Welcome (again)!

The next attempt to start my newsletter

Yes, I did a newsletter many years ago to announce some new software available at https://www.power-devops.com. I think it was in pre-COVID era. I stopped doing it because I didn’t have enough time.

Yes, porting software to AIX and Linux on IBM Power, preparing presentations and Youtube videos, articles on LinkedIn and even single post on ex-Twitter about how happy I am that IBM announced some new version of something, everything takes time. Nobody pays to me for this time and I must confess, I prefer doing my daily business. Deploy systems, troubleshoot and fix problems, deliver trainings. You know - usual things, every system administrator, trainer or consultant does daily. Unattended. And unattentive.

I have a friend. He is a project manager in IT and works for some big companies helping them to deliver new products. Even if we both are in IT, we learned each other because our children went to the same kindergarten and we didn’t talk too much about IT. But once he asked me:

Andrey, I know you work as a system administrator. But what are you doing in your job daily?

Word after word and I opened for me completely another view on my job. From outside it looks like as a system administrator you don’t do anything. Or at least nothing useful.

Do you deploy systems? Sorry, in the modern world everyone can click a button in the cloud provider interface and deploy a system.

Do you update systems? Sorry, why should you do it? Isn’t it easier to re-deploy a new system with a newer version instead of updating the old one?

Do you troubleshoot problems? Sorry, what type of problems? We all know, that the majority of problems are in the software and it is software development fixing problems, not a system administrator.

On a conference I visited once, I said, I am a system administrator and got my own portion of buuuuhs.

Yes, we have a very bad image in IT industry as people who stay on the way of modernization, prevent IT development from doing cool stuff and do almost nothing.

That’s why I decided to start again with the newsletter. In my life I learned many brilliant people doing awesome stuff and many of them are system administrators. I want to share with you what I learned from them. I want that we all can do our infrastructures more automated and more usable for our colleagues and our users. I want that they don’t have a chance to complain about our infrastructure. And as you know:

Manageable and mantainable IT infrastructure

is the foundation for your company’s daily business and modernization.

Let’s talk how we can achieve it. Let’s discuss what we can do. Let’s help each other to do it.

This is the whole reason to start with the newsletter again. I am still thinking if I do it weekly or bi-weekly as I do my Youtube videos. Anyway I’ll do my best to give valuable content for free with a lot of examples.

But some of the content I will place behind the paywall. I don’t work for IBM or any other big company which would pay me a lot of money for doing this. So I need your support. If you find my work valuable and would like that I continue it, you can support me by subscribing to a paid plan.

If you or your company are in European Union (EU), you can contact me directly and you can get an official EU invoice for your tax office.

Last but not least. If you got this newsletter by e-mail, it means that you’ve subscribed to it on my site - https://www.power-devops.com. If you don’t want to get it by e-mail, you can always unsubscribe from it. I hope Substack will add a link to unsubscribe to the footer of the e-mail, because I can’t find any button for it. Or you can contact me directly and I will remove your e-mail from the list.

By the way, in case you didn’t know it. You can download all files from https://www.power-devops.com without entering your e-mail address. Just click cancel.

Sorry the first newsletter is not very technical but the next one will be technical. I promise! I already have some thoughts.

Meanwhile have a lot of fun with your IT infrastructure!

I have it too!

Andrey