cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

Turning a new page, and working on that home development environment

It's vacation / psuedo-unemployment time for me, as I've made a career move and have moved on to another company (spending a week between gigs). It's a nice step up, and definitely will take me a bit farther away from the hands-on work I periodically enjoyed at my previous employer; on the other hand, it will get me back to the strategic IT and business-outcomes focus, as opposed to heads-down implementations and operational support.

It also will allow me to clearly delineate my development work as separate and distinct from efforts at my employer. I've been looking a lot at maps and mapping (future post), and have some database-oriented ideas as well ... gotta get back to my Eclipse series!

My big efforts during this week, along with my rather extensive "honey-do" list from The Boss, will be to reconfigure my home-based development network / environment(s). First up - getting the network admin basics back up to speed. I have a fairly detailed set of weekly processes to keep things as "clean" (ie. anti-spyware and virus scanning) and backed-up as possible - but I've really let that slide over the past few months, so I am updating software and getting things in a better state.

A catch-22; over the last month or two, I've realized that a Wiki-type approach to system and process documentation might be fairly simple and powerful (along with keeping copies on multiple machines for fault-tolerance, etc.), but which project first - redoing a LAMP-based development server, or getting the network basics in order? Oh well, this part of the process will defnitely be a bit ragged (hmm, maybe "evolutionary" would be a better term).

The big work in pass 1 - getting my main network server to boot with No Errors ... which reminds me of an ongoing debate from my old tech team on the necessity of compiling with zero warnings ...

Why go through all of this effort? Remember, it's not just about wanting to scratch that development itch! It's quite practical, really - if you want to be taken seriously by techies and vendors, you need to be able to understand how things work, what is generally new in the technology world - and, to keep the business side engaged, you need to understand what type of effort is required to make things happen!

posted by James P. MacLennan at 9:05 AM | Permalink | 0 Comments