If you detected a hint of apprehension in my last post you weren’t mislead. So let the record be set straight – SysAdmin Day 2010 was a blast. My feeling toward the SysAdmin meet up is similar to the feeling after having installed a program upgrade for a user and having it be accepted with open arms and minimal follow-up support. Especially when in the back of your mind you were expecting the follow-up to be an afternoon of “Well the old program did x, y, and z like a, b, and c” with a few “Are you sure you can’t leave the old program installed?” mixed in for cheer. Dilbert sums up an accurate representation in the following clip of such a situation.

But I digress, SysAdmin Day was awesome on so many levels. First, it was encouraging to meet such a diverse group of admins  from departmental IT techies to gurus at Google and Etsy. Regardless of system size and complexity everyone was open to talking shop or kicking back and meeting new people. There were numerous people from all over the world who attended the meetup because they were in the city for DebConf (I had no idea Perl was still so, alive! *wink*). Second, it helped foster the desire to give back to the community and made me just a little more thankful for some of the open source projects I’ve come to love and depend on. Last, well, I may not frequent bars but The Ginger Man was great (a large part due to the company). My only regret was not being able to hear better above the crowd noise and having only a couple short hours to know a bit more about my fellow IT workers.

It’s Friday night and in just under 2 hours I’ll be at the Standalone Sysadmin’s SysAdmin Meetup in NYC. Just to prove I’m conforming to the east coast and being proud of my geek roots this entry is being typed up from a Starbucks near NY Penn Station. It’s a long way from where I was 2 years ago at this time and I feel like a little fish in a big pond… one that has lots of concrete, pigeons, and other fish just trying to make their own way.