[sysadmin] Skills

[Brian Reid]

My areas of primary technical expertise are computer hardware, 
networking and protocols, DNS, operating systems, and random sysadmin 
things like backup/restore.

I am moderately competent in php, awk/sed, c, sh/bash, python, Ruby, 
Java, and Cisco/Juniper/Ubiquiti router configuration languages which 
typically have no names. I have never made my peace with the 
object-oriented usage style of PHP.

I am frightfully ignorant in databases/SQL, CSS, Javascript, and .NET. I 
am terrified of Perl and couldn't learn it even at gunpoint.

I am a world-class expert in a vast number of useless dead or near-dead 
languages (Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, MACLISP, Scheme, APL, PostScript, 
PL/I, Algol68, Mesa, BLISS, BCPL, SAIL, MAD, Eiffel, Tcl, Erlang, 
SNOBOL, Ada, ML, JOVIAL, and a dozen assembler languages). This does 
have the interesting side effect that about once every year or two I get 
an urgent cry for help from some company or government that has a 
critical system still running in one of these ancient languages and 
haven't been able to find a living person who can work with their code base.

I was a NASA certified space electronics assembly technician, though I 
suspect that my certification, issued in 1971, has expired. I built a 
couple of sub-modules that went to the moon on Apollo 17. The residual 
value of this training is that I can make custom cables that actually work.