Been programming & sysadmin professionally since 1990. First I was a sysadmin that programmed alot. Then I became a Programmer of sysadmin tools. Then a programmer of massively scalable distributed sysadmin infrastructure. Then a programmer of distributed systems. Now I program for fun.
I cut my teeth as a sysadmin on a wide array of Unixen. Linux kernel 0.98f; Ultrix 4.2; SunOS 4.3; Irix 5.2; HPUX 9.03; OSF/1. First I specialized as a HP/UX admin (shudder). Then a Solaris expert (even signed the NDA on the UltraSpace Cache problem; for those of you who know, you KNOW). Then Linux took over the world and there was much rejoicing.
I've worked at AOL and Amazon and Verisign and a half-dozen startups (none paid off a lot).
Now I occupy my brain with Go, Clojure and Node.js. But I used to play with Perl/POE and Python/Twisted. You get the async IO thread eh?