Introducing the LISA14 Blog Team

We've already touched on some really notable changes in this year's LISA program. Over the next few weeks, our diverse team of bloggers will be bringing you more details about the changes to the program, the people who drove the changes in the various planning committees, and the current state of the conference in general.

From the experienced sysadmin and LISA veteran to the operations engineer making her first LISA appearance, and everything in between, the blog team will bring you different perspectives on the conferences based on different backgrounds, experience levels, and interests. We'll have interviews with some of the people who have worked hard over the past year to make LISA the best conference it can be.

Coordinating the blogging team is Saint Aardvark the Carpeted, Hugh Brown. Hugh is a veteran LISA attendee, having first attended in Washington, D.C. in 2006. Hugh is particularly excited to geek out on space robots at this year's keynote, "Robots in Space, Politics on Earth: Behind the Scenes on NASA's Robotic Spacecraft Missions." He's also looking to sharpen his software engineering skills at H. Wade Minter's "'You Code Like a Sysadmin'—Software Development for the Non-Developer."

Katherine Daniels, a self described "Sparkly DevOps Princess" and beer enthusiast, is experiencing LISA for the first time this year. Although relatively new to the field, she's clearly been around long enough to know some of the important priorities that many in the LISA community can relate to: The talks she's most looking forward to are Tom Limoncelli's "How To Not Get Paged" and Lars Lehtonen's invited talk on "Burnout and ops."

Mark Lamourine will also be writing. He's a book reviewer for ;login:, so many of you will already be familiar with his work. Having worked as a sysadmin since 1986 and first attending LISA in 1993, Mark could be considered would have graybeard of the group, except he chose to avoid that distinction by shaving the beard. Expect to see Mark at several events in the Workshops program. As he puts it, the workshops are great because they "give me the chance to meet people who are both leading and learning. I can contribute and receive."

Last year's blog team lead, Matt Simmons, will be rejoining us again this year, both as a writer and to share some of his experience with the rest of us. Matt's been working as a sysadmin since 2001 and first attended LISA in 2009. Matt has been around long enough to recognize that we've got all the data we could ask for, but don't always do a good job understanding what it can tell us, so he's really looking forward to the "Statistics for Ops: Making Sense Out of Data" training session. He's also helping behind the scenes at LISA as a coordinator for the Invited Talks and Tutorials tracks.

Rounding out the group is yours truly, Noah Meyerhans. I've worked in sysadmin and related fields since 2000, and first attended LISA that same year. It's been five years since I attended, so I'm particularly excited to get a taste of what's new in the updated program this year. On a never ending quest to get the most out of my systems, I'm particularly looking forward to Ted Ts'o present "Linux Performance Tuning" and Dieter Plaetinck's "Rethinking Metrics: Metrics 2.0" invited talk.

And now that I've introduced everyone, what can you look forward to next? Well, Katherine Daniels will be telling us why she's going to LISA for the first time. If you're wondering why LISA's such a big deal, she'll fill you in -- and if you're an old-timer, you'll be reminded of ways to persuade your junior colleagues to give LISA a try.