Hi, I’m Arthur
I’m a system admin / post-production person.
My work is usually focused on two big areas : infrastructure and support.
Infrastructure first. In post production, because we work with video and 3D, we need a lot of storage, compute and memory. The ratio of the size of the infrastructure compared to the amount of people working can be a lot bigger than other environments. We are also usually fewer sysadmins, and we have lower budget to work with; in a studio with comparatively a lot of users and resources to manage.
With that in mind, everything that can be simplified, should be simplified. Second-hand hardware, open source tools and platforms, infrastructure as code , clever configuration management are what we use to make a lot of things happen with fewer people (and fewer $$$).
The best part : it’s empowering and enjoyable. One button deployments, upgrading a full rack of servers with a clever script, seeing all that metal do what it’s supposed to. This is what gets us going.
Now let’s talk support. We are lucky to support really talented people, that make a living crafting the most beautiful images. They like what they do, so they always come up with ways to improve their work. In turn, this attracts weird and challenging problems, and we usually can’t fix them well if we don’t understand how people work.
This forces us to learn about the industry, the tools people use, how they interact with each other and the infrastructure. It sometimes feels like doing splits from the artist all the way up to the metal. This works out because we talk to each other, we are curious, and this is why a big part of the job is human interactions.
I love it, because it puts a tangible target in front of us. We are here to help people do cool things.
This place is where I try to write about my experiences, both work and not-really-work.