In honor of the sysadmins who are in the data center trenches every day, we're pleased to mark System Administrator Appreciation Day (July 26) with our third annual animated gif contest!

How to enter

Submit an animated gif and caption that illustrate a slice of sysadmin life. One of our winners from last year serves as a great example:

When you realize you transposed the source and destination of a massive rsync:

Submitted by Peter Bukowinski

Your submission should be smaller than 2 MB and reasonably family friendly (i.e. no nudity). Send your submissions to [email protected], or just tweet your gif and caption to us (@puppetlabs) with the hashtag #sysadminday. We'll accept submissions through Monday, July 29. Your gif will be attributed to you unless otherwise specified. While we love DevOps Reactions, we ask that you use these gifs for inspiration, and don't grab them wholesale.

We encourage you to submit multiple gifs as inspiration strikes, and to share your favorites via social media. If you're looking to win, that's a great way to get people to voting for your gif. Keep track of incoming gifs in our 2013 gallery.

How to vote

We'll assign a number to each submitted gif as it's posted, and you can vote by submitting the number of your favorite in this form. Check back often — we'll be adding gifs frequently as submissions roll in. Voting will be open for the duration of the contest, and while it's fine to vote for more than one gif, we ask that you refrain from voting for the same gif multiple times.

We do ask for your email, but only for prize purposes. Which brings us to...

Fabulous Prizes

If your gif is one of the top three when voting closes Monday, July 29, you will win one of these fabulous prizes:

If for some reason you can't enjoy any of these prizes, we've got a few backup options. Puppet Labs employees are welcome to submit gifs, but are ineligible for prizes.

One lucky randomly chosen voter will win a $150 gift card — because gif appreciation should be appreciated too.

We look forward to your submissions! Happy (early) SysAdmin Appreciation Day!

Learn more: