It’s been real!

For the past 5 years, I have slaved at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. And by slaved, I mean s-l-a-v-e-d. I made less money than typical System Administrators/Engineers at my level doing pretty much anything and everything you can imagine to keep the Observatory’s HPC environment functioning as best as it could with the EXTREMELY limited budget that we are given to work with after the Science staff have their way with it. We were expected to perform magic on a budget that is less than all of the salaries in a single year for the entire HPC team (which isn’t very much mind you). While we kept (and they keep) it running as best as one can, it is truly sad to see the premiere Radio Astronomy Observatory in North America being ran on a shoe string budget. I feel like I did my time in the pits and needed a change.

A bright horizon

Finally, after a few months of searching since the beginning of the year, I found a new home at the University of Virginia. I’m finally going to be making what I’m worth. While that might sound a bit cocky, I know what I do and I know my skills and they have not been valued at all for the best few years. After a near hour phone call with the director, I had an interview within a few days and was offered the position as a Linux Systems Engineer focusing on HPC within less than 3 hours after. It feels good to know that when they see someone with the skills, they make the correct move to obtain them quickly. I got to meet the entire team and cannot wait to start working with them all in July! There is a full new water-cooled cluster that will be at my disposal to fix and work on whenever issues arise, a group of extremely intelligent folks, and the office looks amazing! I’m super stoked.

Needless to say

Super stoked. Short posts are my thing currently, but I have setup a wiki over at wiki.cfultz.wtf that will contain my more in-depth posts like walkthroughs and guides. Weird way to end this post, but I figured meh, why not post it here.