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by stevekemp·2y ago·view on hn ↗
I started as a developer, and became a sysadmin by accident/necessity.

Over the past 20ish years I've been: "sysadmin", "sre", "devops engineer", "cloud engineer", and "platform support engineer". Probably more titles, and roles, than I can remember to be honest.

I write scripts, I automate systems (in the past with perl, then cfengine, puppet,etc) via the use of AMIs and standard templates. I use strace to debug problems, and diagnose networking issues with tcpdump/wireshark. Nowadays I mostly use EKS/K8S, but at heart I remember debugging broken deployments with GDB and patching binaries with emacs and I like those simpler times.

I want to call myself a sysadmin, but people hiring for stuff want devops/cloud everywhere. It's all a mess. Still I like big networks and lots of systems, and it seems there's no shortage of things to improve no matter the size of the company.