Tech-ronomicon: Keeping documentation that won't drive you mad
About the Speaker
Principal Systems Administrator at SAIC
Michael Campfield is a Principal Systems Administrator with the Digital Solutions Delivery group at SAIC in Oak Ridge. He is a Linux systems specialist, SME in cloud solutions, a configuration management master, and a DevOps proponent (except where DevOps doesn't work). If you sit still long enough he will wax poetically about becoming a librarian or his moderately sized collection of slide rules.
"They just walked out the door and left us with no idea how everything works!" Institutional knowledge always exists but relying on it will chip away at your organization's sanity. Some people call it built-in job security. What it really means is: "Panicked calls from operations about a NetApp failure while I'm at Disney World." If your group jokes about how doomed the department would be if some person actually left or wonder exactly why there are binders about Windows NT 4.0 on the office bookshelf - this talk will be perfect for you. At the end of this presentation you will have a handful of extremely quick and simple methods that will start you writing sane documentation that will make your life simpler, work easier, and keep your team out of padded cells.