So long, LISA

In 2010, I attended my first conference. My friend Matt—who I met because we read and commented on each other’s blogs—was leading the blog team for USENIX’s LISA conference. He wanted to add a few people and asked me to join. I was thrilled.

That fall, I went to San Jose not knowing what to expect. I was a system administrator (in a large installation, no less), but there were so many things I didn’t know. Would I fit in? Yes, as it turns out.

The community was large, but incredibly welcoming. I got to have dinner with some of the Big Names in system administration, all of whom were kind and gracious. For six days, I woke up early (because time zones), attended sessions all day, went to BoFs and social events in the evening, then stayed up late to write a couple of posts for the conference blog. By the end of the week I was exhausted, but having the time of my life.

For several years, I was a regular attendee and blogger. In 2016, I served as co co-chair of the Invited Talks track. In 2018, I was on the program committee. Since then, I haven’t been involved with LISA (except for a lightning talk this year) because my career has taken a different direction.

But even though my job is no longer system administration, I’m still friends with so many people I met through LISA. And it’s not a stretch to say that being on the LISA blog team set me up for success as a writer. Of course, it gave me a lot of practice writing on tight deadline. But it also helped connect me to people who have since given me a boost in my career. I doubt that I’d be working on a book right now if it weren’t for the LISA conference.

So you can imagine how sad I felt when I saw the news that the LISA conference has come to an end. All good things must end, of course. LISA had a terrific run. But the field—and the world around it—has changed. So we must bid goodbye to the conference that started me on conferences. I learned so much and met so many wonderful people. And I’ll always have that.

LISA wants you: submit your proposal today

I have the great honor of being on the organizing committee for the LISA conference this year. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know how much I enjoy LISA. It’s a great conference for anyone with a professional interest in sysadmin/DevOps/SRE. This year’s LISA is being held in Nashville, Tennessee, and the committee wants your submission.

As in years past, LISA content is focused on three tracks: architecture, culture, and engineering. There’s great technical content (one year I learned about Linux filesystem tuning from the guy who maintains the ext filesystems), but there’s also great non-technical content. The latter is a feature more conferences need to adopt.

I’d love to see you submit a talk or tutorial about how you solve the everyday (and not-so-everyday) problems in your job. Do you use containers? Databases? Microservices? Cloud? Whatever you do, there’s a space for your proposal.

Submit your talk to https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa18/call-for-participation by 11:59 PM Pacific on Thursday, May 24. Or talk one of your coworkers into it. Better yet, do both! LISA can only remain a great conference with your participation.

Come see me at these conferences in the next few months

I thought I should share some upcoming conference where I will be speaking or in attendance.

  • 9/16 — Indy DevOps Meetup (Indianapolis, IN) — It’s an informal meetup, but I’m speaking about how Cycle Computing does DevOps in cloud HPC
  • 10/1 — HackLafayette Thunder Talks (Lafayette, IN) — I organize this event, so I’ll be there. There are some great talks lined up.
  • 10/26-27 — All Things Open (Raleigh, NC) — I’m presenting the results of my M.S. thesis. This is a really great conference for open source, so if you can make it, you really should.
  • 11/14-18 — Supercomputing (Salt Lake City, UT) — I’ll be working the Cycle Computing booth most of the week.
  • 12/4-9 — LISA (Boston, MA) — The 30th version of the premier sysadmin conference looks to be a good one. I’m co-chairing the Invited Talks track, and we have a pretty awesome schedule put together if I do say so myself.

Submit your LISA16 proposal!

I am co-chairing the Invited Talks for this year’s LISA Conference, alongside Patrick Cable. I’ve attended LISA since 2010 (with the exception of 2014) and it’s a great conference for systems administrators and other operationally-minded tech folks. I’ve enjoyed many great talks over the years, and as a co-chair, it’s up to me to help make sure that trend continues.

