LISA is the large installation systems administration conference
put on by Usenix. The conference has an HTTP web-site at
https://www.Usenix.org/conference/lisa19

I'm excited to get to attend this conference this year.  I had been
wanting to go for a number of  years, but it's expensive. After
about six months of bugging work to pay for me to go to a conference,
and get some education they agreed.  When I submitted my proposal
and showed the cost they balked at first. It was only when some
manager at a higher level started talking about sending his people
to a large expensive conference that I got any traction. I've found
that this is the way that it works in corporate world.  The lower
level managers all live in some kind of fear and they don't want
to rock the boat. Waiting for the next opportunity to get maybe
some more money or prestige.  I don't understand this kind of
motivation.

That's not the point of this post though. This post is about setting
forward the game plan for the Portland trip and my time at the
conference. The conference is Monday the 28th of October through
Wednesday. I am flying out on Sunday and flying back on Thursday.
I didn't leave alot of time for sight seeing because it is a business
trip. This doesn't mean it'll be boring.

Updates: I'll post updates on mastodon on my regular account using
the hash-tag #LISA19 @mnw@mastodon.sdf.org

Schedule: There are talks, then a social event, and then lightning
talks or Birds of a Feather type events.  Here's my plan so far.

Monday: Opening keynotes, there isn't anything else to check out.
If I oversleep or something I won't miss much content here I think.
They have two keynotes at the beginning and end which I think is
weird. Keynotes I figured would be like keystones and you really
only use one keystone per arch, but who am I. I am very excited
for the container Operators Manual key note talk.  It's the hot
stuff lately and I need to get up to speed. First full talk is
about Finding Security Shangri-La.  I hope that it's got detail
and isn't one of those fluffy pieces that some people seem to love.
At 1100 is a talk about aligning teams to share in monitoring.  My
current work team kind of just abandoned monitoring and depends on
me :'( so fingers crossed I find out how to get everyone on board.
Then we have lunch, it's unclear if there is something being provided
or not.  The first session after lunch looks like I'm going to
attend the Troubleshooting Linux lab session.  We'll see how it
goes. I'm anxious about this being either too advanced or beginner
level.  Mastering ZSH is after that and is something I am excited
about.  ZSH is the new default shell in macOS and I suspect I'll
have to start supporting it in some capacity.  The BOF session for
this day has two that I'm interested in one is about being assertive,
and the other is with Red Hat and fedora people.  I think it depends
on how full the room is.

Tuesday: Start with a puppet talk, then gitops in a hybrid cloud
environment. These hopefully give me a bit of needed background on
the infrastructure plans we are trying to lay out.  There is a talk
I'm interested in personally about Ops on the edge of democracy.
Lunch time! Then for the afternoon is Kubernetes the very hard way,
this is a big talk for my business justification at work. Next talk
is really a hard call there is a talk about DDOS's that I think is
going to be rudimentary, but may be educational and give me some
data I can share with manager types, but at the same time is a talk
about the challenges of using open source software for your
infrastructure which is totally what we are facing too. It's a hard
call.  My teammates will love me if I bring back a solution proposed
in this next talk it's an approach for handling unexpected work.
Next is hard call number two. There is a talk about a method to
integrate your database into a continuous deployment pipeline versus
the talk about distributed systems admin teams, and how to grow
those teams. My job description would be the Database thing, but
my reality on the ground is building teams and doing the manager
work that managers wont do for some reason.  Lightning talks round
out the night. I might just go drink at a brew pub or check out
some comedy. I didn't expect the conference to have stuff to do
from 7am to 2200 it's wild.

Wednesday: This is a bit simpler day today.  The hard choice is do
we start the day with one about self-care very important, or
containerizing your monolith a very real problem we are facing at
work.  How to have an operational incident is up next this is cool
because we don't have them often at work, but I'd like to have some
cool documents ready for when they happen.  Our next challenge is
the choice of learning about software testing or vulnerability
scanning.  The scanning talk is an intro which might be my speed,
but the actual utility of it is questionable.  The talk before
lunch is about writing more engaging post mortems. This is a document
that I'm not familiar with writing and would really love some help
with.  After lunch is some soft skill training. There's how to
advance and level up your soft skills, I think I need this to
convince my managers they aren't doing their job really. Then
there's a talk called failure at Scale and how blameless incidents
are more productive. At least I think.

So that's the plan right now. I'm going to have a review post a
day and then a post for each talk if I manage to take notes and
have something to say about it.  I am not sure I remember how to
link to other gopher posts so there may not be a table of contents
or links between documents.

Thanks for reading!

-mnw