International Systems Engineer Day 2020: Meet Our Secret Heroes

Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels

Hello to November 27th. Today is a special day for us, as we are lucky to have “Systems Engineers” in between our colleagues to celebrate this day with them.

Happy Systems Engineer Day

We are reading this article, or sitting in front of a laptop, scrolling through a browser on our smartphone, each of these, is proof of a Systems Engineer’s significant role in our lives.

They are sitting in front of at least one computer, every day, and helping to make the world a better place to live in. 

Let’s celebrate “International Systems Engineer Day” together.

Table of Contents

• International Systems Engineer Day
• a9s Managed Services
• anynines Managed Services Team 
  • Khaled Blah – Team Lead / Senior DevOps
  • Maximilian Müller – Systems Administrator
  • Philipp Barth – DevOps
  • Marcelo Gonçalves – Devops

International Systems Engineer Day

Can you imagine a day without digital equipment?

If yes, leave us a comment. 

The world is growing to be more digitized every day, smart devices are fulfilling all aspects of our lives, both professional and personal. 

Systems Engineering teams are one of the most important groups of people, who are working on complex projects to build and improve our lives and world. 

The last Friday of November is called Systems Engineer Day and this year, we are celebrating it today on November 27th. (What a coincidence, Thanksgiving and Black Friday)

We decided to celebrate today, by introducing our System Engineers and their department.

You can learn more about a9s Managed Services department, its team, and their services here:

Photo by Massimo Botturi on Unsplash

a9s Managed Services

anynines Managed Services wants to help customers host any kind of application or service in heterogeneous environments. We support customers by using our experience of 10 years of hosting applications in constantly changing environments. We also advise customers on which services their apps might benefit from. If an app doesn’t work as expected we help to find out what’s wrong.

We also want to make sure our customers understand that we are always there for them when they need us. Be it by phone, email, or (video-)chat, we are never far away because we strive to support our customers in such a way that they do not fear a potential downtime of their app or service because they know we will react quickly when they contact us.

anynines Managed Services Team 

We like to thank our Managed Services team today for their hard work and efforts to build up this team and their dedication towards developing and implementing services for customers. 

Continue reading to become familiar with them:

Khaled Blah – Team Lead / Senior DevOps

I started using computers in the mid-90s when they were usually grey and rather loud boxes of mystery. I wanted to understand how they work. The blinking cursor seemed to have the same effect on me then a ball of wool may have on a cat. Unfortunately, I’m not as cute as a cat though. Once I understood a particular thing I wanted to understand what it is that makes this thing work in turn. I wanted to go deeper into the virtual world so that I would be able to do these things myself. I decided to study computer science and make this my job because it fit my desire to solve problems and understand the next problem. I became a Systems Administrator and after more than 13 years of doing that, I’m working on automating all the things. I’ve learned that a Systems Administrator requires a particular kind of thinking. That thinking should contain a healthy dose of skepticism. Without that skepticism, you may find yourself answering a call at night when you could be sleeping soundly. That’s one way to learn and I certainly learned my fair share that way. Now though I want to use modern approaches which give me more confidence in the result of my work. But the skepticism remains.

Maximilian Müller – Systems Administrator

Hey,

My name is Max and I’m a 26 years young “IT guy”.

I am a so-called Systems Administrator, which means I get called when the cleaning lady unplugged the server or the fridge didn’t order new milk after it ran out of stock.

But seriously, as Systems Administrators, we try to keep the IT running. We work in the background and as long as you don’t hear from us, everything works fine.

I have worked as a Systems Administrator for almost four years now and joined the anynines GmbH at the beginning of the year. We try to automate as much as we can, so we can concentrate on the important (and exciting) stuff.

I got into Systems Administration because nowadays everything is connected and one has so many possibilities. I run my own little infrastructure to host the most important stuff. But the biggest fun in a project begins when it already works because then you can find out how to improve it (hopefully without breaking it).

Philipp Barth – DevOps

I started using computers at a rather young age, first for games but later I got drawn into the deeper layers as I was curious about the inner workings of the systems I use. By teaching myself some programming knowledge, digging into the inner workings of Windows systems, and starting to build my own Linux from scratch, I gained more of an understanding of how things are connected and which pitfalls might exist in a system. After working with Windows virtualization for some years, my interest shifted more towards the Linux and automation side of things. At the same time, I always kept up my deep interest in most things cybersecurity. 

When working in DevOps teams, you need a somewhat solid understanding of a multitude of topics, sometimes broad, sometimes rather detailed. So a natural curiosity and willingness to dig into the smallest details – if needed – can be really beneficial. Equally important than a technical understanding of what’s going on, maybe the ability to ask the right questions to tackle a given problem or task, because often problems or tasks aren’t as big as they might seem at first glance, once you gather the information to be able to classify them. 

Marcelo Gonçalves – Devops

Hi, 

my name is Marcelo. I started working as an intern in the Managed System Team of anynines a couple of weeks ago and I am learning a lot every day. I started studying IT motivated by my curiosity, I wanted to know more about the technologies we use every day. I wanted to understand better how they work behind the scenes and I must confess: The more I learn, the more fascinating the subject becomes.

Becoming the IT guy is to be more or less like becoming a wizard. We try to understand how things work, practice a lot and then we are ready to “say” the magic words and make complex systems work like we want them to. But don’t fool yourself, it involves a lot of hard work and analytical thinking is also imperative. But when you write the correct magic words and get a complex system running you feel really like a magician. Anynines is giving me the opportunity to learn the magic words and soon I will become one of the powerful wizards.