Site Reliability Engineer, Chris Nehren, will be presenting, "Devs and Admins Sitting in a Tree" at FossCon this Saturday, August 10.
Historically, there has been some animosity between developers and systems administrators. The BOFH meme is too popular for it to be without a kernel of truth. As software systems become more complicated, and scale ever inexorably upwards and outwards, this kind of adversarial relationship only serves to hinder progress. In his talk, Chris will review a mixture of technical and social approaches to problem solving and information sharing. While most of the material won’t be specific to Perl, the general strategies presented will transfer easily to any environment.
Chris's career path is probably somewhat unusual for the typical Perl developer, in that he's moved backwards from the typical progression of sysadmin who knows Perl to Perl developer.
Chris says,
I’ve observed some things that developers can do to make an admin’s job much easier. I’d like to share these insights, in the spirit of collaboration and "camaraderie.
The people behind Fosscon are free software enthusiasts, user group members, coders and users. The goal of this grassroots event is to provide a space for all to come together in the Northeast.