What are some of the perks of working at CCIS? For one, the opportunity to attend highly specialized conferences, with expenses covered by alumni and the college. CCIS students Eddie Hurtig, Jonah Min and Liam Hughes and College of Engineering student Matan Kaminski all attended the LISA conference – Large Installation System Administration – in Washington, D.C., as a result of their employment at the CCIS Systems Administration Lab.

“The conference was pretty amazing,” Liam, a second year student studying computer science, says. “It was a whirlwind of tech booths, free t-shirts, fantastic talks and far too much caffeine. I feel like I never stopped learning while I was there.”

The students attended talks and participated in challenges, all built around systems administration. Systems administration is all about the maintenance, configuration and operation of computer systems and servers – it’s ensuring that computers and servers work as they’re meant to, and do so constantly and consistently.

“The conference definitely opened my eyes to seeing what I don’t know in the field,” says Matan, a third-year student majoring in electrical engineering. For him, one of the most eye-opening topics was the discussion of people skills and how to manage people. “A lot of people are now trying to implement the same strategies that we use on computers, on our teams as well, to try to optimize and make our teams better, and therefore our work better,” he says.

Both Matan and Eddie, third-year students in computer science, were impressed by a talk given about Google’s Disaster Recovery Test, or DiRT. The company-wide test involves creating disaster scenarios to test whether Google can recover, and if so, how long that recovery takes. This testing ensures that failure protection systems currently in place work, and that the systems can be recovered without compromising the product users rely on. “I took away from that talk how to convince management and how you could implement these tests without actually affecting your users,” Eddie says. “It’s very much a people skills thing.”

The conference was also an affirmation for Liam and second-year student Jonah, also a computer science major, who both agree that they left convinced that they’d chosen the right field. “I love the idea of a field where you can still be learning 15 years into it, and with the same vigor and excitement as a second year college student at their first conference,” Liam says.

The four also placed third in the Mars Coding Challenge, in which teams were told to imagine a scenario in which they were trapped on Mars with limited battery power to operate their computers, and a storm approaching. The challenge was meant to give participants about 24 hours to work on their responses and figure out how to reconfigure the servers to maximize battery power. But because Eddie, Jonah, Liam and Matan flew in on the morning of the conference, they only found out about the challenge three hours before it ended. The tight time frame didn’t deter them though, and they managed to come in third place.

Attending LISA has made a lasting impression on the students, especially Liam.

“This was my first conference experience, and I am pretty sure it has ruined me for all other conferences,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been spoiled by how fun this was.”