It may seem slightly “odd”, out of character with the times, that I spend so much time on the subject of fundamentals. And. Yet. Without them. Where would we be?
The History Channel has had a wonderful series recently entitled “Life After People”. They posited, put forward, the idea that all of a sudden Man is gone, completely, and utterly. And. Given that condition, they then asked themselves “What would happen to everything else on the planet?”: pets, such as dogs and cats, cattle, sea life, structures, cities, and so on. They then step through major and minor catastrophic events in various increments (1 year, 100 years, etc). If you have an opportunity to watch it, do so.
While viewing one of the episodes I asked myself the following questions: “But what if not everyone is gone? What if only the majority of mankind vanished? What would the survivors do?”
The answer to this particular doomsday scenario was: they would have to revert to the most fundamental fundamentals there are for survival: Food To Eat And Shelter To Keep. There would be no more luxuries, no more TV, no more iPods, no more police, no more armies, no more hospitals, no more grocery stores, no more … nothin’ … except a few societal leftovers … for a short while. And, of course, no more IT.
All of the niceties of life that we know and know of would eventually evaporate. The survivors’ would be forced to focus solely on the daily grind of, well, bare bones survival. Pretty fundamental.
And.
The fundamentals that I address herein are nearly down at that level, what you might call “IT survivor basics”. Many of the ideas I have, and have yet to, discuss are at the “what you have to do” to survive, let alone flourish in IT level. Most of the subjects described on this site are not optional, they are absolute down to scraped bare earth basics, they are such foundational elements that IT groups cannot exist for long without them.
And.
You know they are foundational elements because they apply to more than “just IT”. The majority of the fundamentals discussed on this site apply to engineering, architecture, construction, project planning, and so on. That my focus is on IT is because I know IT, inside and out; regardless of the latest platform or whiz-bang software gadget. A guiding principle, for me, in choosing subjects for this site is that the IT fundamentals discussed have to have breadth beyond IT, i.e. they have to apply to all of engineering and in some cases all of business (such as NotesOn: Risk Management – Risk Analysis). IT is an engineering discipline after all.
Remember, when you read the word fundamental think “Food To Eat Shelter To Keep”. They are non-optional guiding principles. If. You wish to survive and flourish in IT.
Since I brought it up, let’s go off on what may seem to be a bit of tangent for a moment and go back to the notion of some catastrophic event, though not as severe as in “Life After People”. Possibly it’s not comfortable to think about but there is a point to it. Assume that, of a sudden, few folks are around, that most everyone vanished into thin air in some manner such as was at one time suggested of the Anasazi Indians of the New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona area. And there you are, left holding the bag as it were, an empty bag.
What do you do first? If you have shelter already you would want to protect it, assuming its defensible; if you don’t have shelter you would need to find some. And water, of course, that you would need as well, a lot of it so you would have to obtain and protect a source of water. Presumably you would have at least some food on hand already and you would want to protect that as well, plus obtain more — no one has years and years of food stored in their homes so you would need to find a source, preferably many sources. Grocery stores would be a place to start, but some of the other survivors are going to have the same thoughts. But. When you go out to rummage through whatever is left over are those others with the same notion going to be friendly? Or are they going to be greedy and want to haul away every last can of baked beans and cat food they can find? Just like you were planning on doing? Maybe yes, maybe no. So you’d better be prepared to defend yourself in case they are not so nice. That means guns and ammunition. Do you know how to use a gun? Do you even have one? Or are you so secure in your belief that society will exist forever and the police will always be but a phone call away that you have no need to ever so much as touch such “icky” things as weapons? Well, that is certainly your choice but if you don’t have at least a semi-automatic or a “six-gun” around you’d better figure on having something handy. At least maybe a bow and arrows? Remember that part about protecting your home? Throwing rocks from your roof won’t get you very far. Speaking of which, how do you get from your “home base” to the grocery store? That requires a working vehicle and good supply of gasoline; unless you have an electric car in which case it will be useless in short order as one can assume that without folks to run the power plants electricity won’t be available for very long. And what do you do when the gasoline runs out and the grocery stores are stripped bare? Do you know how to grow crops? Do you know how to hunt and skin out a cow or a deer and then preserve the meat for future use? Do you know what plants and fruits are edible? Would you know a blackberry bush if you saw it, or have they always only come in neat little plastic baskets. And what about medicines? Do you know even basic first-aid?
Issues such as above are the rock-bottom fundamentals of raw, naked survival in a post disaster scenario. By the way, we don’t even need a doomsday incident to force you into a situation not too dissimilar. I used to live in Southern California, major earthquake country. The recommended absolute rock bottom minimum food, water, medical and sanitation supplies needed on hand at all times was at least one week, for each person, plus any pets. Do you know how many folks had even half that on hand? Not many. Only a small percentage.
I would be willing to be that unless you live in “the country” that you would have a very difficult time surviving any sort of major disaster without outside help, because … you have lost if you ever knew them most or all of your fundamental survival skills. For you to make it you would have to relearn them, ignoring all of the “arm chair” philosophical discussions about “animal rights” and “tree rights” and so forth and you would have to get over the notion of “waiting for the cops” to show up, and so forth. You would also have to be or become a team leader and organize fellow survivors into a tight knit group; being a “lone wolf” makes for great movies but significantly cuts your chances of survival, significantly.
Does this make sense? The concept of fundamentals? They’re what you use to survive with. They are what you build a future on. They are what success is built on, long term success. Unless you plan on discovering a long lost gold mine somewhere or you have some unknown rich relative who you are absolutely sure is going to drop a few million in your lap next week, you need to think long term success. And that requires knowing fundamentals. And if you don’t know them, then finding or figuring them out.
Let’s move this up a couple of notches now. Let’s suppose that you walk into an IT “area” and there is no one there, no one around with any real experience. But you still have to get the job done. Or, you have to do it all yourself. What fundamentals are you going to need to know? Which ones have you lost, or never learned, that you would need to depend on in order to survive in IT, let alone flourish and prosper? I mean the down to earth, lever and pulley type fundamentals that could get your IT group going and get quality products out the door. Where do you start? Do you just jump in and start coding? Spending days, nights, weekends, holidays heads down over the keyboard? Without talking to anyone else? Do you just wing-it and build something that you like and then hope someone else does? Do you take whatever someone else has done before you and shove it out the door? What do you build the system on, assuming you know what to build? What infrastructure, what databases, what networking, what languages, what … Do you just slap something together and figure you’ll “fix it” later? What will your users say, and think, really think, if you do that? What if there is a team in place but you don’t know their development environment, their database platforms, their networks, etc., at all? How would you succeed? Would you succeed? There are many more questions than this that will pop up and you will need answers.
When you know your fundamentals you can adapt to changing situations and conditions and build a future on potential opportunities. But only if you know your fundamentals.
And.
That. Is what this site is all about.
I don’t know all the answers but I do know many of them because I have spent the time to track down and consider the subject of fundamentals in general and IT fundamentals in particular. With your help I believe we can nail them all.
Hope this helps. And may you have a happy and prosperous 2010.
DP Harshman
