Chastity Blackwell took her first job as a system administrator in 1999 just to pay the bills until she could get a writing job. After 12 years working in infrastructure operations at the University of Illinois, she decided this might actually be a career, and was lured out to the Bay Area to work for a startup. She survived a yearlong stint as a manager before recently returning to the front lines as a Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp.
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