Category: Business

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Business Life Technology

Tools and Jobs

In What Happened to the Month With Linux, I had this paragraph:

I lasted about five days before I gave in and decided that I’m just going to give up with trying to do anything like this and continue to use the best tool for the job for me, or (as my friend Aaron Spike has said), the tool most familiar to me.

I added the very last part of that paragraph after some texts with my friend, Aaron Spike. It got me thinking about what a “best tool” might look like for different people and it really does come down to what the two of us were talking about.

It isn’t enough to be a tool that can just get the job done. For every job, there are multitudes of ways to complete it using any number of tools. What makes a tool great probably gets down to the user being comfortable using it.

But maybe comfortable is not enough. The tool needs to make the user feel like they are able to accomplish more than they would when using another tool. It might just be a feeling, but the ability to “delight” (there is a terrible word to use for almost anything) makes the choice of tools to be a completely personal choice in almost every case.

That’s why I continue to come back to OS X and iOS, entirely because I FEEL like I can do more with them. It might not be true, but the feeling is very powerful.

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Bob Speaks Business

Episode 11: A Holistic Approach to Service Management

I decided to post an episode instead of trying to get a post out. This one talks about a particularly complex problem I am trying to tackle in an integrated way at work.

The tracking of assets, people, and setting of some network security settings based upon those things needs a refresh and I am still struggling with what to do. Here are some links:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:52 — 6.3MB)

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Business Life Technology

Fending Off Stagnation

This isn’t another post about how I’m not living up to my plans (I actually did some certification work last night … imagine that), but a longer-term look into the future than just what I am working on right now.

There was a post being tossed around on Twitter recently titled Why your previous developer was terrible, and I recommend that you take a look. It speaks mostly of how a new developer can come into a situation and seem like they have all of the answers because they need to deal only with the current knowns, not with the inherit unknowns of starting a new project.

However, it think it is also a tale of stagnation in some sense. It is easy to get bogged down in the past and present and leave the future to, just that, the future. Solutions you HAVE made in the past tend to stick around longer than they should because … they are a decision we don’t have to make today (and who around us is needing to make fewer decisions).

The prevailing thought from many people is that you shouldn’t stick around the same place for too long so that things don’t stagnate. I can understand that, but I happen to think that there are downsides to the opposite as well … moving around constantly or a constantly shifting group of workers as well. Knowledge is lost. Decisions are having to continually be made over, and over, and over … it can be maddening on the other side as well.

So the question becomes: how can a person fend off stagnation at the place they are at?

That’s the question I want to talk about. Usually they’ll just toss out “move to somewhere else”, but that’s not what I want an answer to. I want to talk about how to fend it off when you are dedicated to staying where you are.

Let’s talk about that.

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Business Technology

Changing Focus

I have many interests, too many to be certain. As I try to satiate my innate desire to know everything that I can, I end up knowing nothing because I can’t commit my mind to working on a single things for more than an even, or maybe (just maybe) a week.

So, starting April 1, 2014, I am going to take the next quarter of the year to focus on sysadmin stuff. I’m setting aside my iOS books and picking up system and network administration material instead.

This will also include working through my SUSE CLA material as well. If that goes well, I’ll start planning on the next step of my certification journey by looking at CLP and CLE certifications as well. By the time I get to that step I’m hoping that the training resources will be rewritten for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (currently in private beta) and not be tied to Flash either (which makes using an iPad particularly difficult).

The change is really pushed by professional needs at the moment. Linux and system administration is something I do every day and I want to be able to do that better. It helps that I also tend to enjoy doing it quite a bit as well.

I’m sure I’ll have more to write about this in the future.

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Business Life Technology

Coworking Not Just for Freelancers

I’m currently reading REMOTE but the people over at 37signals as preparation for some long-distance thinking on my part and I’ve been enjoying it so far. If you have read REWORK (also by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson), then you know the style of the book and I think you’ll enjoy REMOTE as well.

That’s some context for my reading of the following tweet:

Some local people here in New Ulm have discussed looking into starting a coworking space here, but it is cool to see it happening (or at least being looked into) in Shakopee as well. I think there is a real need for spaces like this, and it is only going to become more and more of a feature for a town or city to have.

However, something I’ve always needed to overcome is the idea that a coworking space is exclusively for mobile or freelance workers. Basically, it is only for people who aren’t tied to a specific company or area. My mind worked on this and has a slightly different angle on it now.

A former coworker of mine and I talked in the past about the lack of collaboration outside of the strict walls of where you are currently employed, and I think that coworking spaces have the opportunity to break some of these walls down.

Reading REMOTE, maybe relaxing the need to have all employees in the building at the same time could allow some collaboration for hard (or even simple) problems in a coworking space. Get a bunch of network and systems admins together into single space, throw a problem at them, and then let them talk through all of the possibilities. It will require cultural changes, but it follows a sort of “open source” model of collaboration in the idea that “the rising tide lifts all boats” to an extent.

I’d never thought of it that way, but maybe there is something there to not just have a space, but to enact cultural changes in some companies to open them up and improve things for more people overall.