League of Professional System Administrators - Mentoring

How to ask questions

cat — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:56:40 -0700

It's often challenging to find answers for the problems that plague you -- and it's even worse when the folk that you try to ask are frustrated and confused by how you're trying to ask, or simply ignore you completely!

There have been tons of good things written about how to ask questions in a way that gets answers (and how to find answers, or at least things to try before asking).

One of the best articles that I know is Merlin Mann's "Solve problems by writing a note to yourself". Merlin makes the very sensible point that writing things down helps you to understand the problem you're trying to solve -- and also means that you've got all of the information about what you've tried, what you've found out, what results you've gotten et al handy, if you do end up needing to ask somebody else.

LinuxFest 2008 Recap.

mhalligan — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:04:34 -0700

Last weekend we went to LinuxFest NorthWest 2008 in Bellingham, WA. It was a great time, we handed out a bunch of Tee-Shirts, met a lot of good people, and saw some interesting presentations. I even spoke with around half a dozen potential summer interns.

Random thoughts on mentoring

trey — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:39:54 -0800

I've been thinking recently about what the term "mentoring" means for professional sysadmins.

I've usually said that I'm "self-taught" in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn't take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few system administration jobs. My supervisors and coworkers may have given me hints or things to look at, but I didn't have the opportunity to watch them work directly.

But I'm not really "self-taught", certainly not in the way that a musician might be "self-taught" or a cook might be "self-taught". You can imagine someone teaching themselves to play the piano, for instance, by sitting down at the keyboard and pressing different keys in various ways and observing how the piano sounds, or someone trying cooking ingredients in different ways and tasting the results. But can you imagine someone sitting down at a Unix prompt and typing random keystrokes until they learned how to administer a machine?