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Well, well, well….look who has been slacking off on the website!

Sorry about that!

I suppose I am pleased that there’s nothing to report as of late, which means that things have been going smoothly, but it is indicative of where I’ve been mentally these days.

I have reached a bit of a professional plateau at the moment, I suppose. I’ve got a decent job as an IT sysadmin (systems administrator), and it’s fine…and while I don’t like the word ‘fine,’ I think in this case, ‘fine’ is the word.

I have:

• settled into the role and can easily deal with day-to-day issues
• established easy and comfortable relationships with management
• ironed out the kinks in previous systems and built things in a coherent way
• documented the network and written a playbook, including network diagrams
• written + implemented scripts and automations in a system that almost runs itself.

However, after the initial rush and crash course of learning this new role + career and setting it all up, I feel I am becoming a bit directionless. After familiarizing myself with the network infrastructure and configurations, but lack access to certain capabilities and system combined with our org’s relatively uncomplicated setup has left me rather directionless as of late.

I learned a significant amount of PowerShell.
I learned enough about Microsoft Power Automate to get by and automate some stuff.
I learned probably too much about MS Graph.
I started a Linux+ course.
I started an AZ-104 course.
I started playing with Ansible.
I started playing with Rocky Linux (basically Red Hat) and Ubuntu.
I started playing with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server.
I started playing with WSL.   

But at the end of the day, I’m not sure what I’m doing all this for given my level of access and our org’s (lack of) use cases for all this. I enjoy learning, but the main issue is finding ways to actually use what I’m learning….knowing me, I would learn it and then forget it pretty quickly.

The job is good! It’s a stable, flexible, and friendly environment to work in. At the basic level, it’s everything I could have ever asked for! However, I feel myself getting antsy….

I’m running out of new projects to work on and things to train with. I have an Ansible / Linux idea that I’ll start working on today, but after I finish it (will probably just take a couple of days), I’ll likely be out of fish to fry.

I don’t enjoy the reactive side of IT. I don’t like waiting around for problems to come. I want to build things as well – not wait around to fix things. I do not want to leave this job, even though it may sound like it….

I suppose this is where the real test of the sysadmin role is:

Now that things are settled, quiet, and the initial heavy lifting is done…how can we remain proactive and stay in that continuous improvement mindset?

That’s what I’ve seen over and over again in the IT subreddits. Once you’ve made it up to sysadmin status and gotten everything set up and on a roll, you have to create your own work and work on your own projects.

This is where I currently find myself…we’ll see where this goes!