I have not been very good about keeping up with my weekly reviews. I will try and be better about updating them in the future. I think they are actually really useful for focusing my career objectives.
Over the last few weeks I have found myself focusing more and more on the job of being a sysadmin, rather than focusing on the technology that I am working with. At first, when I started this job, I was really focused on learning the technologies. There was a massive learning curve, there were just so many things that I had never worked with before. And none of them worked properly. However, over the last few months, I have slowly made progress with these things. I have developed an understanding of the core technologies, networking, servers, etc and through trial and error have managed to move things onto a more stable footing.
So now I have some time and space to actually consider what the job entails when I am not continually fighting fires. A while ago I joined the Sysadmin subreddit. This has proven to be a super resource. The users on there have put a lot of effort in to collating resources to help people to develop as a sysadmin, particularly at the start of your career.
One resources I have found particularly useful (recommended by the sysadmin subreddit) is the book ‘The Practise of System and Network Administration’. I bought a used copy and have found it to be an incredibly useful reference.
One of the questions that I have been going around on his how and what to document. One of the key pieces of advise that keeps being handed out is to document everything. But having landed in this role without ever having someone to learn from I didn’t really understand what good documentation would look like. Consequently, I was sort of frozen by indecision and hadn’t really made any progress on building up a body of documentation. I had done some research on the subject online but hadn’t really found anything particularly useful for someone like me who didn’t really even know where to start.
So when my copy of the book arrived in the post, the first thing I did was delve into the chapter on documentation and it gave me sufficient structure to begin creating the documentation that I had been spinning my wheels on for some time.
Fast forward a few weeks and I have my regular catch up with my line manager (not technical) and show him the documentation I had been working on and he was super impressed. So I can safely say that the advice on documenting is not only useful for me and whoever takes on the role after me, but also helps to showcase the work I have been doing to people in the organisation who don’t have the same technical understanding.
So yeah. Document everything.
