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.

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