Wed, 05 Oct 2005
Anachronism in the Office - Writing Procedures
Today I was taken through a couple of system tasks that were both in-depth
and pretty time consuming. And like a good lad I wrote down instructions
fine grained enough to go through the task on my own. Now firstly this
means if I missed anything I have to go through it again and make
corrections. Secondly I wrote them by hand. Which was a mistake.
After I'd finished the oddness of what I'd just done came to me. I spent 45 minutes making a, probably imperfect, and has to be tested anyway, set of steps for things that you do on a computer. Wouldn't it make more sense to fire up a screen capture tool, plugin in a mike, record the "teacher" and then archive the footage somewhere for future use? That way you get the exact step by step footage while retaining any spoken details.
And it gets us a little closer to this ever promised paper-less office!
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Posted: 2005/10/05 22:21 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Smart Co-workers Considered Non-harmful
At the last couple of places I've worked I've ended up being the only
real sysadmin in the company. While this gives you a fair amount of control
over what you're doing from hour to hour, it also means you don't have
any one with the same professional interests to bounce ideas off or
sanity check you; caveat: most Perl developers I've worked with have a
pretty comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.
At each place I've been lucky enough to have some incredibly talented developers nearby to talk tech too but I've missed dealing with people that live and breath systems. It might sound weird but I've missed being out of my depth.
Today I got involved in a project that's put me right back in to the middle of it. Managing hundreds of systems without going insane. What's made it odd is we're using some ideas I came up with a couple of companies ago but never got time to implement. The guy I'm working with has got involved and in under a day understands it better than I do, has found a number of parts that need attention and has already got a small prototype up and running. And it was damn scary to watch.
The point of the post? If you're not working for people that are better at your job than you are either change jobs or charge a fortune to make up for missed opportunities. And be thankful for clued co-workers. They make those eight hours a day go so much faster.
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Posted: 2005/10/05 22:13 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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