www.archive.org/.../Cod4l10_Vampires_512kb.mp4

[code4lib 2010]

Bess Sadler: Vampires vs Werewolves

Bess is well known for her involvement in the Blacklight development

Her presentation is called Vampires vs Werewolves,

ending the war between developers and sys-admins using Puppet

Do we want to make a joke about skinny white face guy and a no-shirt stuff so her Puppet is going

to do the work for her for that

welcome Bess

Thank you

alright, hi

code4lib is my favorite time of the year, it's awesome to be here

Hi, I'm Bess Sadler I work at Stanford University Library now

until about a month ago I was at the University of Virginia Library

so a lot of the stuff i'm going to talk about today happened at UVa

but we're trying to repeat the same experience at Stanford

so one of the things I'm really curious about, the process I'm going to talk about

is whether it is repeatable; i think it is

you guys read XKCD, right?

so i was really -- this was great timing; this was the XKCD from yesterday

i don't know if you guys can read it -- yeah..

it's "shit, we're dealing with a sysadmin"; that's just such a great line

so, why is my talk called vampires vs werewolves?

this is a situation i've encountered at many institutions that i've worked, not only

places they're describing the process of what's happening at their own institution

for example

you mightk now my work from projects such as Blacklight

and the number one thing here, when eople want to implement blacklight

i would really like to implement blacklight, ruby is not in our technology stack

and there's no way i'm going to be able to talk our sysadmins into it, right?

i see a lot of nods in the room, i hear this a lot

so, i really enjoyed cathy marshall's talk and some of the ethnographic studies that she did

here's what my research findings say

developers say those sysadmins, they keep me from doing my job

my job is to develop new software and ship new features, and impress our customer base

and make my institution look good, i get evaulated on whether i can do cool stuff and get it out there

into a production system, right?

and if they sysadmins are keeping me from doing my job, i look bad

but the sysadmins, at the same time are saying, those developers, my job is to keep systems and keep th

em up all the time, to build trust with our community

they take their job serious; i was a sysadmin for a long time

so i'm coming at it from that point of view too.

building trust with the community is very important

if we're building repository, and we're saying you need to trust us as an institution

you need to trust us with the cultural knowledge, right?

you have to take that seriously and really have good uptime

so, but the thing is if we're constantly warring against each other

we're not paying attention to villagers with pitchforks and torches at the gate, right?

and these guys are going to show up

if we go too far in either direction

if you've got systems that are not staying up

the villagers with the pitchforks show up, and if you've got products that are never updated, the villagers

with the pitchforks show up

so some of the stuff i'm going to talk about is innovation; i'm going to talk about some pretty

innovative things, actually -- i'm not such a genius, these are best practices from industry, not stuff i

made up, but in the library world a lot of this stuff might be called very innovative

so i want to preface this by saying, innovation is about risk

and i want to talk a little bit about, let's get touch-y feel-y for a moment, you don't take risks with

people you don't trust