Networking allows us to explore the genius of others and share our own. As a small but vital community connected by a mutual desire to better ourselves, we gain a depth of knowledge about ambitious and energetic people across a wide breadth of disciplines. First we learn, and then we know.

Success in networking comes when we have so well grasped the genius of our fellows that we are able to describe their capabilities in ways that are compelling to a wider audience. We become mutual evangelists, able to spread our knowledge with confidence and conviction. We know one another’s stories and can tell them to great effect.

To do this takes time, attention, interaction, and a willingness to truly listen. If we are not inwardly convinced, those we talk to later will know. Uncertainty is very difficult to hide.

You have over half a million minutes to spend this year. Set aside enough to really understand what’s amazing about all those you see here today. You will have plenty of minutes remaining for the new opportunities you’ll receive, opportunities to demonstrate the genius you’ve developed through the millions that came before.

An important part of software development is having a way to consistent track bugs. Generally, there’s an identifier for easy reference, a short title, a more detailed description of the problem and how to reproduce it, the current status, and who is currently responsible for making sure the bug is headed towards a fix. All this goes in a database and becomes a kind of knowledge repository not only of the ongoing progress of improvement, but has interesting information about what customers do with the software.

Companies that actually test their software, track bugs, and spend time stabilizing the software before it’s put into production end up with a better product.

What about products and services that aren’t software? Why isn’t this process used for other things? Let’s imagine a bug in a non-software service:

ID: 234983

Title: Customer hold time exceeds five minutes on weekday afternoons.

Steps to Reproduce: Call company after 2pm but before 5pm any weekday. Select 1, then 3 for technical support. You’ll hear two rings, then a voice will pick up telling you about unusually high call volume and asking you to hold. The music will begin and in ten seconds, the voice will come back and give an estimated time for an answer. In over two dozen tests, this has never been less than five minutes and has been as much as thirty.

To me, hold time over five minutes is a bug in the customer service operation. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely there’s any way for the customer to file a bug, track progress, and get a resolution. Why aren’t these kinds of bugs handled the same way a software company handles bugs in their code?

You can apply the concept to your improving yourself. There’s no reason you couldn’t track bugs for things that have nothing to do with a product or service, or even with anyone else. Bug tracking is simply a method of identifying problems in a systematic way in pursuit of higher quality. Let’s consider another one:

ID: 2309

Title: I fail to practice guitar for the three days prior to my lessons.

Steps to Reproduce: Go to guitar lesson. Monitor practice time after the lesson. In days one and two, practice runs about thirty minutes each day. Days three and four average fifteen minutes. Days five, six, and seven (the day of the next lesson) will include no practice.

Identifying, describing, and tracking the problem force the problem into your face and help you understand it. From there, you are more likely to fix it. You can definitely resolve it. Many bug tracking systems for software include a variety of resolutions of which Fixed is only one. Other kinds of resolutions include Duplicate, Not reproducible, and a very important resolution option, Won’t Fix.

Another feature of many bug tracking systems is some form of priority level. At Microsoft, we tracked both severity and priority. Severity would be from 1 (Total application failure) to 4 (Cosmetic.) Priority ranged from 1 (Must fix before release) to 3 (Fix only if time permits.) The bug tracking system I use today with clients has seven priority levels with very descriptive descriptions like “Hurry up, people are waiting” and “Do when practical.”

Applying some level of priority (and maybe severity) lets you sort the bugs you track during a process called triage. Maybe the guitar practice bug doesn’t rise to the level of priority that you want to actually take the time to fix it compared to other things. You can decide to resolve it with Won’t Fix or you can just leave it on the list until you decide the priority is higher or higher priority items are all resolved.

Tracking bugs doesn’t have to be complicated or require an expensive bug tracking system. You could use index cards or a list on a piece of paper. Slightly higher tech would be a spreadsheet, such as with Excel or Google Apps, which allows for sorting quickly and easily. Like with most anything, find something that provides only what you need, but as much as you want.

Track bugs on everything and everything will be of higher quality. Not just your software.

As a columnist and book author, Mary’s career demonstrates the principles that we advocate through the articles in this magazine. Fortunately, Mary is so approachable that my request for an interview was promptly granted. I was very pleased at the opportunity and the results. I share that interview with you now.

Never Another Job: So, you haven’t had an office job since 1985. What was the last one you had?

Mary Roach: I worked half-time doing PR for the San Francisco Zoological Society. The best part of this job was that the office was in a trailer on zoo grounds, right next to Gorilla World. Given the sort of primates one usually has to deal with in PR jobs, I was pretty happy with my situation there by the gorillas. I wrote articles for the zoo membership magazine. I can still remember this one story about the experimental use of a laser scalpel to remove a plantar wart from the foot of one of the elephants. I watched the operation. The wart was as big as my head. It took the guy hours. This was my idea of a fun job and still sort of is.

NAJ: What motivated you to move to freelancing?

MR: What happened is that the job went from part-time to full-time, and I didn’t want to work full-time on staff anywhere. I’d been freelancing part-time, doing stories for the Sunday magazine of the SF Examiner newspaper, and didn’t want to give that up. So I quit. I would have preferred to hang on to the job a bit longer, but they wouldn’t let me.

NAJ: How did your mom (or dad, or favorite uncle, or¦) react?

MR: My parents didn’t care. I was of that generation where you just sort of checked in with your parents once or twice a year. Nothing I ever did really made much sense to my mother. She just wanted me to get married, go to church, have children, and the rest was irrelevant. I do recall some giddiness when a piece of mine was reprinted in Reader’s Digest.

The only person who really questioned my sanity was me. I have distinct memories of sitting on my living room floor, having no assignments, trying to work up my nerve to call an editor about a query I’d sent, and going, “What the fuck was I thinking, quitting my job??

NAJ: Have you had any moments of sheer despair where you wanted to just go get a steady paycheck again? If so, would you describe one in characteristically witty fashion?

MR: No, actually. Freelancing is/was a dream. It allowed me to travel all over the world, make my own hours, be creative, choose the things I do and the people I work with. The occasional financial panic was always worth it.

NAJ: How did you handle the shift from articles to books?

MR: With utter glee. Books are wonderfully freeing. With books, you are the product, and you are left alone to do what you want to do (and then pray that they like it). With magazines, the magazine is the product — not you. So you have to conform to the tone of the publication, the concerns of the advertisers, the interests of the readership, the editor’s quirks.

Financially the shift was untroubled. I got a nice advance for Stiff.

NAJ: Now that you’re writing books, do you still write articles?

MR: Occasionally. I write them as part of the publicity process. I’ll do something on a similar topic that will run at the same time the book comes out. Right now, I’m in between books and am doing some magazine pieces (for Outside and for National Geographic.)

NAJ: Beyond your writing, do you dabble (or more) in other kinds of work, whether volunteer or paid?

MR: Nope. I’m completely incompetent in all other fields.

NAJ: Do you have anything you want to say to the American Idol contestant who shares your name and interferes with Google searches about you?

MR: Please abandon your website at once. I need the URL.

NAJ: Your next book is tentatively titled Bonk: Sex in the Laboratory and due out in Spring, 2008. Explain if you will the connection between sex research and being quarantined as part of a visit to a swine farm.

MR: I am leaving this to your imagination. You will have to buy the book to find out!

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Stiff was a 2003 American Library Association Alex Award winner, and Spook was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for Outside, Wired, New Scientist, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She is a Frequent Contributor at the New York Times Book Review, a former columnist for Salon.com and a Contributing Editor at the science magazine Discover.