Liveblogging LISA'07

So here I am in Dallas TX, at the annual LISA conference for systems administrators. It's been a great conference so far, even though I haven't gotten out of the hotel since I arrived on Sunday evening. Heck, I haven't gotten off the lobby/2nd/3rd floor zone! I love it when I can do all my teaching early in a conference and then just relax and enjoy myself. I did two half-day sessions on Monday, and both went really well-- interested and involved participants, and compliments afterwards. I started off with my tried and true favorite Practical Project Management, that I 've been teaching and refining for several years now. I estimate that I've trained over 200 IS professionals in project management at this point, with typical class sizes of 45 - 50, and in one case, 89 or 90 attendees. This year we didn't do the advanced class, Project Troubleshooting, although we had a great session of that in June at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference. The afternoon tutorial was a fairly new class that I developed in 2005, Problem-Solving for IT Professionals. We had a really spirited class discussion, and I was pointed to a great resource after class, a book (and Wikipedia entry about the book) called How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, by Gregor Polya. It has a set of rules for generalizing problems, and looks useful in building more problem-solving processes. In the class I teach generalized processes, which I hesitate to call "patterns" as they're not sufficiently rigorously expressed yet, such as server-client interactions, and introduce modified process taskflow diagrams that aid in debugging. It's possible to debug applications that you have never seen before if you have a strong understanding of fundamental patterns of design and interaction in computer applications and systems.