Sysadmin

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. ...

They handed you the keys and a pat on the back. “Good luck,” they said, with a look that was equal parts pity and relief. You’re the new sysadmin, the new SRE, the new DevOps guy. And you’ve just inherited a steaming pile of undocumented, unmanaged, and unstable infrastructure. Don’t panic. I’ve been there. More times than I care to count, starting from my first encounter with a closet full of overheating Sun SPARCstations in ‘98. The names change, the tech gets “better,” but the situation is always the same: you’re walking into a digital minefield. ...