I’ve been doing this since 1997—started on heavy iron back when “remote troubleshooting” meant driving to the data center at 2am. Unix, Cisco networking, EMC/NetApp storage. The kind of work where you learned to respect the fundamentals because the abstractions didn’t exist yet.
These days I still live in Unix and write a fair amount of code (Python, Rust, whatever the problem needs). I’m an Emacs user who runs Evil mode—I like Vim motions because I can use the same muscle memory whether I’m in my editor or ssh’d into a box that only has vi.
What I like to talk about:
- Storage architecture and the nightmares that come with it
- Network debugging when the packets just… vanish
- Automation that actually holds up in production
- The stuff that isn’t in the docs
I’ve seen a lot of systems fail in interesting ways. Happy to trade war stories or help untangle the weird edge cases.