Meetings and Events

A brief look at common shell commands and pipelines found in most engineers' scripts, this talk aims to illustrate how the appropriate use of the various flexible unix tools might allow for more efficient execution and argues against the premature dismissal of the shell as a scalable programming environment.

Originally given in 2007 at the Southern California Linux Expo, this updated version of the talk will also diverge into the direction of premature optimization and overuse of "the big gun" for simple problems.

Jan Schaumann currently works as a Senior Network Security Engineer at Etsy. Prior to that, Jan was a Senior System Administrator, Systems Architect and finally Principal Paranoid at Yahoo! Inc. He is also an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes in System Administration and UNIX Programming.

With this unique background in both a small scale academic as well as a massive industry-leader corporate enterprise environment, Jan has over 10 years of extensive real-world experience in the practice and teaching of System Administration. He has given presentations on various topics at both national and international venues.

At the moment, Jan is working on a course book on System Administration, to be published by Wiley & Sons in 2013. He lives with his wife and two daughters in New York City, where you may find him riding a large skateboard. You may feel free to buy him a beer anytime.

• Event Audio (recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)