SeaGL 2026

Freedom Is Elemental

Our virtual conference space is open! Whether you're attending in-person or online, come chat with fellow attendees and get excited for keynotes, sessions, social events and more!

As always, SeaGL is free to attend and registration is not required.

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Advice on becoming a sysadmin: A talk for my former self

SeaGL 2015

“It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future” - So is Attribution

Being a sysadmin is a career path which can be fun, lucrative and one of the best ways to get paid to work with and on open source software. In this presentation I share some of the mistakes I made so you don’t need to repeat them. Why not make new and interesting mistakes?

It is a confusing time to enter this field. Why not be a DevOps instead of a Sysadmin? What is this Site Reliability Engineer thing? What if the whole world goes NoOps? Do I really have to carry a pager? I’ll provide some answers, hints and raw speculation.

Presenters

Paul English

Paul English, Vaisala Inc, Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild, League of Professional System Administrators, Seattle Privacy Coalition, Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays, Emerald Onion Project

Paul English is President of the Seattle Area System Administrator’s Guild, Board Member for the League of Professional System Administrators, and multi-year organizer of the Cascadia IT Conference. Paul also works as a system administrator and manager at Vaisala Inc, creating weather forecasts for wind, solar and hydro power.