Attending technical conferences can provide the system administrator with a number of benefits. A good conference can broaden or deepen your skills, expose you to the state of the art, and provide networking opportunities and some valuable recharging and entertainment away from the office grind. And it can be fun.

At conferences, I tend to choose training sessions on topics or problems that maybe we don't have today, or haven't identified yet as a weakness or opportunity. For example, we don't conduct our own penetration testing or web application reviews (we have a dedicated Security team for that), but therein lies an opportunity for our admins to become trained, or certainly more aware of the practices in this area that can make us more secure. "Many hands make light work" and all... So I signed up for session on penetrating and exploiting web applications.

The tough part (and potentially a cause of expectation mismatch with your boss) might be your ability to return from the conference, head aswim with ideas, get dropped back into the fray, yet still find the time and energy to share what you've learned with your team. "We spent $X,000 and what do we have to show for it?"

What to do?

• Make your course guides and handouts available to your team as soon as you return.
• Send a summary of the classes you took and their potential applicability in your world to your team. Keep it short, they're busy.
• Over the next few weeks or months, as you have opportunities, revisit your course materials and consider them in the light of your current job role or interests.
• Consider teaching a "potpourri" session where you cover the "5 Coolest Things I Learned At Usenix", for example, to give people a jumping-off point for new ideas.
• If you're shy of speaking in public, share that information on a team wiki or internal blog. I'd do that anyway, teaching or not, since your teammates may vary in how they consume new ideas.
• If you decide to "teach", don't attempt to reteach the course. Unless you took copious notes, you'll likely miss something teaching from someone else's powerpoint deck.

While the kids watched Tarzan this afternoon, I spent about an hour re-reading the presentation notes from Dan Geer's Measuring Security session at USENIX in June of last year. In light of new responsibilities and changing emphases in my job since then, I came away with 9 new tasks or ideas that my team can or should do. They're now on the GTD list and in the pipe to make us more aware and hopefully make our infrastructure more secure.

Some days we move the platform/product/team/company forward. Some days we tend the garden. Both are needed. My exercise the past two weeks has been the planning and prioritization of the my group's infrastructure projects for the year. I'm lucky in that my boss and I are sympatico, seeing the opportunities and shortcomings in much the same way. Still, it's hard to say what the landscape will look like in October - that's a whole nine months away. Yet, we try. I'm balancing the garden-tending against the big initiatives, trying to not let the weeds overtake us.

This time of year, starting with a fresh list (although with some carryover) emphasizes the personal satisfaction that I find in my position. I'd never plead indispensability, but it's good to be dedicated and focused and know that we'll get support for most of the good projects and finish them. Looking back at what we did in 2006, project-wise, puts a soft-focus on the year and takes the edge off days of host recoveries, difficult on-call weeks, and the occasional pettiness of daily corporate life.

I've thought a lot about how to make a career. I have friends who are attorneys, engineers, doctors, and accountants. Their professional paths are well-defined. Knowledge and skill are prized among them. Bigger cases, projects, and deals are the hallmarks of growing and progressing in those fields. It's human nature probably to compare jobs, so I weigh my days as a system administrator often, and check the progression. In my field, unless you head into management, the careers progress with projects and innovation. Are the projects technically challenging? Do they move us forward or are you tending garden? Are they bold or simply incremental? These are the things I consider.

So what am I doing? I can't very well list my projects here, but the areas of focus are very buzzword-compliant. To wit:

• Privacy and Security
• Integration and Standardization
• Redundancy (with resulting service availability goodness)
• Reporting and Monitoring

Each of these areas has a bunch of verbs, "improve", "upgrade", "migrate", "decomm" (my favorite!), and objects such as mail and DNS. Some of the projects are technical challenges, while others simply need a long span of attention to finish - no wondering off after that next shiny thing.

The interesting part of this whole exercise, beyond moving us forward, is the balancing of company interests and goals with my professional goals, interests, and skills. Somehow it all works out, maybe I'm good with puzzles, and we now have a set of marching orders.