Systems Administration

Since I am in the mood for gloating, I thought that I would share a small achievement that I have managed to accomplish recently. It is nothing very great but since it is something that I had only managed to achieve through some effort, I have a personal sense of accomplishment of it. The achievement is something that is so obscure that most of you would probably not be able to appreciate it as much as I do.

I have made the top 1% of users at serverfault.com site several weeks ago. The site is sort of like an experts exchange site where people can come to ask questions and other people can help answer the questions. Serverfault is dedicated to the business of systems administration. There are almost 20,000 users on the site at the moment and the numbers increase all the time. In fact, the question volume has shot up considerably since it first started.

Users are awarded points through a democratic voting system. If I said something good, it would get up-voted and if I said something dumb, it would get down-voted. If I answered the question accurately and the question is accepted by the person who asked it, it would also get awarded bonus points. These points finally add up into a final reputation value and users are then ranked by rep. It is a long-tail distribution though. The top performer has an order of magnitude more rep than I do but those are rare.

Oh, I thought that I would add a flair to my side-bar to gloat.

PS: If you have not heard of Serverfault and you are in the business of systems/network administration, you may want to check it out. It also has sister sites – stackoverflow.com and superuser.com – for programming and software issues.