So here’s where you come in: it’s time for you to submit a proposal. The Call for Participation is open through 11:59 PM PDT on Monday, April 25. You may think “I have nothing worth sharing,” but you may be wrong. Patrick and I are particularly interested in finding talks that address cross-cutting topics, talks from new attendees, and generally interesting talks.

Talks don’t have to be about the cutting edge of technology to be interesting. Some of the best-received talks last year weren’t even technical in nature. So much of the job is cultural: the culture of your team and the larger organization. Alice Goldfuss’s “Scalable Meatfrastructure” talk may have broken the record for the amount of praise on social media channels.

Tell us about a problem you had and how you solved it. Tell us about how you applied technology to improve life for your organization and users. Or propose a tutorial in order to share your deep knowledge.

Go out on a limb and propose a talk. If you get accepted, it’s a great way to attend the conference and expand your professional network. if you don’t get accepted, I promise it it’s okay (I’ve had several proposals to other conferences rejected). If you want some advice on how to make your proposal awesome, both Patrick and I are happy to talk to you.

I hope you’ll submit your proposed talk soon.

Coming up: LISA ’12

It may seem like I’ve not been writing much lately, but nothing can be further from the truth. It’s just that my writing has been for grad school instead of Blog Fiasco. But don’t worry, soon I’ll be blogging like a madman. That’s right: it’s time for LISA ’12. Once again, I have the privilege of being on the conference blog team and learning from some of the TopPeople[tm] in the field. Here’s a quick look at my schedule (subject to change based on level of alertness, addition of BoFs, etc):

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Now I just need to pack my bags and get started on the take-home final that’s due mid-week. Look for posts from me and my team members Matt Simmons and Greg Riedesel on the USENIX Blog.

LISA ’11: the first half of the week

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know I’ve been in Boston for the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference. Once again, I have the honor of serving on the conference blog team, which means I spend all day sitting in sessions and all evening writing about them. We’re halfway through now, so here’s what I’ve written so far:

You can follow along with the rest of the blog team at http://blogs.usenix.org

LISA ’10 Interview: Tom Limoncelli

This post was originally posted to the Usenix blog.

Anyone who has attended LISA in the past few years is undoubtedly familiar with Tom Limoncelli.  Tom’s not just a LISA fixture, he’s also a widely-respected author of two books (Time Management for System Administrators and The Practice of System and Network Administration) and a contributor to the Everything Sysadmin blog.  Over the weekend, he sat down with me for a few minutes to share his thoughts about LISA ’10.

Ben Cotton: You are, quite truly, an expert on everything sysadmin.  How did you reach that status?

Tom Limoncelli:  I’m honored by the question but the name “EverythingSysadmin.com” comes from my co-author (Christine Hogan) and I trying to come up with a domain name that was related to our book, but wasn’t really long.  Since the book tried to touch on a little of everything, we came up with EverythingSysadmin.com.

BC:  So would you consider yourself a generalist or do you have a few fields that you feel you’re truly an expert in?

TL:  I do consider myself a generalist.  I think that’s because when I got started in system administration you had to be.  Now things are different.  Now people tend to specialize in storage, backups, networking, particular operating systems, and so on.  Remember that The Practice of System and Network Administration has three authors; we only know “everything” when all three of us put our brains together.  I guess you’d have to say that my specialty is in always knowing someone that can find an answer for me.

BC:  That’s an excellent lesson.  You’re scheduled to conduct several training sessions on time management during LISA ’10.  What would you say is the biggest lesson to be learned from them?

TL: The biggest lesson is that humans are bad at time management, and that’s OK.  The great thing about being human is that we can build tools that let us overcome our problems.  The class that I teach has very little theory. It’s mostly a list of techniques people can use to solve specific problems. Use the ones you like, ignore the rest.  The one that most people end up using is finding a good way to manage their to-do list.

BC: If someone’s taken your time management training before, what do you have new for them this year?

