{"id":2,"date":"2008-05-16T10:31:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-16T15:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webadminblog.com\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2008-09-27T22:26:34","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T03:26:34","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Web Admin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the Web Admin Blog!\u00a0 This blog is written by a loose confederation of Web Admins – the original core of the group was the Web Admin team at National Instruments<\/a> in Austin, Texas.\u00a0 But as people have moved on and our social network has spread, there’s an array of people welcome to post here.\u00a0 Heck, if you’re a Web Admin and have something to say, email me<\/a> – at a minimum we can link you; we’re inviting other posters too but usually we’ve at least met you at some convention or something and like you \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

What is a Web Admin?<\/h2>\n

A Web Admin, also known as a Web Systems Engineer or similar title,\u00a0is a person responsible for the systems which lie behind your favorite Web sites.\u00a0 Designers make the pretty pictures and CSS, programmers churn out the Java\/PHP\/Ruby\/whatnot (or .NET if you’re a poor benighted bastard).\u00a0 Admins make it all run.\u00a0 Like Scotty from Star Trek, although usually working to keep the ecommerce revenue\/viral videos\/porn flowing rather than dilithium crystal-produced warp energy.<\/p>\n

Uptime!\u00a0 Performance!\u00a0 Security!\u00a0 Efficiency!\u00a0 Agility!\u00a0 If they’re “everyone’s job” then they’re no ones’ job.<\/p>\n

Want to be a Web Admin?\u00a0 Web Admins\u00a0have a system administration skillset,\u00a0 but are not system administrators.\u00a0 They have programming knowledge, but are not traditional Web developers.\u00a0 They need to understand their business model, but aren’t suits.\u00a0 Their job is to focus on the systems and technologies that fall into the gaps between these worlds. In smaller shops it’s a part time job, but once you get to any real size it’s a whole team.<\/p>\n

Back in the earliest days of the Web, one person could do anything.\u00a0 You’d load up UNIX, install the NCSA http daemon, write some HTML by hand and make some gifs, and then write some CGI scripts, then view them in Mosaic.\u00a0 (Yes, I’m that old.)\u00a0 Ta da, you were a “Webmaster.”\u00a0 But the Web has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 15 years.\u00a0 Just “writing the HTML” is an entire field of endeavor if you are good at it, with stylesheets, JavaScript, client technology, etc.\u00a0 Programming has fragmented even more – front end specialists, people who write services, people who write database queries, and all in different flavors for different languages or technology stacks (mainly LAMP+, Java, and Microsoft, although insane people use about every language ever invented in the history of computers on the Web).<\/p>\n

People who don’t know anything about the field still sometimes say, “What are these Web Admins for anyway?\u00a0 Aren’t they just operations monkeys who, you know, reboot the site when it needs it?\u00a0 And move files around because developers aren’t supposed to due to lame compliance requirements?”\u00a0 And it can be that, for slow, weak security, poor quality Web sites. Or, “Why should it be a separate role – why not just have a programmer, a UNIX sysadmin, and a DBA get together and figure it out?”\u00a0 One, because there’s a wide variety of software, tools, and technologies that the Web uses that some of those people could learn, but are certainly not part of their usual skill set.\u00a0 And two, and pardon my manager-ness coming out here, but ITIL has something when they talk about service management and reorganizing your IT along the lines of services, not technologies.\u00a0 If you get those three aforementioned people together and the Web site goes down, whose problem is it?\u00a0 Unless the problem is something obvious, everyone is sure “it’s not my code\/the database\/the network.”\u00a0 And if reactive work is that fragmented, proactive work just doesn’t get done.<\/p>\n

A Web administration team takes responsibility for the site reactively.\u00a0 It also takes responsibility for it proactively, and is an advocate for the engineering aspects of its design – reliability, performance, maintainability, security, etc.<\/p>\n

Here’s what Web Admins do.<\/p>\n