LOPSA is excited to relaunch our Mentorship Program on more stable footing. Sharing our excitement is our first mentee, Adam Snetiker. We picked his brain about participating in our program and present the interview below. If you'd like to contribute as a Mentor or participate as a mentee check us out at https://mentor.lopsa.org/
[Q: Could you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us about your current background and experience, and your aspirations with regard to the field of system administration?]
It all begins with my love of design. I've always been impressed by anything that looked really cool and stopped me dead in my tracks. I always wanted to get into the field of special effects, but when I went to college at Indiana University (Bloomington), I noticed the Informatics major. Not knowing much about it other than that it was a new, hot field related to IT, my family and I decided it would be a more practical major than fine arts. It was all about choosing a cognate area, and I chose Telecommunications which allowed me to take courses in Flash, 3D modeling and animation, DVD authoring, video editing, and TV studio and field production along with the required courses in Java programming, mathematical foundations and others.
My first few roles were in DVD menu design and authoring. After being laid off, I began to teach myself the basics of web development which led to a content management role producing marketing and client retention content for mortgage companies and their loan officers. After being laid off from that role, I began self-study in advanced web development tools including various JavaScript frameworks, automation tools and more. After failing to grasp some of those concepts and build up my skills without proper instruction, I decided to return to school to begin pursuit of a career in one of the more traditional areas of IT including networking, system administration and cybersecurity. Currently, I'm taking these courses in pursuit of an Advanced Network Specialist Certificate of Achievement at Moorpark College, and eventually will be going after a Cybersecurity certificate when those courses are developed in the near future.
Two of the required courses for the certificate that I have already taken include Microsoft Windows Administration and Microsoft Windows Server Administration. Both of these courses completely opened my eyes to System Administration as both an area of IT and a viable future career path by making me look at computing in a completely new way. Immediately, I was blown away by the sheer number of useful tools available in Windows that I never noticed as a general user and the fact that these tools have always been right there on every PC I have owned. I am amazed the power they give administrators to perform both simple routine maintenance and complex tasks that enhance system performance and allow management of all devices in an organization.
[Q: How did you find LOPSA? When did you join? Why did you join? ]
I decided to search for professional organizations and joined LOPSA and others in an effort to make valuable connections with people and continue learning outside of my current classroom environment. In addition to LOPSA, I am currently a student member of the ACM, IEEE, ISSA and OWASP, and have attended a few conferences.
For a long time, I have followed thought leaders and industry experts on Twitter and other social media platforms and have occasionally sent emails soliciting advice or asking questions. Generally, I have gotten their opinion which I value very much, but have always hoped to find a mentor I can turn to for help in establishing myself as somebody who can add value to an organization as an IT professional. Thankfully, I came across LOPSAs mentorship program and was recently accepted and matched.
[Q: What do you find appealing about the LOPSA mentorship program? You mentioned you've been looking for something like this for years, could you tell us more about that, and what excites you the most about the program? What do you hope to get out of it?]
What excites me the most about this program is the ability to interact with someone who is a current practicing professional with experience in areas of IT in which I hope to build a successful career. What I hope to get out of it is specific feedback that will help me to establish a focused plan of action that includes careers I should target at the entry level and the most important skills for success. Eventually, I hope this feedback process will repeat itself as I work through my career so that as the specific skills and job titles change, the focus is still on making sure they are in sync so I can continue to advance and add value.
[Q: How has your interaction with your mentor been so far?]
We have sent several messages back and forth through the LOPSA Mentor web page, have connected on LinkedIn and have scheduled a Google Hangouts meeting next weekend. My biggest hope is that this person becomes a valuable connection that will be able to hold me accountable and notice the progress I make while being able to continue pushing me further towards success.
[Q: Anything else you want to communicate to our readers (who are both seasoned professionals and students and everything in between.]
The biggest thing I would emphasize for readers is to become somebody in the eyes of other people. Networking is the best thing you can do for yourself regardless of what career level you're at, but make the extra effort to send a message so that people know who you are. Take me for example - if I was just another person who filled out the form on LOPSA's mentor website, I wouldn't be featured in this newsletter. Instead, you're all reading a story written about me.
Adam may be found on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamsnetiker) or contacted via email at adam.snetiker@ieee.org. "I look forward to meeting anyone and everyone and hope we can all work together to advance our careers and continue learning together."
LOPSA has hired a new Community Manager. As LOPSA expands, the work of maintaining such a large organization is a daunting task for volunteers. Roger Luedecke is a long time Member and Volunteer of the openSUSE Project. As Community Manager he brings his experience in open source and tech communities to the tasks of managing the LOPSA community.
Roger can be reached at rluedecke@LOPSA.org
I'm proud to announce the Leadership Committee's 2017 election results. The results were prepared Matt Okeson-Harlow, processed by Andrew Hume, and confirmed by Scott Murphy.
Thanks to Paul English, George Beech, Ski Kacoroski, and other members of the board for supporting the Leadership Committee during the elections.
Extra special thanks to the Leadership Committee this year. Without having any incumbents re-run, there was much more work leading up to the election compared to usual. Our success is thanks to Adam Luck, Andrew Hume, Matt Okeson-Harlow, Scott Murphy, and Trevor Thorpe. They are our Leadership Committee.
I'd also like to recognize our exiting Board Members for their service. Thank you for your service Atom Powers, Paul English, Ray Thrush, and Ski Kacoroski.
