What is on Your Mind?

Hello All,

I was thinking to start this POLL, sometime back but couldn't get time so starting it today. So we all work either as an Admin or as a Developer or as a QA etc. So let's have a thread(POLL) where we could share our experiences(if it doesn't come anyone's privacy category) so that we could learn, come to know people's experiences and their thinking on this.

Here I want to give an example like(Being a cricket FAN) I am giving cricket's example only:
So let's say a person is a GOOD bowler and doesn't know batting at all only for name sake he is going to bat because of rule of cricket all 11 have to bat, so we could call him a TRUE Bowler. Similarly a person who could BOWL and BAT equally could be called "ALL ROUNDER". Similarly there are categories where could be a TRUE batsman or a batsman who could bowl(as a part timer) or a bowler(who could bat sometimes).

So why this big above explanation, because we could co-relate this with our IT field and with our work, so here are some categories.

I hope we all will enjoy this POLL, keep your replies, experiences coming. Also feel free to add more options/categories to POLL(I think I missed QA here).

EDIT:Wanted to add here like we could share our experience/journey(as we have lots of very experience and knowledgeable people here) also so that youngsters could get inspiration from that journey.

Thanks,
R. Singh

Could I add a few suggestions (in no particular order):-
I'm here somewhere, I'm sure


Robin

Thank you rbatte1 for your views, 110% you could add them

Thanks,
R. Singh

I can't really poll on this as I don't fit anywhere.

I am a mere amateur who likes working in the worst case. I like finding the limits of languages without using extra external libraries to do my tasks. I have abandoned Python because there is a library for just about everything a programmer needs, these things make life easy. I am hooked on Shell Scripting and haven't even scratched the surface yet after 3 years of experimentation.
Am I capable of being an admin? NO!
Am I developer? Well yes and no.
I don't consider myself good enough to code something like Audacity but I am quite capable of coding to hit the hardware where it hurts hardest in some languages that were not designed for the task. ;o)
Am I management material? Absolutely not, if I can't get my hands dirty then I am not interested.
Why do I code? Purely to learn something different from my profession, (a retired), Electronics Engineer.
Could I set up and maintain a serious server farm? NO! End of story.
Could I set up and maintain a tiny private network? Yes, but that makes me no expert by any stretch of the imagination.

So an extra section for the pure amateur:-

Amateur with no absolute knowledge of any one part of computer science, but willing to learn.

@wisecracker.......Are you having a laugh? Any member who has posted 1,116 times AND been thanked 293 times is no amateur my friend.

First off, you have long evolved from "amateur" status, so please: STOP IT! ;-)

And, to make it official once and forever:

~lights candles, dims lights, you know the routine~
Invoking hereby my powers invested in me by Brian Kernighan and his inborn son Denis Ritchie, as a loyal follower of the cult of David Korn and ordained disciple of Doug McIllroy i declare you officially to be of the status expert!

~waves wand of content (usb-stick) and scroll of knowledge (man page) at wisecracker~
Mumbo-Jumbo, Abracadabra, Kyrie Eleison, philosophus mansisses, <some more unintelligible latin here>

Well, this ritual returned RC=0, which means you are now an regular expert. Go forth and dost thou program in BASIC no more.


OK, after this litle exertion, i have to admit i don't fit into these categories either.

I like to script most of my work as an admin: not because of the development process itself but because this way i can assure that a certain work process is always done the same way and with a certified outcome. The key to administrating large environments is to industrialise and standardise as much as you can. Even if such a process turns out to be systematically faulty it will be done faulty in the same way on every system so it is (relatively) easy to create another script to correct that systematically.

Systems administration, on the other hand, is much more than to work on systems. It includes careful and long-term as well as short-term planning of the environment you work on. This means having a firm grasp of technological advances to expect, it means knowing the trends of usage patterns on your environment, it means taking into account maintenance- and life-cycles and so on and so on. Planning is everything and in systems administration it is even more important then some other areas.

At the same time there is troubleshooting: a systems administrator works as the "glue" between the hardware and the OS on one side and the application(-engineers) on the other. You need intimate knowledge of the systems interior (in more than one regard: from hardware to system calls to APIs, etc.) to be of help in this endeavour when not everything is working the way it is expected to do (which is more often than not the case) and you are the one to make it run no matter what.

Every admin('s knowledge) is a trade-off between fulfilling these widely divergent areas of competence (you can't excel at everything so you will specialise in one area cutting back on the other). But one needs to have at least a certain minimum amount of knowledge in any of these areas to be of any help in an admin team.

bakunin

This was an no harm intended update, since that was on my mind