Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 20 Nov 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to choose a different route and see what you notice on the way.

    The pandemic has kept most of us at home. We drive less, go less places, do less. For me, while I still go a few places, I do less for sure.

    When I saw this item pop up, I had to think about how I’d choose a new route. Walking from my house only gives me one route for a mile to get to the end of my street and out to a place where I can then go in a few directions. Driving around, it often doesn’t make sense to go a different way, but I thought this might be a good way to change my day.

    I’m lucky in that my gym has been open since May, and while there are restrictions and limitations, I can go. My week usually has 3-4 trips, twice for yoga and 1-2 trips for weights. I’ve avoided most classes, though I may go back to a swim a week as well.

    The route there is pretty simple, and while the facility is about 10mi away, I can take a separate route, wind through some neighborhoods slightly out of my way, and keep this to about 14mi.

    I did that recently. I took the long way, which winds alongside E-470 in S Denver, but also has a small bridge over the highway. That leads to the back of the neighborhood where I used to live. I drove through, looking at houses where friends used to live, or I used to bike/walk/horseback ride through. It was a nice trip on which to reminisce.

  • Scaling Serverless Azure

    I enjoy reading articles and blogs about how people solve technical issues. The
    Trainline blog has had some good posts over the years, and the Netflix tech blog always gets me to think, even thought I don’t use many of their technology choices. There are others of course, but for the Microsoft tech, I run into some neat posts at the Microsoft Devblogs.

    Recently I saw one from Davide Mauri on streaming at scale using Azure SQL Database. I really like the platform, but it still feels like something that needs maturity. Seeing this post with metrics, testing, and evaluation of how the system works with data gives me more confidence that this might work for a scenario I hadn’t considered.

    I love that the post includes lots of references to code and other explanations, making me think I could set this up and test it. Certainly I’d like to know more about the actual costs of the test, which is something missing from too many discussions of cloud implementations, especially PaaS ones.

    An exception might be Troy Hunt’s series on Azure and how he’s built HaveIBeenPwned. This is a scaling post, though you can find others if you search around. He’s disclosed the costs of things in some of his posts, which help me to understand how important choices are to both performance and your budget.

    If you are looking to build systems in the cloud, I urge you to search out and read as many experiences as you can. Most of them boil down to write for the cloud, write good code, and test, but do so in a way that takes advantage of the cloud. Don’t expect to just have things work for you, no matter how good a developer you are. You need to understand your tools, and the cloud is just another tool.

    Steve Jones

  • Speaking at DPS 2020

    I was lucky enough to attend the Data Platform Summit a few years ago. One of my favorite speaking photos was from the event.Me on a massive stage, massive auditorium and huge screen.

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    This year the event is virtual and I’m on the slate with a couple talks. I’m doing a blogging session and a DevOps session. Both are recorded, but I’ll be online for chat, and certainly available for questions later.

    There are tons of sessions, with pre-cons, post-cons, and lots of sessions, running around the world. It’s inexpensive, so if you missed the PASS Summit or SQL Bits, join DPS. US$124.50 for the event and recordings. Pre/post cons are about $175.

    Register today and I’ll see you there.

  • Daily Coping 19 Nov 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to be overcome frustration by trying out a new approach.

    I tend to go with the flow, and I don’t have a lot of frustrations with how my life goes, but I do have some. I’m annoyed that my gym limits class sizes and quite a few people seem to reserve spots and then not show up. However, I’m also grateful I can just go.

    I’m annoyed that despite months of fairly safe competition and practice in volleyball, with little evidence of transmission from games, that counties have blanketly closed all competitions. I get it, and I know this disease isn’t something to take lightly, but I also know we need to balance that with continuing to live.

    Our club cancelled full practices, limiting us to 5 athletes and two coaches for skills, no competition. That makes coaching hard, and this is a challenge with keeping a team together. After talking with my assistant, rather getting upset, we decided to donate an extra day of time and split out practices to conform to the limits and work on keeping kids in the gym twice a week, along with a rotation so that different teammates get a chance to see each other.

    A minor part of my life, but still frustrating. Taking a positive approach and changing up how I work through this has helped cope with the frustration.