Essential read: 51 Insights, Perceptions, and a Few Things That I Think Are Important to Professional and Personal Progress

I highly recommend this article. Stephen Abrams clearly explicates several of my own personal beliefs and expounds on many others.

Some highlights:

#20: Iteration is everything

In this new web-enabled (web-dominated) world of information service and delivery, we are mostly dealing with technologies that are still in grade school (less than ten years old) and many of the major players range from pre-school to primary grade age. We just are not going to get it permanently right with a few development cycles. We are in a state of continuous development state and this will likely last for many years if not forever.

#24: Prefer action over study

If you or your team is studying something to death – remember that death was not the original goal! I have been in libraries where their systems folks in the host institution were studying whether to upgrade from Windows 95 to 98 in 2005! Scary! You see studies today about cloud initiatives that take too long and delay the savings.

#34: Don’t assume – TEST

You may believe that you understand your customer. You may even have been a customer or ‘ordinary’ person or ‘normal’ user in a past life. You may think that you know what the user will do in nearly every situation. Don’t believe it. There is nothing more humbling than discovering the infinite variety of user paths and behaviors and thinking patterns out there in the real world.

(I find this one is important for ANY technical system - don’t assume it works, test it and make sure it works.)