I am not a programmer, but I play one at work.

I am officially Sr. NT Systems Engineer. I am responsible for the health and well being of about 190 Windows based servers. We run about 90 of those on three IBM x445 8-way servers running VMware ESX.

Since our team has a need for some tools to make our life easier we have resorted to writing them ourselves. I started out with simple batch files and then moved on to Perl. I switched over to VBScript when the rest of my team didn't want to use Perl. No I have stepped up to VB.Net and C#. The development side of the house is a little wary about us writing our own applications. The problem is that we sometimes have to tell them how their code works.

I think it is great experience for sys admins to know how to program and programmers to know practical systems administration. Not this I rule the box and do what I want, but really having to work in a heterogeneous environment where everything touches each other and downtime is unacceptable. Then maybe they would be a little more cognizant of the system resources their code is using up.

Anyway I am officially taking a C# class next week. This is really because there are not any MS admin classes that I want to take that will help me out with my career. I think I am better off learning how to code in a more modern language than I learned in college. Pascal and Lisp were great for adding numbers, but they don't build a GUI very well. I have been working on hacking stuff together myself, but one of our real developers took the code and made it much more elegant. I will post on that one later.