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Advent of Sysadmin 2025

sadservers.com

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Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#111
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roll 2d6, sum result. Your CI migration target is: 2. migrate secret manager. Roll again 3. cloud build 4. gocd 5. jenkins 6. gitlab 7. github actions 8. bamboo 9. codepipeline 10. buildbot 11. team foundation server 12. migrate version control. Roll again

somehow i am really liking the kind of people that comment in the comment sections of sysadmin posts. i wonder what personality type this is

[deleted]

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#113
We use Sad Servers for evaluating candidates for DevOps/SRE roles and it's phenomenal.

Feedback from candidates is that they find it a bit stressful during the actual interview but love the approach once it's completed.

The interview option also makes it trivial to just send to a candidate via Zoom chat, ask them to share their screen and "just works".

Happy to answer questions folks may have about how we use it.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#114
post #45
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bugs happen to all of us. whats your better solution - gitlab?

Roll 2d6, sum result. Your CI migration target is: 2. migrate secret manager. Roll again 3. cloud build 4. gocd 5. jenkins 6. gitlab 7. github actions 8. bamboo 9. codepipeline 10. buildbot 11. team foundation server 12. migrate version control. Roll again

Bump up to 2d10 and add:

    - Travis
    - CircleCI
    - Drone/Woodpecker
    - Tekton Pipelines
    - TeamCity
    - Zuul
    - Buildkite
    - Agola

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#115
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aren't they canonically 12? 12 days of christmas etc

No, Advent is the liturgical season preceding Christmas, beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas (which is also the Sunday nearest November 30), it is a period of at least three weeks and one day (the shortest period that can start on a Sunday and include four Sundays.) The 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas and end on January 5, the eve of the Feast of Epiphany. 12-day advent calendars are a fairly recent…

In the Orthodox Church advent starts on November 15th and continues until December 24th.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in love with its insistence on recreating the container from scratch every step of the pipeline, among a bundle of other irksome quirks. There are certainly worse choices, though.

Opposite of Jenkins where you have shared workspaces and have to manually ensure workspace is clean or suffer from reproducibility issues with tainted workspaces.

It's up to you whether you have a shared workspace or not. My machines/pods are destroyed and recreated after each job, so I never had this issue.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#117

We use Sad Servers for evaluating candidates for DevOps/SRE roles and it's phenomenal. Feedback from candidates is that they find it a bit stressful during the actual interview but love the approach once it's completed. The interview option also makes it trivial to just send to a candidate via Zoom chat, ask them to share their screen and "just works". Happy to answer questions folks may have about how we use it.

This is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing.

Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#118

We use Sad Servers for evaluating candidates for DevOps/SRE roles and it's phenomenal. Feedback from candidates is that they find it a bit stressful during the actual interview but love the approach once it's completed. The interview option also makes it trivial to just send to a candidate via Zoom chat, ask them to share their screen and "just works". Happy to answer questions folks may have about how we use it.

This is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing. Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.

Sad Servers is great for trying out how to fix scenarios that you would probably run into while working in the real world.

If you are looking into more of the "people" side of things, I would HIGHLY recommend Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss [0]. A big part of being a team lead and/or working at a larger firm is understanding where people are coming from and then convincing them that your solution is "win/win". The book is great at highlighting multiple different tactics to do that.

Turn the Ship Around [1] is also great at giving examples of how to "change organizations in place". If you end up at larger firms, there will be a LOT of legacy infra and processes that you may want to improve. Marquet gives excellent examples of how to change things WHILE ALSO getting buy in from the team.

0 - https://amzn.to/48dBSn2

1 - https://amzn.to/4pfL2Wb

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing. Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.

Sad Servers is great for trying out how to fix scenarios that you would probably run into while working in the real world. If you are looking into more of the "people" side of things, I would HIGHLY recommend Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss [0]. A big part of being a team lead and/or working at a larger firm is understanding where people are coming from and then convincing them that your solution is "win/win…

I actually read "Never Split the Difference" a couple years ago! Initially just to prepare for a salary negotiation but I found it to be very useful in many other ways. Your second recommendation is also appropriate: I had a ton of latitude to build and configure whatever hardware was needed to solve $BUSINESS-PROBLEM (which was often very exciting) but it was done in a bit of a vacuum without any mentorship. Adapting to a more rigorous/larger/slower working environment is exactly what I need to do.

Great suggestions and thanks for taking the time to respond :)

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#120
post #114
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roll 2d6, sum result. Your CI migration target is: 2. migrate secret manager. Roll again 3. cloud build 4. gocd 5. jenkins 6. gitlab 7. github actions 8. bamboo 9. codepipeline 10. buildbot 11. team foundation server 12. migrate version control. Roll again

Bump up to 2d10 and add: - Travis - CircleCI - Drone/Woodpecker - Tekton Pipelines - TeamCity - Zuul - Buildkite - Agola

IBM ClearCase anyone? Noone? I AM old
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