Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Markdown Links– Remembering the Basics

    For some reason, I can never remember how to do markdown links. I know to use the hash symbol (#) for headings. I know that asterisks do bold, or italics, though I can’t remember one or two without checking. This seems to work for me. Though when I check the markdownguide.org, I see I’ve forgotten underscores can be used.

    I know numbers and dashes for lists, that’s intuitive. I get that and use it all the time.

    But I can’t remember how to do links. I know parenthesis and brackets are involved, but I constantly seem to get it wrong.

    Writing help memory

    At least for me, writing actually helps my memory. so, I’m writing this on a piece of paper.

    [text](link)

    As a matter of fact, I’ll write it a couple times, and type it here.

    [text](link)

    [voice of the dba](http://www.voiceofthedba.com)

    while I’m at it.

    ![text](image)

    Maybe now I’ll remember this.

  • Daily Coping 23 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 go outside, play, walk, run, exercise, relax.

    Last Friday Colorado moved a number of counties to the “red” level for the pandemic. We also added a “purple” level to our dial of risk. I appreciate trying to manage things, while also finding ways for life to move forward.

    This means that for some people, the level of restriction that exits precludes much ability to leave your house. However, I haven’t seen a complete lockdown anywhere that prevents any leaving.

    You have your own tolerance for risk, but for me, going outside to walk a little, to take a trip to a store or restaurant (even with contactless delivery/pickup), or even to go say hi to a neighbor from a distance is worth it. There is something about being in nature, even in a city, being outside, looking around, enjoying life away from the four walls of my residence that I like.

    I’m lucky, on a ranch with the need to go outside regularly, especially if something is broken, but I appreciate the ability to walk outside in cities when I travel, taking a moment to enjoy life outside, watch the world, and walk, run, or even sit with a drink and see the world around me.

    Recently I’ve been chatting with some friends, and I left my desk to walk outside and continue the conversation there. It helps when you have a couple friends hanging out as well.

    20201110_154227 (1)

  • Building for Scale

    This year’s pandemic has moved a lot of business to the digital world. We see that with increased ecommerce from many companies, including lots of local business, like restaurants, that have embraced online ordering, pickup, and delivery. In many cases, the companies providing these services were able to scale and meet the additional load, which arguably wasn’t that high for any individual organization.

    However, some services aren’t able to handle the loads, especially government services. Recently the Florida voting registration website crashed under a larger than expected load. We’ve seen unemployment sites crash in the US, the contact tracking website in the UK, and plenty more.

    I can understand the challenges of government sites, many of which were built on older technology and rarely upgraded with budget restrictions. Investing in new technology is not only expensive, but it can be a huge challenge to ensure systems work through a transition, especially when many users are counting on services to be available.

    I do think that the future of much software development needs to be with a hybrid cloud architecture. There are great government secure options from AWS, Azure, and other providers. However, even if you build software that is intended to be in your data center (or a rented one), you ought to be thinking about how to scale it beyond the machines on which it exists, especially if you provide public facing access.

    Whether in government or private enterprises, we see the demand for systems grow and shrink rapidly. You can have incredible success, or face shrinking demand quickly. This isn’t like an investment in a large physical plant. The digital world allows us to easily scale up and down, using the cloud concepts and architectures developed over the last decade. Learn about the patterns, and ensure your systems can scale as needed.

    Steve Jones

  • Book Review: Making Work Visible

    I was recommended Making Work Visible by a developer at Redgate Software. The book caught my eye as it seeks to ensure you can work more efficiently by watching out for some of the common things we do wrong in software development. It’s a DevOps related book, and many of the concepts of flow, work in progress, etc. that we talk about in DevOps are things that I saw in the book.

    The overall message is that there are five main time thieves that cause you to work less efficiently than you or your team might otherwise function. These are:

    • Thief Too Much Work-in-Progress
    • Thief Unknown Dependencies
    • Thief Unplanned work
    • Thief Conflicting Priorities
    • Thief Neglected Work

    The different issues are introduced early on, with each getting a few pages to describe them. Then later in the book, the author delves into more detail on the issues of this type of time thief, the impact, and ways you can think about working around the issues.

    I read this book alone, but I might recommend you work in team here and do some of the exercises shown in the book. Each is really a physical activity, but I’m sure it would work with a virtual meeting these days.

    The book is really built around Kanban boards, and there is a lot of detail on the ways to organize, or not organize, your board and team. I’ve seen some of the positives at Redgate, and some negatives as well, though I’ve seen more negatives at other companies.

    There are suggestions for meetings, techniques for informing others of status and progress, and even some “beastly practices. There is lots of information supporting why something is good or bad, or really, more or less helpful.

    I read most of this book in my Kindle app, but I did go through some in the cloud reader from Amazon. There are lots of images and illustrations, and lots of color, so I might recommend that you get the physical book, or if you like Kindle, read it online at times, especially with the examples and diagrams of the Kanban boards.

    For me, personally, I get caught up in unplanned work at times, but often I have too much WIP and neglected work. I start things and don’t finish them quickly enough, or focus on getting them out of the way. One thing I took away from this book is to slow down and dedicate more blocks of time to knocking items off my list, rather than doing some things when I feel like it.