Weekly quickTIP
Rolling Through IT Blogs
A popular meme ask how you got your start as an IT admin.
- By Greg Shields
- 06/30/2008
So I recognize that this isn't exactly a quickTIP this week, but it is an exciting little bit of viral communication spreading across the IT blogosphere for the last couple of weeks. The Scripting/Sysadmin Meme more closely resembles a "chain letter for bloggers" started originally by Steve Murawski at the
Mind of Root blog site on June 10th.
According to Steve, a meme "consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." The Mind of Root's meme arrives as a list of questions that probes the reader to divulge their first computer, the first script they wrote and their first professional job as a systems administrator, among other questions. The idea, much like a chain letter but posted instead to blogs around the Internet, is for popular bloggers to answer the questions and then "call out" others to do the same.
In the following weeks IT bloggers everywhere have called each other out to learn more about the other's beginnings in IT as well as advice that they would share with new systems administrators. The result is a distributed compilation of blogger history, the compilation of which tells a compelling tale about how people started into the world of IT.
If you search down even a few of these links, you'll find that many stories are similar. Apple II computers, early UNIX machines and great tales of early starts in IT make for an afternoon's slow reading.
The easiest way to locate many of these is to search for "scripting sysadmin meme" through your favorite Web search tool. Or, take a look at a few names you'll recognize below:
First, my own: http://concentratedtech.com/content/index.php/2008/06/24/
scriptingsysadmin-meme-gregs-turn/
Don Jones: http://concentratedtech.com/content/index.php/2008/06/24/
scriptingsysadmin-meme/
Jeff Hicks:
http://blog.sapien.com/index.php/2008/06/18/scriptingsysadmin-meme/
http://sdmsoftware.com/blog/2008/06/scriptingsysadmin_meme.html
Richard Siddaway: http://richardsiddaway.spaces.live.com/blog/
cns!43CFA46A74CF3E96!1417.entry
Marc van Orsouw: http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/
2008/06/17/scripting-sysadmin-meme.aspx
If you see more, add them to the comments field in this article. Keep the chain going!
About the Author
Greg Shields is Author Evangelist with PluralSight, and is a globally-recognized expert on systems management, virtualization, and cloud technologies. A multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert, and Citrix CTP awards, Greg is a contributing editor for Redmond Magazine and Virtualization Review Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at IT conferences worldwide. Reach him on Twitter at @concentratedgreg.