People Stuff

Technical Debt

by

This week I’m paying off technical debt. If you’re not familiar with the term it’s from the world of software developers, and Martin Fowler describes it better than I would: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the …

Read More

Yak Shaving

by

One of my favorite terms for my day-to-day work life is “yak shaving,” and I’m saddened that so many people have not heard of it when I say it. “What are you doing today?” I’m asked. “Shaving yaks,” I reply. Coined at MIT as part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), it’s described well in Jeremy Brown’s archived email: You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task. Similarly, the Jargon File has it as: Any seemingly pointless activity which …

Read More

Rate-Limiting Steps

by

In the last month I’ve added quite a few blogs to my reading list. One new one is “Movin’ Meat,” written by an ER doctor out of the Pacific Northwest. Besides just being interesting, some of his blog posts support my theory that IT folks can often learn things from people in other fields. The post from June 25, 2010, part four of his “Advice for Interns,” is one of these cases. When you read it (link is at the end because I want to get to my actual point before you leave to read it), I think substituting “customer/system” for “patient” in his list works nicely. My real point is this: one thing in his list really stood out …

Read More

Immortals

by

It’s an interesting thing, this life. You’re born, you live, you die. And along the way there are certain epochs, milestones, that mark the journey. Early on you don’t remember these things, like learning to walk, or, just as crucial, going to the bathroom on your own. Sometimes you do remember them, like your first kiss, or holding your own offspring for the first time. Sometimes the events are obvious milestones, sometimes it takes years before you realize they were signs along the road. Sometimes these milestones are like the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, though. As much as you know they’re a part of life you’d like to put them back, take a do-over, and go back …

Read More

Underpromise & Overdeliver

by

Everything Sysadmin has an interesting post that ends up talking about the whole “underpromise and overdeliver” strategy. I’ve always had a rocky relationship with that strategy, mainly because I really think people just need to stop acting like they’re heroes on Star Trek and get better at time estimation. Certainly when there’s doubt about how long something will take it’s better to overestimate, because that way the promises your customers made to their customers, coworkers, or boss aren’t lies because of you. It also helps to give yourself a little breathing room, so that if something urgent comes up you can deal with that and still deliver. The trick is just not to overdo it. People aren’t dumb, and consistent …

Read More

Accountability and Signatures

by

One of my favorite tricks lately to make people understand how serious I am about things is to get them to sign a form. You want to run your server without backups? I don’t recommend it at all, but I’ll do whatever you say. Just sign this form acknowledging that you know the risks, you know you could lose all your data at any time for any reason (including things I might do), and regardless of cause you don’t hold me accountable for anything. You want to let your employee take a machine out of the building without following our procedures for wiping the drives? We have a policy against that and it’s a terrible idea, but no big deal. …

Read More

Whose Fault Is It?

by

Whose fault is it? It doesn’t matter. Get the problem fixed. You can figure out who is at fault when you’re discussing how to prevent the problem in the future.

Stress

by

Seth Godin has an interesting post today about stress. His perspective is as a marketer, but his point is universal: people are stressed out almost all the time. For us system administrators, do we ever just ask ourselves if something we’re doing, a system we’re building, even a tool we’re implementing for ourselves will create or reduce stress? Why not? I know some of the tools I use cause more stress than if I didn’t have them, to save very small amounts of time, gather almost useless information, or achieve some political goal. What if we could plot user stress versus time saved? Would we choose our tools, our applications, our systems differently?

6 Tips for Technical Presentations

by

Technical presentations are very Darwinian. Do a good one and you get invited to do another. Do one badly and you won’t get any more practice. I’ve survived a number of them now, likely because the audiences got such good sleep during the talk that they tell their friends. 🙂 Joking aside, I think these six things I do for each presentation have helped a lot. I share them with you. 1. Know your audience and talk at their level. Before I give a presentation I ask the folks who are coordinating the event about the people I’ll be talking to. Are they advanced users or newbies? Windows, Mac, or UNIX people? Application developers or system administrators? All these help …

Read More

Why You Shouldn't Lie on Your Resume or CV

by

Some reasons I think lying on your resumé is a bad idea. People, in general, aren’t good enough at lying to get all the details right. One little lie ends up needing a whole network of lies to support it. Especially during an interview. You said that you’ve run large mail servers at your previous job. What software did you use? What did you do about spam? Viruses? If you lie about your experience you need to lie about all the details of that experience, too. That gets tricky, because it all has to mesh perfectly. Even if you can get all the details right you’ll act funny or seem like you’re lying when people ask you about these things. …

Read More

+ More Posts +