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Re: [SAGE] Programmers as.. sysadmins..
We use an internal wiki also. One of the cultural shifts in
documenting things occurs once you have enough information in your
documentation pool (wiki in our case) that searching it becomes the
quick way to get an answer. At that point, most everyone begins to see
the value. There also develops some peer pressure to get the holdouts
to start using the wiki.
--
Dwight D. McKay, Director of Systems Engineering
Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, ITaP, Purdue University
mckay@xxxxxxxxxx / 765.494.4481 / MATH B73
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=dwight.mckay%40gmail.com&mode=week
On Jan 31, 2008, at 12:45 PM, Shaun T. Erickson wrote:
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