Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 22 Jan 2021

    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 take a different route when you next go somewhere.

    I go a lot less places than I used to before the pandemic. It’s something that never really mattered to me, but it stands out now. My Google travel timeline each month is way less diverse than I’d like.

    However, I do go to the grocer, the gym, and coach a little volleyball. Those are relatively short trips, but I can go out of my way a little. The other day, I was going to the gym, and normally it’s a fairly straight, short set of roads. However, I can go a little past my normal turn and turn into a neighborhood that loops back behind the gym. It’s a slower route through some neighborhoods, but it also goes alongside the E-470 highway outside Denver.

    It used to be a very open route, but there has been more development, and there’s less open space. The nature of the changing world, but not a welcome site. As many others feel, I wish the area was more like when I moved here.

    In any case, it was a nice drive, windows open, heat blasting, music turned up.

  • Representative Data Challenges

    One of the areas where machine learning and artificial intelligence have had lots of success is with image work. Whether identifying people in pictures or helping cars stay on the road and out of each other’s way, this capability of computing has worked well. It’s not perfect, and not necessarily as accurate as most humans, but it works well. At least well enough. Sometimes it’s even better than humans.

    There are issues, however, and I think some of them are because of poor data sets. Last year when the pandemic hit, education was challenged with how to conduct remote exams. While there are some solutions, they don’t always work well. Sometimes the algorithms don’t recognize people, especially non-Caucasians.

    The issues raised reminded me of the issues with some bathroom gadgets. I have fairly dark skin, and I’ve always wondered why some sinks and soap dispensers wouldn’t work for me. I hadn’t thought much about it until I saw a few reports like the one listed above.

    I don’t think there is anything malicious here, but I do think that often we find teams work on a happy path when building some new tool. They test it often themselves, but they don’t think widely about how a variety of customers will use things. While I’ve seen many personas, I often don’t see anyone creating personas that might consider something like skin color, or even a different culture. We often consider roles, without deeply examining how those roles are implemented.

    We need to work with representative data in whatever area we work, but data that does include some of the edge or corner cases that might come up. Our dev and test areas can start with small data sets, including those that we build, but at some point we need representative data. Whether we’re building OLTP software, sensors, or image recognition, our data should be well rounded.

    While systems don’t need to solve every issue, we ought to consider a large percentage. In the case of imaging, certainly understanding the wide variety of type of people that can use products would seem to be important. Hopefully future teams won’t make the mistake of assuming that most of their customers look exactly like them.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 21 Jan 2021

    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 connect with someone near you – share a smile or chat.

    One of the things I’ve still been able to do this month is go to yoga at the gym. I try to go a couple times a week, and then practice at home some times.

    Recently, I went early and saw someone I lightly knew from class. Rather than just sit and start my own warmup, I said hi, asked how they were doing and spent a couple minutes engaging pleasantly with someone else.

    That’s one of the things that doesn’t happen often during the pandemic, and it is something I appreciate taking the time to do.

  • Daily Coping 20 Jan 2021

    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 switch off your tech 2 hours before bedtime.

    I try to get away from my computer after work. I am lucky in that I have a separate office and PC. I typically don’t use a computer after hours, and I try not to use my phone too much at night. I do read on it, which I don’t count as “tech”, and have gotten better at not switching to check other things.

    I decided recently to skip reading and instead, just put my phone on the charger and ignore it. My wife and I do watch some TV at night, but I took time to instead hang out, play some cards, play some guitar, and relax without any digital anything.

    It was a nice break. Something I should do more often.