David N. Blank-Edelman

LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.

David is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O'Reilly book Automating System Administration with Perl.

David has spent the last 27+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of the LISA '05 conference and one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs. David is also the recipient of the 2009 SAGE Outstanding Achievement award and is honored to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors.

Linked Presentation: 
Build a Sysadmin Sandbox