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So considering I do both am I a Werepire ? But seriously, on small teams, you can't avoid that you will have a few people doing both for a while. We have a ded

by nkassis 16y ago

So considering I do both am I a Werepire ? But seriously, on small teams, you can't avoid that you will have a few people doing both for a while. We have a dedicated a sysadmin but we work with him a lot considering he has to deploy our code and devs are terrible at helping out sysadmins. I get in these arguments all the time with other devs about making sure it's easy for the sysadmin to configure and deploy the app. When they write code that depends on random libraries, they need to ensure that will be deployable on production servers running Linux and not OSX etc.. I feel having experience with both is important for sys admins and devs to understand each other.

mgrouchy 16y ago
Chances are when you work on a very small team you probably don't have a sysadmin at all. At the startup I work at, I do both and the more I work without a sysadmin the more I appreciate the work they do! When we do have a dedicated sysadmin, at the very least he will be very appreciated by me, because I know he will be improving all the stuff I have done out of sysadmin ignorance.
- sophacles 16y ago
  I think it is extremely important to have at least one developer who has been a sysadmin in the past. One of my closest colleagues started his career as a sysadmin. At first I was a bit distrustful because he didn't have a lot of "real experience" or "education". But as I got to know him, I realized his sysadmin "spidey sense" was a godsend. He has a knack for knowing when things that should just work will in fact fall over. He also has a lot of deep OS and platform knowledge, so frequently when we would want to throw piles of code at something, he would suggest and OS tweak or similar to get the same end result. So yeah, sysadmins on all development teams from the get-go are now a must in my book.
  - mgrouchy 16y ago
    Yeah, I was never a sysadmin, but for 8 months in my university days, I worked as a systems programmer for the CS Department at my university. I worked on stuff that automated system deployments, backups, imaging, etc. Its actually in the process of being open sourced now at http://www.labnet.ca/ http://www.labnet.ca/ (Its actually a pretty incredible system I recommend anyone who is interested in this type of stuff to check it out). Because of this I worked with some awesome sysadmins and unix/linux gurus so even though they were a bit rusty, I had enough core systems admin skills to have a good intuition about how to solve most of the problems I have normally. When I run into roadblocks I know some awesome sysadmins that I can hit up to get me over the hump.
dedward 16y ago
Why not work with him to build an automated deployment system? Get the group to think a bit bigger - consider deployment (and possible rollback) a function that is an integral part of the overall system. Get the sysadmin working on system stuff and automated provisioning tools so environments can be replicated and performance tools, monitoring, etc - and have the developers understand that they are building something that has to be deployed by this tool. The decision as to who gets to push the "go" button is one the group can make - maybe it needs signoff by the sysadmin, maybe it can be overridden with a warning if necessary - etc. These days it's cheap, especially in linux land, to manage and deploy proper development, testing, and production servers with automated tools -and time is better invested generally in working on those tools than manually provisioning things. It's a bit more work at first, but pays off hugely farly quickly.

by nkassis 16y ago

mgrouchy 16y ago

Chances are when you work on a very small team you probably don't have a sysadmin at all. At the startup I work at, I do both and the more I work without a sysadmin the more I appreciate the work they do! When we do have a dedicated sysadmin, at the very least he will be very appreciated by me, because I know he will be improving all the stuff I have done out of sysadmin ignorance.

sophacles 16y ago
I think it is extremely important to have at least one developer who has been a sysadmin in the past. One of my closest colleagues started his career as a sysadmin. At first I was a bit distrustful because he didn't have a lot of "real experience" or "education". But as I got to know him, I realized his sysadmin "spidey sense" was a godsend. He has a knack for knowing when things that should just work will in fact fall over. He also has a lot of deep OS and platform knowledge, so frequently when we would want to throw piles of code at something, he would suggest and OS tweak or similar to get the same end result. So yeah, sysadmins on all development teams from the get-go are now a must in my book.
- mgrouchy 16y ago
  Yeah, I was never a sysadmin, but for 8 months in my university days, I worked as a systems programmer for the CS Department at my university. I worked on stuff that automated system deployments, backups, imaging, etc. Its actually in the process of being open sourced now at http://www.labnet.ca/ http://www.labnet.ca/ (Its actually a pretty incredible system I recommend anyone who is interested in this type of stuff to check it out). Because of this I worked with some awesome sysadmins and unix/linux gurus so even though they were a bit rusty, I had enough core systems admin skills to have a good intuition about how to solve most of the problems I have normally. When I run into roadblocks I know some awesome sysadmins that I can hit up to get me over the hump.

dedward 16y ago

Why not work with him to build an automated deployment system? Get the group to think a bit bigger - consider deployment (and possible rollback) a function that is an integral part of the overall system. Get the sysadmin working on system stuff and automated provisioning tools so environments can be replicated and performance tools, monitoring, etc - and have the developers understand that they are building something that has to be deployed by this tool. The decision as to who gets to push the "go" button is one the group can make - maybe it needs signoff by the sysadmin, maybe it can be overridden with a warning if necessary - etc. These days it's cheap, especially in linux land, to manage and deploy proper development, testing, and production servers with automated tools -and time is better invested generally in working on those tools than manually provisioning things. It's a bit more work at first, but pays off hugely farly quickly.