System Administrator Appreciation Day and why we keep our skills in-house

Fastmail’s spin on System Administrator Appreciation Day: highlighting and appreciating our Platform Engineering team.

What is System Administrator Appreciation Day?

July 31 marks System Administrator Appreciation Day.

We all have someone in our life who keeps our personal tech, our home network, maybe our personal website running – or we are that person for our loved ones.

At our workplaces, sysadmins in IT departments do the often invisible work of keeping computers, networks, printers, servers, and much more running.

System Administrator Appreciation Day is dedicated to taking note and celebrating this important work that keeps the world of tech ticking along smoothly and responding quickly when things get less smooth.

System Administrators at Fastmail

At Fastmail, the Platform team takes on that role, both for our in-house IT, and for the servers and networks that your email lives on.

Like the stereotypical sysadmin, they too are often invisible – they’re not responding to support tickets, they’re not working on user-facing features, and as long as everything is working, you don’t notice their work at all.

As a global service linked with hundreds of other email providers, the biggest exposure you get to their work at Fastmail is when there are network issues.

We do not delegate reachability and email deliverability to a third party, so we have to manage inbound and outbound connectivity between the internet and our servers, network range blocks, DNS, and many other building blocks of what makes an internet service work.

The Platform team is also the first responder for all incidents and outages: Because the platform is the base layer for all services at Fastmail, Platform engineers are best placed to triage incidents and pinpoint where the problem lies.

System Administrators and in-house expertise

And that is why we keep these skills in-house – because these skills are required so that when something breaks, we can troubleshoot and fix the issue or find a workaround, rather than waiting for a service provider to respond to our calls.

If you’ve ever reached out to Fastmail support about not being able to send or receive emails from a specific destination or not being able to connect to Fastmail, and the issue was resolved in hours rather than days, that’s the work of the Platform team.

Because we maintain our own platform, because we keep working on making it more reliable, and because we maintain those skills, we can deliver the best service to you, by making sure that your email can always get delivered.

And that’s the core of a sysadmin’s work: Making sure that the world keeps on turning, using the systems and tools that they build and maintain. And there’s no substitute for that.

We appreciate our Platform engineers, just like we appreciate everyone else in our team that shows up every day to make email better at Fastmail. So we’re encouraging you on this sysadmin appreciation day: Show some appreciation to the sysadmins in your life.

And if you’re a sysadmin, whether at home or at work - thank you, too!