I’m packing for Boston and will be there next week for LISA11. This will be my second year as part of the LISA blogging team, and after how much I enjoyed LISA last year in San Jose I wouldn’t miss this one even if it is on the other side of the country. I’ve tried to finish as much work as possible to be able to focus on the conference but for various reasons of course this was not quite possible, and actually during the first days I will even be on call… In anycase, I’m sure this is going to be a great week full of awesomeness. I will be blogging for the USENIX blog every day, so be sure to follow that for fresh articles from me and the other memebers of our team (Ben, Rikki and Matt).

If you are going to LISA11 in Boston next week, we should definitely meetup. Contact me on twitter or email.

One of the advantages of being a member of the LISA11 Blog Team is that I was able to talk and interview this year program co-chairs: Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes. This was a great honor for me especially since I’ve been a big fan of Tom’s work for many years. The full article is available on the USENIX blog: “Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes Interview”

Also my colleagues from the LISA11 blogging team (Ben, Rikki and Matt) have done some very interesting interviews with some key people from LISA11 to get you prepared for the event. Check out the USENIX blog for more from us in the next week.

Here is also a quick intro of our team: “LISA11 Next Week – Meet your blog team!“

This week I’ll be attending LISA10 in San Jose. I’ve always wanted to go to LISA, and the fact that it was so close to our location here in San Jose made it much easier. This is going to be a full week, but hopefully fun and interesting. I’ll be part of the USENIX blogging team, meaning I’ll have to be extra focused in order to be able to take good notes and prepare at least one blog post per day. These articles will be posted on the USENIX blog, where you can find articles from other colleges in our team (Matt, Ben and Matthew), and I highly recommend to check it out for updates regularly. I will link in this post all the articles I have written during this week in case you want to follow this up.

If you are in the area and want to meetup ping me on twitter or email.

Real-World Configuration Management Workshop: Sunday I’ve attended all day the CM workshop; this was an interesting workshop, where different people shared their experiences and pains in configuration management.

Time Management for System Administrators: Monday I attended  Tom Limoncelli’s tutorial on time management for system administrators. Very educational and inspiring. I will definitely revisit his book as its been a while since I’ve read it. As takeaways, I have at least 2-3 ideas that I’m really looking forward to implement and see how I can use them to improve my productivity.

OpsCamp: Tuesday I went to OpsCamp Silicon Valley - San Jose co-located with LISA10, and even if it was sponsored by LISA this was a standalone event. It was definitely a smaller event than expected (because of this we had only one round of sessions with everyone in the same room), but it was definitely interesting and I’ve met some very smart people with a lot of experience in operations and building high performance infrastructures.

Postfix: Past, Present, and Future: Wednesday started with the opening remarks by the program chair Rudi van Drunen, followed by the opening keynote by Tony Cass from CERN. Amazing stuff; if you have the chance to see the video do that . Afterwards, in the afternoon I went to the invited talks by Dinah McNutt, Google: “The 10 Commandments of Release Engineering” and Wietse Venema on “Postfix: Past, Present, and Future”. It was amazing to be able to meet in person and chat with the author of postfix, a program that I’ve been using for many years.

Being part of the LISA’10 Blog Team, I was lucky to be able to interview Rudi van Drunen, this year program chair. This was a great discussion where I got an idea on what goes behind the scenes when putting on such a big event as LISA’10. The article with the full interview is available on the USENIX Blog: “What can we expect from LISA’10?”

Also, my colleges from the LISA’10 blogging team, have done some very interesting interviews with Anne Dickison about marketing LISA’10 (by Ben Cotton) and Alan Clegg about his DNSSEC tutorial (by Matt Simmons).

As Matt Simmons announced on his blog, I’ll be one of the members of the LISA2010 blogging team. I’m really excited to be part of such a great team with Matt, Matthew and Ben, and looking forward for a great event. We will be blogging and sharing things we find interesting at LISA on the USENIX blog, that you should definitely bookmark it in case you don’t have it already. If you will be at LISA2010 definitely come say hi; I’d love to meetup and chat.

Matt’s full announcement on the USENIX blog: Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team