I specialize in two fields: system administration and programming. I started my IT career in software development, working on real-time process-control systems. But since operating systems are just specialized real-time process control environments - I can do system administration too!

My thing is to help people help themselves. I like the idea of working myself out of a job.

Unquestionably my niche area in system administration is automation. Good programs (a.k.a. scripts) can relieve the system administrator of many repetitive - not to mention monotonous (boring) tasks. Fortunately for me, system administration and programming share many skills. All the debugging and troubleshooting time spent in developing software, gives you great insight and an arsenal of tricks and short-cuts to use when you have to perform these same tasks on a system level.

I have been around the block a couple of times - from running a small clinical imaging lab with an eclectic mix of servers, to being on a team of ten administrators, in a huge enterprise setting, with a very homogenous and rapidly expanding, server pool.

Because I really do like programming, I have kept a development assignment in the mix. There is nothing like writing Layer 3 (Network layer) code to help you really understand a protocol and the subtleties of it's error messages.

Signed
Nix Nooi

Nix ( *nix - many flavours of unix like operating systems) Nooi (girl)