TL: I have an entirely new class this year.  It’s a “part 2” kind of thing, though you don’t have to have taken part 1 to take it.  In the morning I’ll be teaching “Time Management for System Administrators” which is basically the same half-day class I usually teach.  The afternoon, however, is all new.  It is “Time Management: Team Efficiency”.

The thing about Teams is that there are certain things you do that waste time for everyone else.  You might not even realize it.  In this class, I’m going to cover a number of techniques for eliminating those things.  You save time for others, they save time for you.  It’s like “time management karma”.  What goes around comes around.  For example, meetings are often a terrible waste of time.  I’ll talk about some red flags to help you figure out which meetings to skip, and if you run meetings you can figure out if you are creating these red flags.  If you can’t fix a badly run meeting, I have some tips on how to negotiate so that you don’t have to attend. For example, why send your entire team to someone else’s boring meeting?  Send one person to take notes and report back to your team.  If you can’t get out of a meeting, I have techniques for avoiding them. For example, when you enter the room tell the facilitator, “I have a conflict for the second half of the meeting.  Can my agenda items be first on the list?” After your item is covered, stand up and leave.  It isn’t unethical or dishonest: the “conflict” you had was your urgent need to escape badly run meetings.

BC: You’ve been a regular fixture at  LISA.  What keeps you coming back?

TL: LISA is like telescope that lets me see into the future.  Every year there are presentations that describe things that the majority of all system administrators won’t be exposed to for 2-3 years.  When I come back to work I have more of a “big picture” than my coworkers that didn’t attend.  For example, it was at LISA that I first heard of CFEngine, Puppet and other “Configuration Management” (CM) tools.  Lately people talk CM as if it was new.  It’s certainly much more popular now, but people that have been attending LISA conferences have been benefitting from CM tools for more than a decade.

90% of what is interesting in system administration relates to scaling: More machines, more RAM, more storage, more speed, more web hits.  Many years ago there was a presentation by a web site that was managing 1 million web hits per day. At the time this was huge achievement.  People that saw that presentation were in a great position a few years later when all big sites scaled to be that big.

BC: What are the big scaling challenges?

TL: Everything we used to know is about to change because of SSD.  Everything I know about designing and scaling systems is based on the fact that CPU caches are about 10x faster than RAM, which is 10x faster than disk, which is about 10x faster than networks.  Over the years this has been basically true: Even as RAM got faster, so did disk.  SSD is about to change that.  The price curve of SSD makes it pretty easy to predict that we’re not going to be using spinning magnetic disks to store data soon.  All the old assumptions are going away.  At the same time, CPUs with 16+ and soon 100+ cores make other assumptions change.  Things get worse in some ways.  These are the hot topics that you hear about at a conference like LISA.

Just the other day a very smart coworker said something to me that implied that with the new generation of 100+ core machines we could “just run more processes” and not have to change the way we design things.  I was floored.  That’s like saying, “Basketball players seem to be able to jump higher every year.  Why can’t we jump to the moon?”

BC: As an avid basketball fan, I find that idea intriguing.   It’s obvious attending LISA can be very beneficial. As an experienced attendee, what advice do you have for people who may be going to their first LISA conference?

TL: First: Talk to random people.  When you are on line, introduce yourself to the people next to you.  A big chunk of the learning opportunity is from talking with fellow attendees.  Sysadmins are often introverts, so it is a bit difficult.  Someone once told me that it’s always ok to start a conversation with a stranger by sticking out your hand and saying, “Hi!  My name is Joe.” (if your name is Joe).  Unlike some conferences where the speakers are corralled into a “green room” and never talk with attendees, at Usenix conferences you can talk to anyone.  At my first Usenix experiences I met Dennis Ritchie, one of the inventors of Unix.

Second: plan your days.  There are activities from 9am until midnight every day.  Read the schedule beforehand and make a grid of what you want to attend.  Saturday night is a session for “first timers” which is a great way to get an overview of the conference.  During the day there are usually 3-4 things going on at any time.  At night there is an entire schedule community-driven events.  You don’t want to be picking what to do next at the end of each session.  Also, plan some down-time.  Take breaks. Get plenty of fluids.  It is a full week.

