About My Father's Business

As one chapter of my life closes, another begins. I was released from the Bishopric last Sunday and called to the High Council. Two days ago was my first High Council meeting and as you may expect, the Stake Presidency put me right to work. I was given responsibility to oversee missionary work within the stake, among a few other things. The Stake President explained that this assignment is unique from many of the other High Council assignments. He counseled me to take initiative and be actively engaged in moving the work forward. Sure, there are some things like arranging meals for the full-time missionaries, that will simply come to me and need to be done, but in most other aspects I was given authority and encouragement to make it my own. Shortly after High Council meeting ended, I went with the rest of the Stake leadership to a ward conference for one of the wards in our stake. I didn't have any specific assignments or responsibilities, so I simply attended as a representative...

Over the course of my career as a software developer, I have had many different roles and responsibilities. I have had the opportunity to build new software, replace legacy systems, and many other unique projects. Similarly, the department for which I work has had many different employees filling many different roles. I am currently a member of the one-man team know as the maintenance team. In a nutshell, my job is to field all of the bug reports from each of our various systems and fix them. It's a much different paradigm than writing new code. I've heard it described as being the detective in a crime movie where you're also the murderer. I recently found myself working on a maintenance task to replace some old technology that is being phased out. As part of that effort, I was required to make some fairly extensive changes to one of our applications. More than would normally be required when fixing bugs. It's our standard practice to have your changes reviewed by a ...