3 ms·

You don't need to be a developer to know system administration. Hell, it used to be a given, but the barrier to entry has diminished significantly with the adve

You don't need to be a developer to know system administration. Hell, it used to be a given, but the barrier to entry has diminished significantly with the advent of the GUI and now consumer electronics. I agree with the OP. It's important to learn system administration before programming. Know your environment. Writing markup is fine and will help you understand what's going on when you view page source, but it's hardly the enlightenment you make it out to be.

bradleyland 13y ago
"...but it's hardly the enlightenment you make it out to be." I really can't understand how anyone who does sysadmin work and any amount of programming can say this. My mastery of computers grew organically. I started out with "power user" stuff. Namely, tweaking my computing environment (Windows, at the time) to my liking. As I tweaked, I inevitably broke things, which meant I had to learn to fix them. It wasn't long before I realized that being able to fix computers when something goes wrong was a valuable skill, so I developed that skill further. I had a friend who wrote simple programs in VisualBasic from around the time that Windows 3.1 came out. He wrote a baseball card database application that we both used to catalog our collections. From that, I understood the utility of programming as a means to solve problems that were imporant to me, but I was too consumed with other things. It wasn't until the internet gained popularity that I started to write programs. What I'm getting at is that I was late to the game. I was in to computers for a long time before I had much interest in programming. My skills as a sysadmin were pretty decent to begin with, but I became a troubleshooting superman as my programming skills developed. It literally changed my entire perspective, and even my methodology, when troubleshooting. I could read a stack trace! I could load up dump files, import symbols, and dig around to find the offending file, which would lead me to a specific application or a device. Even at a very basic level, learning to program taught me a tremendous amount about how software works. Those insights led me down the correct paths when working as a sysadmin. I began to understand not just what to do, but why.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  I was specifically referring to markup. Sorry if you misunderstood me.

bradleyland 13y ago

"...but it's hardly the enlightenment you make it out to be." I really can't understand how anyone who does sysadmin work and any amount of programming can say this. My mastery of computers grew organically. I started out with "power user" stuff. Namely, tweaking my computing environment (Windows, at the time) to my liking. As I tweaked, I inevitably broke things, which meant I had to learn to fix them. It wasn't long before I realized that being able to fix computers when something goes wrong was a valuable skill, so I developed that skill further. I had a friend who wrote simple programs in VisualBasic from around the time that Windows 3.1 came out. He wrote a baseball card database application that we both used to catalog our collections. From that, I understood the utility of programming as a means to solve problems that were imporant to me, but I was too consumed with other things. It wasn't until the internet gained popularity that I started to write programs. What I'm getting at is that I was late to the game. I was in to computers for a long time before I had much interest in programming. My skills as a sysadmin were pretty decent to begin with, but I became a troubleshooting superman as my programming skills developed. It literally changed my entire perspective, and even my methodology, when troubleshooting. I could read a stack trace! I could load up dump files, import symbols, and dig around to find the offending file, which would lead me to a specific application or a device. Even at a very basic level, learning to program taught me a tremendous amount about how software works. Those insights led me down the correct paths when working as a sysadmin. I began to understand not just what to do, but why.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
I was specifically referring to markup. Sorry if you misunderstood me.