BC: Any other thoughts you’d like to share?

TL: There’s also a lot of great security talks, and an entire track of Q&A sessions with experts answering questions about everything from storage to disaster recovery to consulting.  The last thing I’d like to say is, “see you there!”

Registration for LISA ’10 is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/.  You can find Tom’s training courses on the training page.  He’ll also be presenting two technical sessions.

Marketing LISA ’10

This post is also available on the Usenix blog at http://blogs.usenix.org/?p=520.

You may recall that I’ve been selected to the Blog Team for the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference taking place in San Jose in November. As part of my pre-conference duties, I interviewed Anne Dickison, the Director of Marketing for the USENIX Association. As Director of Marketing, much of Anne’s work involves promoting this large annual event. With less than two months left until LISA ’10, Anne and her team have already been hard at work for several months, getting the word out and enlisting the aid of others (including the Blog Team). LISA ’10 work began shortly after LISA ’09 ended, with the Call for Papers. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to spread the word about large events.

The rise of social media has changed the lives of all marketers. Anne says she relies “heavily on social networking to get the word out.” With a small budget, “barter agreements and word-of-mouth” are invaluable to promoting LISA. Twitter and Facebook have shown themselves to be excellent tools for spreading LISA news, as well as giving attendees a chance to interact with each other before, during, and after the conference.

Last year’s introduction of the blog program was so beneficial that it has been expanded into a “full-fledged team”, and this year there’s a new feature in store. For the first time ever, LISA will have a UStream.tv chat and on-site interviews. Few details are available right now, but Anne said “I think it will be extremely helpful in showcasing the benefits of attending a LISA conference.”

There are many benefits for LISA attendees. A wide variety of technical sessions, training, and vendor exhibits are scheduled, but perhaps the most beneficial events are more informal. Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and various activities provide opportunities to cultivate relationships that can be a source of personal and professional interactions long after the conference has wrapped up. Anne says “we try to make it as easy as possible for people to interact, [and] set up systems so that the discussions started at LISA can continue long after the conference, via mediums such as the sage-members mailing list or the Facebook page.”

With such a large amount of effort put into making LISA successful, the payoff is personal for Anne Dickison: “My favorite part of LISA marketing is hearing really positive feedback from a first-time attendee. It’s great to watch new people who’ve never heard of us discover how much fun they can have and information they can learn by attending the conference.” The uniqueness of LISA also allows more creativity than is sometimes permissible in traditional marketing. “It’s probably the most fun event we do,” Anne told me. “I have more leeway in doing fun things like the adventure theme of this year or the puzzle theme of ’05.”

Registration is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/. Many discounts are available, including for hotel and airfare. Discounted is registration is also available to those who register online by October 18.

It’s beginning to look a lot like LISA

We’re just over two months from the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, and the website has recently been updated with details. I’ve never been to this conference before, but as a member of the official blog team, I’ll get to spend the week doing nothing but participating in, and writing about, LISA ’10. Can I write two blog posts and countless tweets every day? It will be a challenge, and I’m sure I’ll be tired of writing by the end, but there should be plenty to write about.

With three days of workshops, 48 training courses, and three days of technical sessions,  there’s plenty to choose from.  I’m especially interested in the talk “Measuring the Value of System Administration” scheduled for Thursday morning.  Of course, each evening there will be Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, which I’m told are the most valuable part of the whole LISA experience.  BoFs are an informal meeting of the minds, where admins who do similar work compare notes and pick up new ideas to bring home.  And drink beer.  I’m okay with that.  The BoF schedule is still pretty thin, but no doubt it will fill out as November approaches.

If you’re interested in attending LISA, you can register online at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/registration/.  Registration is available in half-day increments, so you can pay for exactly the amount of conference you want, and if you register by October 18, you get the “early bird discount.”  I hope to see you all in San Jose!