One of my colleagues wrote a great post about DBAs and developers, about how a DBA’s pushback on bad code isn’t to be difficult, it’s because they can see the future. I never thought of myself as a modern-day Nostradamus, predicting the future of system performance. Apparently I had another title besides DBA.

Working under pressure and with short deadlines often leads to short cuts. I’ve made them. I’ve implemented quick hot fixes. I’ve forgotten to port changes back to development databases. I’ve increased our tech debt load, just to solve a more immediate problem.

The challenge is cleaning things up later, when we have more deadlines and things to fix. It seems that we never have enough time to do the job the way we would like, and there’s certainly no time to go back later and fix things. Most management won’t make this a priority until things get so bad that we have to rewrite a lot of code (which we should never do).

DevOps, pipelines, automations, and yes, AI, helping can reduce some of the tech debt we create if we use those tools appropriately. Which is a big IF. Often we have more immediate pressures that prevent us from finding time to invest in our systems or in ourselves.

Getting a handle on bad code, checking it early, and doing so every time with automation can help prevent some of these issues, even when we are in a hurry. That’s why it pays to adapt our work and learn from others. Listen to that DBA that keeps your systems alive. Listen to the DevOps engineers that want you to automate things. Certainly, make them prove their suggestions work, but adopt those patterns. Learn to work with them, rather than against them.

They can see the future.

Steve Jones

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