My twist on @AlexTatiyants blog post on Magic Programming. I know I’m replacing Dev with Sysadmin, but I hope this is flattering.
Overall this is a personal view that I struggle to convey with my other technical colleagues, and sometimes they discount my views because I am “Overteching it.”
Good Sysadmins don’t like magic. They want to understand exactly what’s happening under the hood. They want to know how the machine got from point A to point b. Most importantly, they want to be in control of their system (instead of the other way around).
Good Sysadmins also know that magic comes at a cost. That cost is paid when things are don’t work exactly as you expected. Suddenly, you have to dig through a maze of your (distribution’s) abstractions to understand what went wrong.
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Any modern system can be considered magical. Hell, you install the operating system and most likely you can get the computer to do something.
The thing is for certain situations the trade off between transparency and magic makes sense. Sure you could compile your own versions of gcc and sshd, but why would you want to?
I am of the position, that if you did not configure your critical services yourself, and know what the application is doing on your system you do not know your system. If you do not know your system, it is a liability.
And. Liabilities bite.
Just one more point. Steve Jobs is a visionary in technology, but he was a tyrant. He knew how stuff was supposed to work together. So, as the creator do you think he’d enjoy a Magic show?
