Thank you again @TheKinrar for Mastodon.xyz! You fixed that cert issue right quick. ๐
Sysadmin work tends to be invisible and thankless - until something breaks.
Having been in their shoes most of my career, I try to resist the natural urge to get annoyed and complain when things break. Especially if it's rare and they get fixed quickly.
Don't judge work only by errors and mistakes - it's more fair to consider how well (or poorly) problems are handled.
Also consider: in Mastodon-land, often the admin work is a hobby. If it hobbies stop being fun, people find other hobbies...
@superruserr Nice! That was really helpful of you.
It's often the nature of admin work that if you don't tell people what you are doing, they have no idea. But being a good admin and being good at (justified) self promotion is a rare combination.
@HerraBRE @superruserr For me, it's always been important to be able to talk or write about what I'm doing to keep myself motivated. That's a lot easier now that we have an internal social network platform in the company - posting somewhere public always means removing information or generalizing on what I've actually been doing, and writing develops into an additional job instead of a vent.
(I'm aware that putting some effort into it would certainly be more useful to others... Yeah well...)
@HerraBRE Yes! Ppl only notice when things break, but you were doing wonderfully the rest of the year! :-) and no one cared...
@HerraBRE I used to call it โWYSINWYGโ (โWhat you see is not what you getโ), because that was pretty much what my job was like. If you actually noticed my work I probably had a bad day.
Pro-tip: Pick a Mastodon host where the admin is in the same time zone as you. (Modulo your sleep schedule.)
This increases the odds downtime will mostly occur while you sleep. ๐
@HerraBRE That's a good insight, but I"m staying in .de with scroom :-)
I made an account on mastodon.social when I didn't now what Mastodon was all about
Now, if account migration was available, I would move my account on some new instances.
I'd stay a few months on queer.party, a few months on functional.cafe and then I'd explore a few more
Like I did with Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora
But until account migration is not available, I won't
I donate to mastodon.social through liberapay, though !
@catonano Yes, absolutely. Account migration really is a prerequisite for "choose an instance you like."
Until migration is easy and seamless, whenever the only solution to a problem is "choose a better instance", what people are really saying is "this problem has no good solution."
That includes my toot! I just thought the time zone thing was a funny realization.
@HerraBRE Unfortunately there are very few instances in South-East Asia. Also, I'm very happy with @mdallastella as an instance admin. :-)
@HerraBRE This is SO true. No one notices when you do a good job in IT.
@HerraBRE I thought of an idea to add some public visibility to a colleague who is a sysadmin, so I created an 'initial' blog post about some excellent recent work he did and he later polished it off (a lot of it off with more detail) and I later published under his name. Gave him some visibility in the public company site.