During the Watson-related madness earlier this year I wrote a script to put all of the Jeopardy! game data from J! Archive into a SQL database (they have no API so I parsed the very-broken HTML for each game). I never ended up doing anything with the data, but there’s been renewed interest around the house in this data so I took some time to make a word cloud of the Jeopardy! categories.

Crystal ball image courtesy of Daniel De Jager

At Boston DevOpsDays 2011 last week I hosted an open spaces discussion during which we prognosticated on what the everyday sysadmin would look like in 10 years time.

A lively discussion followed and out of it we came up with a few key predictions that we all loosely agreed on; the future sysadmin will:

Write code.

We all agreed that there’s little place for a future sysadmin that can’t (at the minimum) write scripts, and nominally write and understand code in a non-shell programming language.

Do a lot of data analytics.

We thought that any future sysadmin will be much more of a data-driven engineer; they’ll build systems based on engineering not gut feelings or “because it worked last time”. The future sysadmin can do math because the future sysadmin does more science.

Work on a higher level of abstraction.

The future sysadmin needs to build complex systems by treating what we now think of as systems as building blocks. They’ll not think as much about network ports, IP addresses and machines but instead think about the interactions of applications and instances of those applications.

Focus on service delivery.

The future sysadmin has monitors that says if the service is providing the business function, not if the host is pingable. The future sysadmin understands what the service provides and how to make sure that service is being delivered reliably.

Be on call (with her developer friends) and own the problem.

She’s the crisis manager and may have the best understanding of the data as they relate to the system as a whole. She’s got the full stack view that gives her the credibility to the be first line of defense in a tough situation.

Lead the root cause analysis.

The future sysadmin, if anything, has a more complex job because they need to bring together not just computing resources but data and human resources. The future systems administrator is more about the system and less about the administration.

What do you predict?

With the rise of PaaS and IaaS, we see movement away from the traditional role of the sysadmin into a more app-focused, development-aware admin; someone who understands the business needs and the full technology stack, and I feel like the leading edge of administration is already at this point, as the people you see speaking at all the conferences and writing all the books do these “future sysadmin” tasks already. What do you think about these predictions? What do you think the future sysadmin will look like?

My two articles:

• Debugging SSL/TLS with openssl(1)
• Down The ‘ls’ Rabbit Hole

The rest of the articles are wonderful as well, and I encourage you to read them, and, in 2011, to write your own SysAdvent articles.

Fixing UNIX Filenames – An interesting discussion of the non-standard handling of the “standards” in UNIX filesystem naming, such as newlines in names.

An ‘Accordion’ of Wood and Glass – A look at where all the money you spent on your calculus textbook went.

Strace – the Sysadmin’s Microscope – An excellent article on using strace(1), the best way to find out what your process is really doing in Linux.

Print

Garner’s Modern American Usage - Okay, I’ve not read the whole thing, but I keep it on my desk at work to figure out if my word choice is correct, or if it makes me sound like an asshole (and, all of the usage examples are from recent media, including great references to Superbad when needed).

Web Operations – Allspaw is listed as the author but this book is written by many people in the DevOps community (and hey, I reviewed Patrick DeBois’ chapter on monitoring). This book offers excellent practical advice to people doing web operations.

Rework – The 37signals guys wrote this book about the lessons they’ve learned running a successful startup, and while the book is pretentious, it does have solid advice (for example: don’t hire fast; don’t worry about being “professional”, build software you want to use).

The format was a shortened pub trivia, with songs played after reading each question:

• 1 round of 4 questions with each question being worth either 1, 3, 5 or 7 points (you decide, you can only use each value once)
• 1 special picture round (2 points for each item correctly identified)
• 1 round of 4 questions with each question being worth 2, 4, 6 or 8 points (akin to the first round)
• 2 final questions on which you wager up to 10 points each (win or lose what you wager)

Without further ado, here are the questions:

Famous Nerds: Who wrote in a famous RFC, “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”?

Databases: What does ACID stand for?

Networking: How many bytes are there in an Ethernet address?

Systems Programming: What is the only UNIX syscall that returns twice?

Data Structures: This colorful binary tree is self-balancing and contains no data in the tree’s leaf nodes – what is it?

