Transforming Art into Science

Tom Limoncelli of The Practice of System and Network Administration (TPOSANA) and Time Management for System Administrators (TMfSA) fame recently wrote a provocative blog entry called Transforming Art into Science on his Everything Sysadmin site.

In it, he talks about how not only our profession is growing up from the wild days of yonder where nobody had solutions to the problems that plagued us, but we, as individuals and teams of individuals, grow up from system administration as artful expression and intuitive leaps bringing praise and glory for elegant hacks to a carefully planned, methodical, and scientific approach to managing systems in cold, dispassionately calculating ways.

Please go read his post, as it describes how we should approach system administration and some ideas on how to migrate in that direction for ourselves and our teams.