I’m going to attend the Denver Dev Days 2023 in June. I submitted a few sessions and got two picked. I’ll be doing these talks:
These are both sessions I enjoy.
If you’re in the Denver area, this is a fun developer learning event at the Microsoft office in the Tech Center. You can get more information here: Denver Dev Days 2023. Hope to see you there.
I delivered a presentation for the Houston SQL Server User Group tonight, virtually from Colorado. I’d love to go down, but couldn’t do it today.
The slides for the talk are here: BrandingDreamJob.pptx
I had fun and thanks to the Houston group and Paresh for having me.
A few interesting questions:
There is no right or wrong answer here. For me, I want to tie together my efforts, so if I help people on Twitter, I want to link my resume/profile to my Twitter account. It’s why I keep way0utwest and try to get that on new platforms. My profile says “Steve Jones”.
You can do what you want.
A great comment here from Paresh. I think this is a good way to get started and maybe sketch out a post. I would recommend this, though I think this needs to grow and improve.
However.
You don’t know if ChatGPT synthesized sentences and paragraphs from other information, which is what we all do. You also don’t know if it copied paragraphs verbatim from somewhere.
My advice if you use this is plan on editing the result and making it your own.
I’ve networked and built friendships online for years. In the SQL Server Central forums and similar places. Sometimes real time chat, sometimes asynchronous posts. However it works.
If you can get to know people with messaging or posts on a platform, that’s great. If you come to a virtual group meeting, or even a company meeting, early, you can spend a few minutes in chat or live chatting with them. Ask a question, share something, solicit an opinion, or comment on something.
In busy chats, or even aloud, you might @ someone or address them. In chat, @Steve, that was an interesting comment. Aloud, “Steve, have you ever used automatic seeing in an AG?”
Setting up a local web server was something that I haven’t done in a long time and this was really easy. This post shows how to do this with a command line node web server.
Most software that needs a web server sets one up for you. This is pretty easy, and if I have a web app in Visual Studio, it will start up its own server when you run the app. If you had to set your own up, IIS was in many versions of Windows, but it wasn’t a simple thing to configure and manage.
I like simple.
I needed to just serve a file over http to test something. I could have done this by uploading a file to this blog or somewhere else, but I was hoping to keep this small and portable.
As always, I started with Google. I found a bunch of articles on Apache, python (should have tried this) and others. Then I saw this short article on a test web server on Windows. I looked, and this seemed to be something simple. I had node installed, so really I ran this:
npm install -g http-server
This installed somewhere. I had created a new folder in d:\http, but the web server was installed elsewhere. When I typed “http-server” in the command line, it seemed to be running. I saw this:
I created a quick html file, index.html, with this content:
and voila, I had a web server.
It’s basic, but any file I drop into d:\http can be served over http by entering the file name in the path. You can see in the image above, I was testing moving SQL Server backups. That URL actually downloaded that file from my browser.
This showed how you can set up a server with node. It’s quick and easy, and flexible. I can set this up as needed for tests without any big config. If you need this, here’s one way to test your own web stuff.
Conveying information is a bit of an art and science. Many of us have written reports, graphs, charts, etc. at some point in our career. We’ve likely created some good ones and some bad ones that our clients love or hate. Perhaps if you’re like me, you make a small attempt and then ask someone else to clean it up for you.
However, visualizations are important. In the modern world, many people want a visualization instead of a table of data, or at least alongside a table. That means we want to ensure we are conveying information well and not just picking the prettiest picture.
One interesting thing to consider is how different types of graphs affect how we process information. There was a post from Madiera Data that looked at how different graphs helped someone analyze the data. It starts with bar graphs, which have been very popular in the last few years. They are appearing in lots of business dashboards, news articles, and more. They can be useful in some situations, but not all. Especially when trying to compare the different segments.
Instead, other visualizations can be better. The article shows table graphs are working well. I conducted my own experiment with visuals, and I found a line graph was easier to use. However, that was for my data. Your data might need different visuals if you use it differently.
I don’t think there is a best graph, but there can be a best graph for a particular data set and a particular client(s). The way someone makes decisions based on a visual could dictate what works best. That’s my advice: work with your clients.
For good general advice, I think you should lean on https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/, Meagan, and resources such as Edward Tufte, who have spent a lot of time thinking, experimenting, and understanding how to convey information visually. You could learn a lot from them.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