Ski has served eight terms, which is the longest of any Board Member in LOPSA history. Thanks for your time and dedicatation, Ski. We wish you the best in your future endeavors.
=========================
Election Results
The elections for the 2017 LOPSA Board of Directors has concluded. The winners are Drew Adams, Andy Cowell, Aleksey Tsalolikhin, and Danielle White.
We present below the report of the independent monitor, Andrew Hume. The Leadership Committee
----------------
Report on the 2017 election.
The 2017 LOPSA election was conducted as it has been in the past. Votes are automatically collected by software run by Matt Okeson-Harlow and at the end of the election are captured and processed by the Meek single transferable vote method. The software is available at http://www.openstv.org (although I just did a ‘yum install openstv’) and if you'd like to run the election yourself, the raw ballots are presented below. I used version 1.7 of OpenSTV.
For a more detailed explanation of the overall method, material may be found at http://www.openstv.org and Wikipedia.
The abbreviated summary for this election follows below.
Andrew Hume
------------------
Election title: LOPSA Vote 2017
Method: Meek STV with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional threshold
Ballot Cleaning: San Francisco
Number of total ballots: 54
Number of invalid or empty ballots: 0
Number of ballots used in the count: 54
5 candidate running for 4 seats.
Round 1: Aleksey Tsalolikhin and Danielle White are elected.
Round 2: Transferring surplus votes; no new electees.
Round 3: Transferring surplus votes; Andy Cowell and Drew Adams elected.
The election is over since all seats are filled.
The votes in BLT format (md5=c1d76489ea5fe1176d79d251adbbc022)
5 5
1 1 4 3 5 2 0
1 4 1 2 0
1 3 5 4 1 2 0
1 4 5 1 2 3 0
1 4 1 2 3 5 0
1 4 3 1 2 5 0
1 5 4 3 2 1 0
1 3 4 1 0
1 1 4 3 2 5 0
1 4 1 5 3 2 0
1 4 1 5 2 3 0
1 4 5 2 1 3 0
1 4 2 5 3 1 0
1 4 1 2 5 3 0
1 1 4 2 5 3 0
1 1 3 4 2 5 0
1 1 4 2 3 5 0
1 1 4 5 2 3 0
1 1 5 2 3 4 0
1 2 3 5 4 1 0
1 1 4 2 0
1 4 3 1 5 2 0
1 5 3 2 1 4 0
1 1 2 4 5 3 0
1 2 5 3 4 1 0
1 1 2 4 3 5 0
1 4 5 2 3 1 0
1 1 4 0
1 4 1 3 5 2 0
1 4 2 1 5 3 0
1 2 1 4 5 3 0
1 5 4 3 1 2 0
1 5 1 2 4 3 0
1 1 3 4 5 2 0
1 3 4 5 2 1 0
0
"Aleksey Tsalolikhin"
"Andy Cowell"
"Andree Jacobson"
"Danielle White"
"Drew Adams"
"LOPSA Election 2017"
#LOPSA-Live 2017-06-21
Once again, my apologies for having to split the posts. I believe I can manage it with just two posts this time. This was lightly edited to remove some of the noise from the transcript
#LOPSA-Live 2017-06-14
As mentioned in the beginning of the transcript, we also have Danielle White's answers to these questions.
With the benefit of answering these after the #LOPSA-Live session (and thank you for this opportunity) I see overlap between these questions.
Question #1: I strongly feel that there exists interest but is from an audience who isn't seeing us right now. In part due to my role change in mid-2016, to a position where I am doing more development than operations, I found local Research Triangle chapters of some groups, such as Girl Develop IT and Women Who Code, of people in similar capacities. Generally, they don't know of LOPSA even though sysadmin tasks are part of their jobs. Locally there are employers where nobody defines themselves as a system administrator even though many are doing so.
My approach to address this is to work on getting LOPSA into those spaces and make the case for our relevance. I feel strongly that we can be of substantial benefit because what I often see there are people who are doing ops work without a lot of support, and there is a solid case that we will make.
A Research Triangle specific note: LOPSA is still listed as affiliated with North Carolina System Administrators (NC*SA) which effectively no longer exists at this point. The other group where LOPSA is known, TriLUG, does not have participation from the individuals I described above and, for a number of reasons, almost certainly will not.
Question #2: If you'll allow me to take advantage of knowing the next question I believe questions #1 and #3 are our biggest at this time. I don't wish to suggest that if we solve them we've solved it all, only that we must focus on those two right now because solving those are critical to anything more.
Question #3: I would love to say that there is a way to make LOPSA-EAST viable but I am doubtful right now. The best approach that I see here is to look for conferences that are gaining and work with them. In the Research Triangle there is All Things Open. Also, there are a number of DevOps Days conferences where we need to be.
Don't forget the second session on June 21 @ 21:00 Eastern
The following series of posts are the transcripts from candidates #LOPSA-Live session. We have a size-of-post limitation for these items so it will be split across four posts.
1 Slight editing was performed to remove blank lines and entry/exit messages
The Leadership Committee is conducting moderated LOPSA Live sessions on Freenode IRC network in the #lopsa-live channel. These sessions will be your opportunity to ask questions of the candidates running for the LOPSA board.
We have two sessions, which should accommodate most time zones:
The League of Professional System Administrators 1200 Route 22 East, Suite 200 Bridgewater, NJ, 08807 USA Email: info@lopsa.org