Introduction

Nothing could be closer to the truth.

The modern business landscape, in an economy that has been beaten nearly to death, requires skills normally reserved for elite military special operation teams. With their ability to adapt and their training on how to do everything with almost nothing in the worst possible environments draws a strong comparison with what the modern IT professional is asked to accomplish for businesses on a daily basis. Better, Stronger, faster, slicker, and best of all cheaper and oh by the way with 10 people less then it would realistically take to do this and in half the time. The pressure is intense, the margin for error, nil.

Your team requires truly epic survival skills, and that is what we will discuss here.

This will be a weekly blog discussing how to survive in the modern IT industry. Everything from finding jobs, to keeping them, from maintaining existing systems, to developing super systems. Difference we will discuss how to do it the 'right way' while still managing to come in on time and on budget.
We will discuss things we can do to save ourselves a lot of pain as professional developers, and make us look like nothing short of miracle workers. We will get into thinking ahead, account for the future while maintaining our project schedule and not killing our Project Managers.

All topics will be touched in all possible ways. We will get into very general topics of 'Good System Design' from Business Analysis all the way through Database design, Code Design, to Quality Assurance, User Acceptance Testing, Deployment procedures, etc.

In other words we will talk EVERYTHING.

My hope is to provide some good, educational, and entertaining topics that spark thought and conversation around the blogs that lead us all to surviving more as IT Professionals.

So who the hell am I to tell you how to do things? No one really, just another rank and file code monkey. Have .NET will travel.

Seriously, My name is Jeffrey Pryciak. I have been in IT for 12 years and held every position from helpdesk support, to server ops, programming and IT management.

Our small programming team has dubbed ourselves 'Rogue Developers'. We are not married to any specific methodology, programming model, language or tool set. We bring what ever is best to the situation to the table, if we don't know it, we learn it. It is an attitude that has allowed us to design some of the coolest applications our company has seen.

Over the last year and a half my professional forays have led me into pretty large project where I have coordinated with at least 30 people, in 7 different business entities in 10 cities on 2 continents. It ended with all the classical roles that one finds in a large project, and It was one of the most technically complex things I have ever had to deal with. We had many successes and many failures both in procedure and technical aspects. Retrospectively thinking about this project is what has inspired me to create this blog.

So stay tuned friends, this is gonna get good. My plan is to publish a good topic early every weekend so that the next week leads to spirited and heated debate.

I appreciate passion and love a good argument. All I ask is that we keep this professional, keep your comments clean and not personal, and lets have a great time.

Peace.

-JP,

P.S. Just to establish my full geek credentials.....

Smolderthorn US
80 Death Knight :)