i’m just a few years from turning 30. i’ve noticed i have changed some of the ways i operate. some of it comes from age/experience and some of it comes from having a different job role.

quite honestly when dealing with IT-related problems in the past…often i had been impetuous in trying to find a solution. and i’ve been burned by that recklessness..not very often but it happens. and it’s a horrible feeling of dread when something goes wrong and you’re the person to blame. this hasn’t personally happened to me very often, but it has happened…and it does kind of scar you.

you remember to test things thoroughly before putting something out in the wild. and then at least if something goes wrong you know you tried as much as you could to prevent it. you still will feel horrible if it all goes wrong, but at least not as bad.

anyways, when structure breaks down in troubleshooting.. non-guru IT people (such as myself) often rely on not so much trial-and-error, but moreso intelligent guessing. and very often it’s an effective tactic. just nowadays i’m much less opt to experiment on important data or systems. i’ve become way more conservative than i used to be, and that’s a good thing.

now i like to know that safeguards are in place before i experiment..snapshots, data backups, cloned environments, ample time to figure out what went wrong if it does, etc.

and really i think this stuff can only be infused in you the hard way, that’s by experiencing a disaster or two. that’s just how life goes.

and as always there’s an extreme to this type of thinking…like extreme conservatism…when you are so fearful of making a change without talking about it for a month, planning, testing, or whatever…that you end up with way too much _inaction_.

a moderate stance is the way to go.

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