How can I incorporate programming in a linuxadmin job?

10 points·shivajikobardan··9 comments

I'm working with Linux and SQLs. How can I incorporate programming, learn programming in my job? Something like bash shell scripting and?

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Replace bash scripts that are more than 100 lines with Python or Go binaries. Use ansible for configuration.

Make your infrastructure as immutable as possible.

Why use ansible for configuration? It's an arbitrary DSL that doesn't scale beyond apt install xxx

Best advice here. This is literally how I made the transition from infrastructure engineer to programmer.

> How can I incorporate programming, learn programming in my job?

Find repetitive tasks and try to automate them tasks. For simple scripts shell (bash) is great. For more complicated scripts that require error handling, API access, parallelisation, etc. use Golang, Python, Perl or Ruby.

F# is extremely expressive, has algebraic datatypes and just about everything C# has to offer. It has a REPL so you can write your code interactively and make fast and safe progress. .net is practically first class on Linux now.

Start your .fsx script with: #!/usr/bin/dotnet fsi

When startup time becomes a problem you can compile the file to an assembly instead.

Pro-tip, F# has an extremely efficient CSP-style concurrency library called Hopac.

F sharp is a great language, but his code will need to be maintained by others which is why Python is a better idea.

I'd recommend Perl, it's closely tied to bash/Linux and has many powerful features that can help a sysadmin, native regex support for one.

Perl is basically deprecated, I would definitely not use Perl.

Big tech cos usually use python for glue code. Ruby is used with chef.

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