And then there are the resolutions

I'm still digesting all the stuff that came out of LISA this year. But there are a number of things I want to try out:

• I learned a little bit about agile development, mainly from Geoff Halprin's training material and keynote, and it seemed interesting. One of the things that resonated with me was the idea of only having a small number of work stages for stuff: in the queue, next, working, and done. (Going without the info here, so quite possibly wrong.) I like that: work on stuff in two-week chunks, commit to that and get it done. That seems much more manageable than having stuff in the queue with no real idea of a schedule. And a two-week chunk is at least a good place to start: interruptions aren't about to go away any time soon, and I can adjust this as necessary.

• A corollary is that it's probably not best to plan more than two such things in a month. I'm thinking about things like switching from Nagios to Icinga, setting up Ganeti, and such: more than I can do in an hour, less than a semester's work.

• I really want to work on eliminating pain points this year. Icinga's one; Nagios' web interface is painful. (I'd also like to look at Sensu.) I want to make backups better. I want to add proper testing for Cfengine with Vagrant and Git, so I can go on more than a wing and a prayer when pushing changes.

• I also need to work more closely with the faculty in my department. Part of that is committing to more manageable work, and part of that is just following through more. Part of it, though, is working with people that intimidate me, and letting them know what I can do for them.

• I need to manage my time better, and I think a big part of that is interruptions. I've just been told I'm getting an office, which is a mixed blessing. There's a certain amount of flux in the office, and I've been making friends with the people around me lately. I'll miss them/that, but I think the ability to retreat and work on something is going to be valuable.

• Another part of managing time is, I think/hope, a better routine. Like: one hour every day for long-term project work. (The office makes this easier to imagine.) Set times for the things I want to get done at home (where my free time comes in one-hour chunks). Deciding if I want to work on transit (I can take my laptop home with me, and it's a 90 minute commute), and how (fun projects? stuff I can't get done at work? blue-sky stuff?). If, because a. my eyes will bug out if I stare at a screen all day and b. I firmly intend to keep a limit on my work time. So it'd probably be a couple days a week, to allow time for all the podcasts and books I want to inhale.

• Microboxing for productivity. Interesting stuff.

• Kanban. Related to Agile, but I forgot about it. Pomodoro + Emacs + Orgmode, too.

Probably more as I think of it...but right now it's time to sleep. 5.30am comes awful early after 11 days off...