Author Archives: girlgerms

Spawning a child process – from development to production!

      Hands free mum! Sitting at my PC with bub 🙂   A post shared by Jess Dodson (@jess_girlgerms) on Aug 26, 2017 at 8:58pm PDT A warning – this post isn’t going to be technical at all (despite the title!). It’s going to be quite confronting because it’ll go into (somewhat) gory details around pregnancy, birth and… Read more »

Seriously slack…and seriously sorry!

Hi – just a blanket apology for being completely slack and not doing a new blog post in a while (even though I have about 20 drafts!) and not keeping up to date on here. Just looked at it and have seen it’s been nearly THREE MONTHS. That’s just ridiculous. I’m super sorry. No excuses, just a few reasons why… 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 »

The shitstorm that is rheumatoid arthritis

(DISCLAIMER – If you are an anti-vax wacko who wants to try and sell the benefits of ‘clean living’ and ‘removing toxins’, please fuck off. Do not comment. Your comment will not be approved. It will be ignored. It will be trashed. I’m not interested in what your Googling told you, or your conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical companies, or the… Read more »

This is what a handover should look like

So I was recently thrust back into my team leader’s (TL) position again – albeit for a much shorter time for this stint, only three weeks. My previous stint was for just over 6 weeks last year…can tell you now, I much prefer the shorter stints!  One of the biggest issues I have with being put in these kinds of roles… 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 »

Ownership vs. Responsibility – the fine line of a sysadmin

One of the biggest issues I’m noticing in the industry is that we’re still seeing sysadmins taking “ownership” of certain things. For example, I’ll hear people talking about “my” servers or “my” service or “my” tickets. I know I’ve been guilty of this before (I’ve referred to the DC’s at work as “my DC’s” many many times) but I’m trying to… Read more »