Author: way0utwest

I’ve always thought that you should invest where you can. Make a little effort now that will pay back later, in life and in your job.

I read a blog recently from Mike Walsh that talks about making that investment. If you do something that can save time later, that can be of great benefit in your job. I’ve heard this same argument for people when developing software. If you take more time to architect and test, you’ll save time later on.

I agree with that, but it’s not always that simple. Should you automate a report that your boss wants once a week? If you take 5 minutes in Excel to build it from a query and you think it would require about 4 hours to build the report, set up the email automation, test it, etc, is it worth doing? That’s a years worth of time to do the report at once as opposed to your 5 minutes a day. Plus there’s the chance that things will fail and you’ll lose a couple more hours during the year maintaining it. Not such a simple choice now.

In that example, I’d probably continue to do it manually until it became a pain point. 5 minutes a week is annoying at times, but my boss might change things, he might get tired of it, or he might require it to happen when I’m on vacation. In those cases I think it would then make sense to build a report.

If I do things repeatedly, it does make some sense to automate them, or make an investment that saves me time later. However you can’t invest in everything and you have to make choices. That means taking a few minutes to think about how big an investment this is, to what degree does it help, and how important is it to making your job easier. If it seems worthwhile, do it. If not, deal with it as it comes up.

Eventually you start to build a level of experience that helps you judge what’s worth investing in and what’s not. You’ll never get that 100% right, but don’t be afraid to let some things go and deal with them as one-offs, even regularly, if the investment doesn’t make sense to you.

One of the things that I thought about doing after the 2008 PASS Summit was to bring someone along with me as a photographer/videographer that would take lots of pictures and video of the event. I thought about bringing my wife, but that didn’t work out and I dropped the ball on that task.

And I regret it.

Coming back, going through some of the images and video I did get made me realize how much I missed. I rarely stopped to take video, I’d forgotten my tripod support, I got distracted, and ended up not getting much in the way of media from the event.

Pat Wright walked around with his camera and got a lot of great shots, but he wasn’t always near me, and I realized that I missed a lot of shots.

So another goal for 2010. I need to carry a video camera and real camera (DSLR or other fast response camera) to events and make sure that I get some footage. I want to get some responses and impressions from people, more shots of the setup, the signs, and people milling around.

And some “manamana” quotes from people as well. I’d like a little Muppet video to come out of 2010.

I used to really try not to over-license in the small companies I worked at. It seems I’d spend a few days every quarter or two counting up usage, asking people what they did, looking at logs, and eventually calculating our needs. Then compare the needs to what we’d purchased and I’d price out software. Typically I came to this conclusion.

License everyone.

It didn’t make sense to try and manage Office applications or SQL Server CALs. It was work, and it distracted me from other things I could be doing to make the company more productive. If we were over-licensed by a few hundred dollars a person, it was a waste of my time. And what I found was that we were rarely overlicensed, and as soon as I didn’t give someone Powerpoint or a SQL Server CAL, they’d request it.

I know that licensing is expensive, and not everyone needs all software, but there is a core set of software, and this likely includes SQL Server CALs, that should just be purchased for everyone and then ignored. It’s too hard to do anything else, and it’s likely a waste of time.

I do think that you ought to try and combine SQL Servers where possible, and share the instance with multiple databases, but I don’t think that it’s the same with clients. Get ‘em and forget ‘em.

I have a pretty good administrative system here at SQLServerCentral for managing the site. The upgrades we made in 2007 really simplified some of the back end work, and while there are bugs and issues, it has made it easy for people to submit articles, scripts, and questions online. I typically have a queue of work that I dig through on a regular basis to edit articles, schedule things, etc.

However a number of people continue to send me articles through email. That’s OK, and it’s actually easier for me to edit things that way than with our online editor.

However that leaves me with two different workflows for articles, and no good way to sync them up. Especially as I don’t have meta data that allows me to determine where an article came from. Without that, I can’t easily feedback changes to someone. If I enter all articles in the system myself, then I struggle to effectively communicate with authors, who might be expecting emails or system messages on their content.

I’m behind again editing things, mostly from offline submissions. I was well caught up before the PASS Summit with my online submissions, but I’d dropped the ball on email submissions and have a few that are a month old.

So this week is article catch up week, to the detriment of other work.

Except writing, of course. I can’t forget about that.