Re: [SAGE] Programmers as.. sysadmins..

["Shaun T. Erickson" <ste@xxxxxxxx>]

Neil Neely wrote:
> Who I really want to work for me is someone who loves to solve problems 
> so that someone with less training and expertise can solve it the next 
> time it comes up.

Yes, we should document our work. At my last job, the sysadmin team had 
an internal wiki. I resisted using it, at first, because I felt that 
time spent documenting was time not spent performing administration work 
(nor were my coworkers using it). Eventually I decided to give it a try 
and whenever I ran into a problem I had to solve more than once I 
documented the problem and my solution.

Not only was it good for the reason you mentioned, but I found that 
knowing someone else would have to read it and follow it made me more 
conscious of my work - causing me to streamline it and clean it up so 
that it was something that was straightforward to do, was documented 
concisely, and wasn't "just an ugly hack" to get the job done.

It also meant that I didn't have to commit the solution to memory, 
freeing up brain cells for other uses. All I had to remember was enough 
to recognize the problem and recall that I'd documented the solution. 
Then it just took a quick search.

-ste