Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 15 Aug 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to make some tasty food for someone who will appreciate it.

    My daughter left for college last week. A few days before she left, I asked her what she might like for dinner. She is gluten sensitive, so while I can cook a lot of things, I often need to modify or prepare things for her.

    She asked for a few things, which I enjoy cooking and the rest of the family enjoys. We did a tasty Greek dinner:

    I also made pineapple sorbet, which everyone enjoyed.

  • Initial FSD Thoughts with a Tesla Subscription

    This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

    I subscribed to the Tesla FSD in July, since I had a couple trips planned where I’d be driving longer distances on the highways. I wanted to see how well it worked and what value there was from the subscription.

    Cost-wise, this is a good way to try things out. The FSD cost is US$12,000. If I subscribe, it is US$199. Worth a month to test this out and see what it gets me. The additional items for FSD (and Enhanced Autopilot) are:

    • Navigate on autopilot
    • Auto lane change
    • Auto park
    • Summon
    • Smart Summon
    • Traffic Control and Stop Sign Control

    Note: This isn’t the beta version of FSD that everyone is writing about. This is production, which is less capable. I could have opted into the beta, but decided not to.

    Subscription was easy. I clicked a few buttons on the app and within minutes, I had new options in my Autopilot screen. I clicked on a few and set up some confirmations and enabled options.

    I then tried it on some shorter trips. Overall, I appreciated the ability for the car to stop at stop lights and stop signs, though the confirmation from me wasn’t great. However, I don’t completely trust the car, so I liked it.

    I also did like the lane change on the highway. Often when I’ve used Autosteer, I get behind a slow person at some point and I’d like to be able to change lanes. It did work well when I confirmed a lane change and waited for other cars that were close to pass (or fall back) before the car moved lanes. I could not initiate these changes, however. I had to wait for the car to ask if it could change lanes.

    There still is some phantom breaking and some weird speed changes at times, so it’s not anywhere close to perfect, but I liked the feature.

    I don’t think this is worth US$200 a month for these features, but maybe at $100 I’d use it I drove more. I just don’t go on enough longer rides to use this very often.

    I’ll write a few posts and shoot video of a couple of the features.

  • DevOps is Mostly About People

    I was giving a talk on DevOps recently and one of the questions from a person in the audience was how to get others to buy in. This person also had complaints that “DevOps” wouldn’t work because their boss wasn’t interested.

    I think these are great examples of things that many developers and managers don’t think about when they look to embrace DevOps. While there is no shortage of technical articles and videos on how to introduce automation or deliver features in a new way, what gets lost is the need for cultural change.

    DevOps is all about people. It’s about learning to trust each other and work together. It’s about adapting and changing how you write or deploy code to make the process smoother. It’s about sharing your knowledge with others and learning from them. It’s about being blameless and also accountable. It’s about support from management to improve the software and the process.

    It’s about people.

    The automation is cool and it’s a lot of what is easy to demo and explain. I show that because I don’t know the people involved in your environment and I can’t explain how you can get them to change how they work. Instead, we tend to focus on the tangible things that an individual can learn: the technology. Use version control, validate and test with CI, deploy consistently with release servers, and build packages that are versioned and reviewed. Those are the easy parts.

    The culture is what really matters, both in development teams, in conjunction with ops teams, and with support for management. There is no magic to software development and DevOps doesn’t bring any. All it helps you understand is that you need to be a team to build great software.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 12 Aug 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to smile and be friendly to the people you see today.

    Another trip today. Back last night from Seattle and off to LA today. I try to do this in general, but making a note to emphasize this today, no matter how tired or stressed I might feel.