In my latest position, as an IT Operations Manager I was confronted to the classic problems of a non-mature Operations: We were understaffed, in a fire-fighting mode, there was poor documentation (either missing or not up-to-date, often misleading), almost no backup, and the team members had almost no overlap in their skillsets and were demotivated. I couldn’t afford to lose a single person of my team as the knowledge lost would be dire for the company, and to make things even more complicated, our CEO wanted us to be able to deploy our home made software to remote client sites. ...

As far I know, there is no course to become a Systems and Networks Engineer, aside from courses to learn (and gain certification in) a given vendor’s product. In fact, back in my university years, I remember that my teachers seemed to assume that there was no interest in this kind of thing as learning the options and caveats of a particular product was all you needed. In their eyes, algorithmic and development approaches (RAD and OO at the time) were where the real focus lay. ...

Hello there! In this introduction post I will try to explain why on earth I’ve started Yet Another Blog. For years now I’ve exchanged ideas about IT Infrastructure and Operations with my colleagues and friends, be they IT Ops guys or dev dudes (or even from a completely different background). I’ve learned a lot from those discussions and I believe my work has matured as a result. Lately though, this flow of communication has dried up for several reasons and I’ve grown frustrated about it, hence the idea of this blog. Hopefully it will allow for fruitful interaction with people I know and indeed others that I don’t know. People with whom I am impatient to share ideas and experience! ...