Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Sabbatical–Not the Flagpole I remembered

    My employer, Red Gate Software, offers a sabbatical to their employees, and this year I’m taking mine. I’ll be gone from June 2 – July 14, away from work, but I’ll be blogging here about my experience.

    I finally got my DVD and drawing for the flagpole.

    Photo May 12, 9 34 52 PM

     

    I saw down and watched it one day, just out of curiosity. It was some of what I remembered, but some I didn’t and I learned a few things. One was that the base, which I was thinking was a 4×4 base sticking up, isn’t what Norm used. I must have confused this with another article I read, because this is a metal one.

    That’s a decision I’ll have to make. I wasn’t planning on welding a base together, though I have a fairly expert friend that I’m sure would help me get that done. It’s tempting to expand on the sabbatical and add on some metal skills. I think some of this will depend on how quickly I get the basic pole built. Once I have the thing glued up and square, I can then measure for the base and plan. No matter what I choose, I want to get it into the ground and cemented before the end of June.

    I guess that leads me to the next step, getting a plan together.

    Most of the rest of the DVD made sense and was what I remembered. I’ll need to build some sawhorses and get a space prepped to work. I’m thinking in front of the garage, just to the side of where I’ll pull out with the car. That would let me easily access tools and power, and also be convenient. I could also easily cover things with a tarp if needed.

  • Sabbatical Flagpole

    My employer, Red Gate Software, offers a sabbatical to their employees, and this year I’m taking mine. I’ll be gone from June 2 – July 14, away from work, but I’ll be blogging here about my experience.

    When I wrote about my sabbatical decisions, I was excited to get moving. However I still had plenty of other work to do, and with a few other commitments, I was slow to get started. Last week I documented my college progress for step 1. This week, I’m looking at my third item, and independent project.

    I want to build a flagpole. Years ago I saw an episode of The New Yankee Workshop where Norm Abrams built a flagpole. I thought it was neat, and I’ve wanted to build one. Around that time we moved to my current house, which had an aluminum flagpole, and it didn’t seem like I needed to build another one, but times have changed.

    A few years ago my flagpole broke in the wind. I’d added a small aerometer to the top, and I think that was just enough weight to cause it to snap in a high wind storm. Since then, I haven’t replaced it, thinking I’ll build a pole one summer. This is that summer.

    Surprisingly I didn’t find much online about building a flagpole, so I decided to order the plans from The New Yankee Workshop. I did that recently, and once they arrive, I’ll start getting supplies ready for my project.

  • Failure

    Tim O’Reilly has written some great pieces over the years on many aspects of technology and change. I’ve followed him for years and I’ve enjoyed many of his thoughts and views on our industry. I think he’s thoughtful and truly envisions the amazing things that technology can do to change the world, mostly for the better. I think it’s worth randomly reading through (or listening to) some of his thoughts.

    He recently wrote a long piece on the failures he’s had in business with his company, O’Reilly Media. It’s an interesting tale that looks at process, at mis-communications, and business. I think about my career, looking back on past decisions, looking at the way in which companies I’ve been associated with are run, and at the way that others around me have worked. I realize that there are many failures to go with the successes in my life. The piece made me take a good, hard look at my past, drawing parallels to the ways in which leadership at O’Reilly has worked as well as how it has come up short.

    This week, Mr. O’Reilly’s look back led me to this question, which I don’t expect to get many responses from. However I do hope it makes you think, and examine where you are, how you got here, and perhaps where you’d like to go from here.

    How have you failed in your career?

    Maybe you should compare your own experiences to those of Mr. O’Reilly, and think about how you might manage your own business, the business of running your career, differently.

    Like many people, at times in my career I have bounced  from job to job, often taking a position that was available rather than deliberately thinking about my future and moving in that direction. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last ten years, it’s that I should think deliberately think about what I like and don’t at work. I should honestly state to myself what I want to do and what isn’t worth the pay. 

    I re-examine my career each year, and seriously consider alternatives. I’ve been lucky in that I work for an amazing company and have a great job. No other alternative has measured up against my job so far.

    However I also realize that I’ve had some failures before this success, and I hope not to repeat many of them in the future by learning from my past.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Why Don’t We Have Better Practices?

    This essay isn’t quite Safe For Work (SFW) and might offend a few people, so be warned, but I found it somewhat humorous. It’s a look at all the insanity and problems with programming and software in the world. It certainly makes me glad that those of us working on software don’t actually build tangible objects like bridges.

    However the piece did make me think a bit. Why do we have so many conflicts and strange practices in our software systems? Why haven’t we decided upon more good security practices that we widely disseminate and use? Why doesn’t much of our code follow established patterns, like those that we might use to build a bridge?

    I think ultimately it’s because of the ease with which we can “try” something out in code. Our industry allows us to easily build mock ups of ideas, which often get altered and enhanced as we test out ideas to the point where we don’t have time to start over from the beginning in a new way. We continue to build and grow our systems like some sort of bizarre Winchester House, often afraid or uninterested in questioning the conglomeration of architectures that might be contained inside a single application. Even databases are not immune, containing multiple data models and substructures that may or may not mesh smoothly with each other, and often don’t contain much DRI at at all. I also think it’s the NIY syndrome that so many technologists have.

    It seems as though the more we learn about computing, and more important and embedded software becomes in our world, the less we seek to constrain the innovation and impose any sort of engineering or strong discipline on our systems. It makes me think we’ll never get to the highly integrated, and well running computer systems of the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.