I forgot to mention that I will be speaking at OTUG on April 19th! I will be speaking on "Living With Systems in Production: Avoiding Heartbreak in Long-Term Relationships With Your Code"

From the summary of the talk:

Everything changes after Release 1.0. One batch of consultants leave, key developers jockey to get themselves reassigned, and the free-wheeling development environment is replaced by the painful rigor of operations. Or, at least, it should be. Systems in production require a different kind of care and feeding. If you have to live with a system in production, your quality of life is largely determined by the things you put in place before Release 1.0. This talk covers the topics that will give you God-like powers over your production systems. If you are an architect or developer who has ever put a system in production--or expects to put a system into production--then this talk is for you.

Much of this will be derived from my experiences at Totality and Best Buy. Spending time in operations gave me a great education about building systems to run, instead of building them to pass QA.

Technorati Tags: operations, OTUG, speaking