Operating Systems: Which process typically has the PID of 1 on a UNIX system?

Computing History: Which of these technologies was not invented at XEROX PARC: Ethernet, The Mouse, The Windowing GUI, laser printer?

SciFi/Fantasy: Who is the Kwistaz Haderach?

Video Games: What item must you retrieve from the Dungeons Of Doom in Nethack?

Role Playing Games: What does THAC0 stand for?

And of course, we had a picture round: ID The Programming Language & ID Carrier/GDS By IATA Code (hey, we’re an airline software company, I have to have some airline trivia).

I won’t post the answers here but feel free to post your answers in the comments (and be aware there’s a few correct answers to some of these questions).

Also, if you’re a nerd looking for a job at a cool place to work, check out ITA’s current job offerings. Not to spam my readers but it really is fun to work at a place where you can host a nerd pub trivia and 10 teams join the fun.

Vladimir has setup a registration link here.

This promises to be a great show; Vlad and Jeff Buchbinder will be giving a presentation on lessons learned while reengineering deployments at their companies. You can read more about what is on the agenda on this post on Vlad’s blog.

See you there – Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010, from 6pm until 8pm.

No Agenda, No Meeting

Meetings without agendas are likely to go nowhere and do nothing. Even recurring meetings need agendas. The agenda should be a few lines covering the specific reason(s) for the meeting, and this agenda should be emailed to the people who will be at the meeting at least 24 hours before the meeting. The reason for emailing the agenda, rather than only putting the meeting agenda in the invitation, is that people will often reply to the emailed agenda addressing the very questions you wanted to answer in the meeting. Sometimes, you’ll address all the reasons for having that meeting via email and you don’t need to have the meeting – which is always a good outcome. Emailed agendas are like the pre-interview phone screen – if the agenda can’t get past this step, no need to waste everyone’s time in person.

An agenda also serves to focus the meeting as it progresses, helping people keep the meeting on track.

Always Take Notes

You, as the organizer, should take detailed notes (except for the times when you are at the whiteboard, or other such situation). You set up the meeting, you have to take the notes. It was important enough for you to break up every attendee’s day, and to cost the company the combined salary of the people you invited, so you should make sure you record what happened in the meeting. Good notes contain:

• A list of attendees
• A copy of the agenda
• Short summaries of discussions/disagreements
• A list of what was decided, including who will do what

You don’t need to worry about grammar and spelling as you take the notes – you can clean them up later. What you do need to do is email all the attendees the notes (some of my friends check the notes into revision control as well; this is a good practice that I need to adopt). When you email out the notes you’re giving people time to correct your notes and clarify what everyone meant.

If you whiteboarded something during the meeting, take a picture of it and include the picture in the email.

Also, if you have trouble paying attention in meetings (like I do), volunteering to take notes is a great way to stay focused on the meeting.

Let People Leave The Meeting

If someone doesn’t need to be there for the whole meeting, don’t make them stay. Let them go after they’ve contributed their part.

Meetings Happen In Person….

Or do they? Scrums and other short status meetings are good candidates for meeting over IRC. A friend of mine who runs a lot of distributed groups runs many of his shorter (and longer) meetings this way, with the help of a few tricks like an IRC bot that can be told when the meeting has started and stopped: after the stop command is received the bot will make a web page from the meeting notes. Scrums are particularly amenable to this format because people can post their prepared list of updates into the chat window for all to see and comment on. Another advantage of scrums or status reporting meetings over IRC is that people don’t have to leave their desks (this seems obvious, but making meetings like scrums fit into people’s workflows is important). Meetings over IRC also let people observe a meeting by lurking in the chat room, which is something that is harder to do in person.

IRC can be a useful tool for in-person meetings as well, providing a place to paste texts, share links, record notes, and so on. I think that Google Wave (or something like SubEthaEdit) has potential for this purpose as well, but haven’t tried it.

What Works For You?

What techniques do you use to maximize the value of your meetings? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

When I’m not being a computer nerd I’m often studying music (I’ve even created website which helps me study), and in an effort to keep me and my friends making music I’ve started Iron Musician, where my friends and I must create at least a minute of music once week or owe $5 to the beer pool.

Take a listen to some of the entries and feel to free to provide some constructive criticism.