Category Archives: Systems Administration

Landing the dream job – I went and DID THE THING!

As many of you may be aware, I was recently lucky enough to snag what I consider to be my ultimate dream job – as of 20th May 2019, I started working for Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) in Identity and Security. When I say dream job, I truly mean it. It’s probably been my goal, for at… Read more »

Careful, your contempt culture is showing…

I recently (I say recently…about 6 weeks ago…getting new blog posts out takes a while these days!) came across a tweet from someone I used to follow (who I’m now blocked by) that they thought was utterly hilarious: I, however, did not. I really really hate this kind of joke. And I’m probably more sensitive to it than most. I’ve… Read more »

Women’s stories from the tech trenches – and how *YOU* can help!

(Warning: this is post is LONG!) I gave a talk with this exact title at Ignite the Tour in Sydney, on 14th February 2019. It was a 15 minute lightning talk, and I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to get through – but something is certainly better than nothing! So I then submitted it as a talk… Read more »

The two words an IT admin should *never* utter…

It’s mid-afternoon. The phone is silent. The job queue is pretty empty. You’ve done the project work you wanted to get done for today. “Jeez it’s quiet!” Don’t ever…EVER…say this. All you are doing is risking Murphy’s Law to come along and whack you up the back of the head with an unexpected hardware failure, or a VIP who’s managed… Read more »

Bring on 2019!

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…2018 (and, truth be told, 2017) was pretty full-on and hectic for me. Being on maternity leave, watching a tiny human continue to grow into the adorable (troublesome!) gremlin toddler she is now, navigating my return to work, going back part-time, balancing work and home… It’s been a fun time. Stressful as all hell, but fun nonetheless! And I haven’t… Read more »

“Explain Yourself!” – Explaining What We Do, While Trying to Keep Everyone Happy

This post contains all the material that I used in my Ignite Australia 2017 Hack@Ignite talk (and I did an interview about it as well!). I received a few requests to either post this online or for myself to give this talk to helpdesks/service desks. If you want to use this yourself, I have absolutely no issues with that –… Read more »

The ethics and morals of operations – how much access is *too* much?

A discussion in 2016 on Twitter & in /r/sysadmin made me pose this question: “How much access do you consider is too much? Is there such a thing as too much access? How much access is actually needed to do our jobs?” Not only that, but a few situations recently have given rise to the fact that a number of… Read more »

I’m now an MVP! How cool is that?!

So Sunday morning of a the long weekend just gone… I wake up, grab my phone, and do the usual – have a quick glance at Twitter notifications, ignore the Facebook notifications and then open my email. And there it was. The email I’d totally forgotten I was waiting for: “Congratulations 2016 Microsoft MVP!” ZOMG! I’ve been awarded an MVP… Read more »

IT Pros – we need to take better care of ourselves!

Earlier this year I became aware of a movement within the Ops community – HumanOps.com This is something I’m fairly passionate about. Those of us who keep the lights on, keep the computers going, keep the servers whirring, keep the network lights blinking…we’re not machines. We’re only human. We are fallible. We make mistakes and hopefully we admit to them! We… Read more »