Time:
    2015 October 23 09:00

    Room:
    Room 1110

  3. You Should Speak
  4. Start Time:
    2015 October 23 14:00

    Room:
    Room 3183

  5. SAFE: An Internet for Privacy, Security and Freedom
  6. Start Time:
    2015 October 23 14:00

    Room:
    Room 3178

  7. Access Without Empowerment
  8. Start Time:
    2015 October 23 14:00

    Room:
    Room 3179