Thankfully, these lessons haven’t been learned the hard way – not entirely anyway.

I’m not referring to my own web services – I don’t provide any of these. I’m referring to a particular web service I use to create and lodge invoices electronically.

Granted they are working hard to restore their services so I’ll refrain from outing them, but I’ll share a few things I’ve learned, not just with this latest incident but with web services in general.

1. Keep the customers informed. If you’re planning an outage period, or things aren’t going as expected, send a single email to your customer base explaining the planned/estimated outage times, or if applicable, an explanation of what went wrong and what you’re doing to fix it. While your customers might still be peeved, at least they’re in the loop.

2. Try and avoid using social networking tools to announce outages. Twitter is NOT a suitable means by which to communicate outages, as progressive and “nu-skool” as this approach may seem.

3. For the love of God, tread carefully when dealing with DNS changes. DNS, by nature and with regards to change, is a slow, unweildy beast. If you make a mistake and spot it too late (i.e. overnight) the mistake may have already propagated, and fixing it will take just as long (unless you set your TTLs ridiculously low).

4. If you can’t release a product or revision to the product without a prominent risk of failure, just don’t. The old mantra “real programmers ship” is as vague as it is foolish….. I’d rather wait another week for an upgrade I might not even notice, than go 24 hours without a crucial service because something went “bang”. You can still make ambitious release dates, but just put some real time, effort, and most of all, serious and careful thought, into setting up your development and release infrastructure. If you do things right, announcing an outage for purposes of maintenence/upgrade will be a thing of the past… your customers won’t even notice.

5. Prepping a release at 6pm on a Friday evening is a no-no. Your developers are probably burnt out from a week of frantic preparation, and this sets the stage for errors. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that shipping a particular feature/product on a particular date is “important to the business”. What’s more important is your image, and having exhausted developers cram something out the door in time for the upper echelons to nod their heads in approval, and then having said product blow up in your face because of an error that got missed, makes you look stupid in the eyes of your customers. Again: it is always better to ship late than ship broken. As a customer, I’d rather see a polished, functional product than a broken, rushed one. A poorly executed release reflects badly on you and your product. Take the time to do it properly.

That’s it for today’s rant!

I have a shortlist (of vendors, at least): Cisco, RedHat, Oracle, Novell. Not necessarily in that order.

I think one thing I’ve discovered is that being the jack-of-all-trades type is extremely handy because you’re so hireable for anybody who touches upon any area of technology you happen to be savvy in. One thing I’m learning through talking to people however is that specialists tend to earn a lot more, even if finding the work they’re after is a little trickier and they have to think on their feet a lot more to move (geographically, if necessary) where the money is.

However the other area in which certification is handy is when you have someone like me, jack-of-all-trades etc who has earned their skills through live-fire exercise, so to speak; usually dropped in the deep end with something or faced with a challenge that threatens to unseat their personal lives through commitment to getting the job done.

I’m talking about knowledge holes. Gaping voids, in some cases.

Being fire-baptised in IT is a great thing because it teaches you comprehension, complex reasoning, problem solving and any number of other valuable skills. All in all, if it were up to me, if you presented me with a) a die-hard hobbyist who’d been playing with computers since the age of 12, with no tertiary education and who’d hopped from one work experience placement to another, perhaps putting in a little grunt time at a university or ISP or their dad’s company, and who’d taught themselves the skills they deemed useful, or b) a straight-7’s computer science student….. in an ideal world, I’d hire both, but if I had to choose, it would be an extremely difficult choice, and most likely contingent upon Mr/Ms Straight 7’s past in the field, i.e. did he/she take to computers early on out of genuine passion, or did they simply fit into the groove after leaving school and do very well.

Experience trumps education. And while that may seem like a very obtuse and foolish view, remember that experience IS education. It’s just a different form of education….. it’s education learned through exposure and practical application rather than theory, study and more theory.

Example: I have absolutely no idea what 1st, or 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th “normal form” is if I were faced with such a question on an exam. But I’d put money on the fact that I can design and implement a database much better than Mr Straight 7’s, because I’ve had real exposure to such problems. And upon examination, it would be perfectly apparent that my design was well thought out, thoroughly normalised and generally in very good shape.

Now, I’m not suggesting a university education is worthless, or even simply unecessary… but where IT managers and the like need to be careful is in simply moving someone’s resume to the top of the pile because they finished first in their class.

Experience is gold. Education makes a great foundation and an even better supplement after the fact, and if you can combine the two, you are dynamite and damn near unstoppable.

But I digress (on a monumental scale). The reason for my desire to attain more certification is to plug knowledge gaps…. I’m a good man in a storm, I let nothing stand between me and ultimate success when it comes to solving technology problems, but there is ground I haven’t covered. I can kick ass in my field and suddenly be left treading water and eventually drowning because there’s just one little area I’m completely unexposed to, and in which I’m completely uneducated.

This is where certification fits in: most people like me can absolutely cream the certification path/uni course of choice, because real world experience primes you to nail the comprehension, complex reasoning and problem solving tasks that you may face during the process, and leave you to simply soak up the knowledge and apply it creatively, pragmatically and most importantly, with an eye for real-world application.

Moral of the story: if you’ve been in the game a couple of years, and are a pro at getting the job done in a half dozen different disciplines, there could not possibly be a better time to pick a specialisation and get certified. By the time your certification is done, you’ve already got several years applicable experience under your belt and can start punching well above your weight straight away.

I can see why people would find it useful…. it’s a great way to find out things about people you’ve just started working with, prospective employers and employees alike…. only small issue is that of validation, i.e. being able to qualify or dispute someone’s association with your business.

All in all though, it looks like a great tool so I’ll certainly give it a spin and see how I go.

Find me at LinkedIn.

On another topic…… in two weeks, I’m going to be a dad. Kristina and I are expecting a baby boy on November 3rd. Stay tuned for updates.