Meetings and Events

Building Better Tools, Jan Schaumann
2009-06-03 @ 19:45 EDT (23:45 UTC) - Suspenders Bar and Restaurant

Every System Administrator has his or her own set of tools, programs and scripts; within every organization, every team of engineers has theirs. This means that a lot of the software used to maintain the infrastructure around the internet is written by people who are not (primarily) software developers. This talk tries to explain how these people can build better tools: tools that scale well, programs that can easily be extended, systems that behave well.

While not specific to BSD systems in general and completely programming language agnostic, this talk focuses on a number of principles, guidelines and concepts that should apply to virtually any system administrators or engineers daily routine.

Jan Schaumann is a Systems Architect at Yahoo!, a nice place to stay on the internet, where he designs and maintains infrastructure solutions servicing over half a billion people each and every day. Jan holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also one of the developers of the NetBSD operating system, where, amongst other things, he manages the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code program.

Jan enjoys life with his wife and daughter in New York City. He can be reached at jschauma@netmeister.org.