[BBLISA] Thoughts about submitting papers to Usenix LISA (and why it is easier this year)

[Tom Limoncelli]

[ Please forward to co-workers, LUGs, etc. ]

I've been a sysadmin for 2 decades.  When I think back about my career
I realize that the first time I presented a paper to LISA was a major
turning point for me.

It wasn't my idea to submit a paper.  My boss at the time put a lot of
effort into career development and he suggested that a good bridge
from being a junior sysadmin to a senior sysadmin would be to start
submitting papers to conferences. I wrote about some projects we had
been doing and submitted.  I couldn't believe it when I got the
acceptance letter!

Being published lead to many important things for me.  It got my name
around; other people wanted to collaborate with me.  It helped me in
job hunting; having a paper published gave me a new level of
credibility.  Most importantly it got me noticed by Addison-Wesley and
that lead to co-authoring writing my first book (the second most
important turning point in my career; which wouldn't have happened
without those early papers).  That lead to some other milestones, such
as being honored with the SAGE Award.

Maybe you haven't considered writing a paper for LISA.  Maybe you
think your projects aren't that amazing.  My first paper was about how
we renumbered the IP address of 1,000 machines (this was before DHCP
was popular).  Doesn't seem to exciting, does it?  We had interesting
problems that needed to be worked through: http://bit.ly/9C8ykH

The last few years some papers have included topics like: Migrating
thousands of users to a  new email server and why it became a
disaster; the method someone uses for stress-testing their web server
to find performance bottlenecks; data mining Cisco network configs
stored in a source-code repository  for many years; virtualizing
networks; using a dependency graph to determine security risk.  All of
these are interesting because they solve real problems.

So...

The deadline for submitting papers is May 17th.  If you want a mentor,
ask the chair and a helpful committee member will be assigned to you.

Unlike past years, submitting papers is a bit easier this year:
1.  This year you don't have to write the entire paper!  Submit a
1500-word abstract.  If it gets accepted, then you'll have to write
the paper (of course!).
2.  We are now accepting "experience" papers.  Do an massive email
migration?   Deploy a new thingamabob?   Survive an interesting
attack, management change, or technology ?   Tell us all about it!

If you have never submitted a paper to LISA, this is a good time to
give it a shot.

It could be a turning point for you too.

Sincerely,
Tom Limoncelli

Submission guidelines:
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/cfp/

Writing advice here:
http://engineerwriting.jottit.com/
...and...
http://everythingsysadmin.com/2010/03/writing-papers-for-usenix-lisa.html

-- 
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