Category: Life

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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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Life

Differences In Learning

As I’ve been working through some training material, I’ve come up with the following problem: I learn by reading and doing … not viewing videos. The problem is that a lot of the “self-paced” training available for certifications is based on videos. Usually those videos are tied up in Flash, and usually they split up the reading material into useless sections.

What I want is a book. It could be an EPUB or a physically book, but a PDF just isn’t the ideal medium when we have phones, tablets, and readers which can be any number of different sizes. Easily-reflowable text is the way to go.

The hard part is that video seems to be getting all of the press and money and I hope that we won’t see the death of high-quality reading materials for those of us who like to learn by looking at words instead of moving pictures and sound.

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Life Technology

Why Certifications

I’m not usually one to champion certifications of any sort. However, I am working through my first professional certification program right now (SUSE’s Certified Linux Administrator) and while it can be a slog (especially at this level), I have come up with some justifications for why certifications exist and why a person might find them beneficial.

TrainingI’m hoping this is what happens when I’m on the higher certifications. Sadly, I probably don’t even consider myself good yet. I just wanted to get an image in there.

Alright, back to what I was talking about:

  • For one thing, a certification can mean more money. I consider this maybe the least of the reasons for myself, but I can’t deny that it is a reason … and sometimes a really good one.
  • It sets a baseline for terminology and understanding within a group of people. This is mainly a benefit when working with others. That could be in the larger community, for support, or just in your own job (if you have coworkers doing the same thing). This one might be primary for me. Getting immersed in the terminology of a community is one benefit.
  • You might just learn something. It might not always be what you expect, but so far I’ve learned some rationale for decisions made within Linux (and SUSE/openSUSE specifically). This is the secondary reason in my case.
  • To set yourself apart … maybe. You’re willing to do the work to get a piece of paper. Essentially this is the “get a college education” reason as well. I’m not sold on it, but it is there.

Those are the four I have right now. It is going to be different for each person, and I have labeled the two which are most important for me, but there are reasons. What other reasons can you think of?

Leave a comment and let’s keep the discussion going!

 

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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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Life

Farmland

This link was tossed around today on some social media sites for a new movie titled Farmland. It takes a look at the next generation of farmers.

Since I’m a part of that generation, I wanted to share the trailer. Head on over to the site and take a look. It really looks good.