Multipurpose Everything

Tech guru Troy Hunt discusses how he "optimised [his] life to make [his] job redundant." The post is lengthy and I won't implement everything he mentions, but I pass word along because it is thought-provoking. I found myself thinking, what a great idea! more than once. And, even when I thought an idea wasn't for me, I gained some clarity because I thought about why that was the case.

Below is part of one tactic I particularly like, and which gives my short post the title above:

I Multipurpose Absolutely Everything I Can

You never know when you might need -- or already have -- one of these. (Cropped from image by Nick ter Haar, via Unsplash, license.)

... When I wrote the You're Deploying It Wrong series on TeamCity, I was actually building out Pfizer's CI [Continuous Integration --ed] infrastructure. Writing the blog was the way I learned the ins and outs of TeamCity; it made me more effective in the office because I was publicising my views on the CI approach and opening them up to public scrutiny. I had to get things right in a way I didn't have to within the corporate environment. Partly that's because people were usually too polite to disagree (remember, it was the APAC region I looked after and culturally, you've very unlikely to be told if someone disagrees with you) and partly it's because I was the smartest guy in the room. Let me caveat that to try and avoid sounding conceited: pretty much everything at Pfizer was outsourced and the internal technical knowledge was gradually carved out (including with my departure) so bar one or two notable exceptions, there just weren't people there with the experience to voice an opinion. It's hard to debate the merits of build agents and MS Web Deploy with people who live in PowerPoint and Outlook! Incidentally, when I left and handed over management of the CI environment, it was that blog series that was my documentation -- "Here you go guys, here are the server names and everything else you need is on troyhunt.com". So I got public recognition for CI expertise, Pfizer got a great build environment, I made the handover a heap easier and I later got consulting work in the same space because of my public profile on it. [link omitted, format edits]

Wow! That's a lot of bang for the buck for some independent on-the-job training.

I have sometimes found new uses for past work, but the above example takes that to a whole new level. I am not that familiar with Hunt's work or other writing, so I have no idea whether he was this forward-thinking at the outset -- or observant enough along the way to see the advantages in what he was doing and press for more. Either way, I'm impressed and grateful that he put that out.

At the very least, simply being aware that one can leverage a part of a project this way makes one able to see or create similar opportunities for oneself.

-- CAV