Last night, I got an email out of the blue. It was from Chris Munns, sysadmin at Etsy, the home to a huge online community of people who make and sell things. The email basically asked if there was any way that Etsy could help sponsor the SysAdmin Appreciation Day event! Excellent.

The only question in my mind was, what kind of sponsorship would our event need? In the end, it winds up being a bunch of system administrators sitting around drinking, swapping war stories. I told them as much, and Chris responded:

Hey Matt,

Chad Dickerson who is the CTO here at Etsy was actually the one who wanted to us to help sponsor/participate. We were wondering if maybe we could just throw some money in for drinks on behalf of Etsy? - Chris

Pick up some of the bar tab? Well, ok!

After some more discussion, we’ve got it settled down, and I am happy to say that Etsy is contributing a very significant amount towards our bar tab tomorrow. I’m not going to say how much just yet, because I haven’t worked out how it’s going to be handled, but I’ll be surprised if anyone ends up paying for a drink themselves.

A huge(!) thank you to Etsy! And if you’re wondering why a site largely dedicated to crafting cares this much about the community of System Administrators, you should read their blog, Code As Craft. They believe strongly in Dev/Ops cooperation, and they spend a lot of time on that blog discussing their infrastructure. If you’re interested in Hadoop installations and continuous deployments, I recommend you check it out.

If you were holding back because you didn’t want to spend the dough on drinks, then don’t be afraid any longer. Check out the event page, then register!

Event registration for SysAdmin Appreciation Day — NYC powered by Eventbrite