Being Professional

Here's a puzzle for you all ...

Assume you're working with a complex system that's highly important for the business, one that is mission critical for some of the staff, where they are dependent of the system so they can do their jobs every day.

Further, lets assume the system has just been restarted after a major meltdown and you're investigating the cause of that failure.

When you think you've identified the sequence of actions that caused the system to go down, when you have a plausible theory of the crash that matches known information, what do you do next?

It's pretty traditional in some quarters to do a retrospective end of year post, recapping the highlights of a blog or community.

But, I've never been a great follower of fashion. Instead, let's focus on what's important for the year ahead, and on how can we improve as professional software developers so that 2012 is more successful, enjoyable, productive and rewarding than 2011.

After my recent presentation at the recent Tech Ed conference in Auckland, I've spent a little time reflecting on the feedback received and identifying some lessons learnt. I thought that blogging these might prove useful for others as they work towards their conference debut.