I had to run out of town, as noted in my other post. So you get to read An Azure Outage. Are things better? The cloud more reliable? You happy?
Author: way0utwest
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A Last Minute Trip to the EU
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer trips, I can be on the road a lot. As it is, I’ve flown across the Atlantic six times this year, and now I’m coming back from a 7th.
I wasn’t planning on this trip. However, life doesn’t always go as planned and we have to roll with the changes.
My daughter is heading to Lueven University (KU Leuven) for graduate school. My wife and one of my sons planned to take her and help her get her apartment, bank, etc. set up for school and do a little tourist time. Her other brother decided to go as well, with the plan to leave on 10 Sept and come back the next week.
I was left out because I have to be in San Diego on Mon, 14 Sept. I have had too many 50 hour trips to other countries, so I was going to stay home.
However, my wife got injured from a horse and can’t fly. She’s OK, just uncomfortable and flying isn’t an option. We were planning on using her status to take extra clothes, better seats, etc. Without that status, it’s a very expensive trip (or an uncomfortable one). Since we had an award ticket, moving me into her slot (with the same status) works. It also gives the kids someone to lean on.
So I flew Thur to Brussels, helped get things set, and I’m back home today, making my way to San Diego. The kids were going to Paris today, so they won’t miss me.
Life in the EU is rough, isn’t it?
In any case, republished editorial, vacation day taken, and it’s going to be a long day today.
If you can avoid it, I recommend against 4 days trips to Europe from the US (or the reverse).
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I Don’t Want To Do XX
Every job is a job on some days.
I’ve said this to my kids and others I’ve mentored over the years. I’ve probably written that here, and I truly believe it. When you work at a job, some days are bad days. There are always days you don’t want to do the work. There are also likely some days that you dread starting. Whether you work for someone else or run your own business, there will be times you aren’t completely in control of the work and wonder how you ended up in this situation. Even if you’re self-employed, you have clients that sometimes dictate your day.
I’ve worked for myself in the past, and I currently have an amazing job as an advocate/architect with Redgate Software. I get to travel all over and talk about AI readiness, DevOps / Database Change Management, Database Intelligence, and random SQL Server stuff. Usually it’s a lot of fun, but at times it can be hard. If you see me not engaging at an event, it might be that I’ve been on the road a lot while still having lots of other work commitments to manage. I might be worn out and need a break. Those often are tough days. (FYI – We always need good people and have a few spots open.)
Lately I’ve been hearing people talk a bit about AI and how it sometimes takes the joy out of work. That might be because it’s doing the stuff you enjoy doing. This conversation with Casey Muratori on using AI is revealing. He’s not using AI because he loves programming. He doesn’t want to have AI doing his coding.
That’s interesting, and it got me thinking about daily tasks, the things we do and what we might send off to be handled by an assistant.
What things do you not want to do at your job?
That’s the question today. Let me know what things you wish you could get someone else to do, or some robot to handle for you. I know lots of people wish they had a robot to do the laundry or dishes at home. What tasks at work would you want a trustworthy helper to handle?
Steve Jones
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The Book of Redgate: Hours
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and one of the things I appreciate is that we value outcomes.
One of our values is:
.The text on the next page continues the sentence:
What you achieve is more important than how long it takes.
Building software is challenging, and building software that can be sold is difficult. We’ve had lots of successes and some not-successes. However, we work towards building the software and celebrate the achievements.
However.
If you’ve built software, you know it usually takes longer than expected and people want it sooner. Many teams know me as the “do it faster” guy. I know software takes time, but I also know that in the business of selling software, we need focus on things that are useful and valued by customers.
I don’t complain that it takes too long to build everything, but I do press on the focus to get the important things done first, which aren’t always the fun or easy things.
Ultimately we as a company appreciate when we have something done and working for customers. We don’t go back and lessen the importance of the effort because of the time it took. We do look to see if we can do better in the future, which is something I’d hope most software engineers would do.
I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.
Voice of the DBA 