Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • End of the Year Stats

    I track some data from my life, some purposefully, some randomly from various services. Here are some areas to look back at this year.

    Reading

    I read a lot. It’s an escape for me from a busy life and a good hobby. I track my books on Goodreads and tag the ones I finish with the year in which I finish them. As of a couple days before Christmas, I was at 117 in the 2021 tag. Quite a bt of growth in books read:

    • 2021 – 117
    • 2020 – 82
    • 2019 – 128
    • 2018 – 79

    Before this I wasn’t tagging.

    Fitness

    I try to work out regularly. A few items from 2021

    • 328 workouts
    • 118,736 kcal burned
    • 225:32 hours working out
    • 319 miles of distance. Unfortunately yoga and weightlifting don’t cover distance Winking smile

    Not a great year, but not bad. I was hoping to be above 365. I tend to do do things on weightlifting days, so I’ve missed too many days this year.

    Music

    I love listening to music. I’ve had lots of music players, and went with an iPhone a few times specifically because the music support was better. These days I am mostly on Spotify, which is a fantastic service for me. It’s in the Tesla, on my devices, and I’ve got stuff playing often.

    I love the wrap up from Spotify this year. A few stats:

    • 33,449 minutes listening
    • Top song – 3 Nights (36 listens) (also Old Town Road, California Dreaming, Who Says, and Short Skirt)
    • Top artists – John Mayer (2,243 minutes), with Beatles, Jay-Z, Notorius BIG and Stevie Wonder rounding out the list.
    • Top genre – Classic Rock (lots of guitar riffs I like here)

    Language

    • 30,043 XP (experience points)
    • Top 1% of learners
    • French and Japanese
    • 5978 minutes learning (99.6 hours)
    • 85 minutes on one day
    • 1074 words learned, probably more Japanese
    • 334 days when the stats came, 575 days on a streak. I used 2 streak savers in 2021, 3 in 2020, so not really all those days.
    • 258 days in the Diamond league (top league)

    I got this icon/image/prize:

    2021-12-06 09_44_49-YEAR IN REVIEW

    Travel

    With the pandemic still going on and not many events, I didn’t think I’d travel much, but I ended up with a good year.

    • 12 trips for me
    • 1 new country (Belgium)
    • 1 UK trip
    • 3 trips to Florida
    • 5 work trips
    • 48 trips according to Google

    The spread in the US:

    2021-12-20 15_41_25-Timeline

    We ended up with 4 or 5 trips in the living quarters, camping out in various places.

    20210727_202028

    Not bad, and hoping for more in 2022.

    I also renewed my United 1K status. With a few trips and some promotions from them, I ended up back at the top tier that can be earned. That’s good as I hope to get back to more travel in 2022 and would prefer to get upgrades across the ocean.

  • Taking a Break

    That’s it for this year. I’m working today, but heading off on vacation with family for the rest of the week.

    It’s been a great year, and I look forward to 2022 starting next Monday.

  • Daily Coping 27 Dec 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 appreciate kindness and thank people who do things for you.

    I get this a lot as a coach, and it’s always nice to hear kids thank me after every practice. It’s a nice sign this year, which I haven’t always had in the past. This is a good group of kids.

    For me, I keep seeing memes around this time of year that it costs you no money to say please and thank you, among other small things. I agree. I have made an effort to do this more, thanking the family for simple things, thanking my yoga instructors after every class, thanking service people for doing what they’d do anyway.

  • Goal Progress in December 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    The last review of the year. I need to set new goals, but I’ll actually do that the first week of the year, taking a little time next week to think.

    2021 Grade: C+

    I don’t think I did OK here with the year of goals, but I learned a few things about setting goals and how to tackle them for next year. That will inform my view of the future.

    This year wasn’t supposed to be as busy. With no real end to the pandemic in sight, I thought I’d be home more often, with a little more time to work on myself, but that was a mistake. I got quite busy, and I found myself spending more time away from deep technical topics.

    Not a bad thing, but it affected my goals. As usual, reading is easier for me than working on technical problems, and that aligns with a lot of what I do for work.

    Here is where I finished in the various areas:

    Reading

    I’ve been working through a few books around the fiction that captivates me. I like the feedback book, but I find myself stopping and thinking often. It’s going slower than expected. The Project to Product was good, making me rethink how I would tackle software in a company.

    The GE one was personally interesting as I wanted to work there when I was in university. It’s almost more of a history book, but it confirms what I thought. A dysfunctional place to work that played with finance more than they were amazing business people. They were good business people, but not the star it appeared from the outside.

    The PoSh book was a bit of a project, but I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one.

    Here’s the current progress:

    Technical Skills

    Here are the items I was aiming to work on this year:

    • Certification –  AZ-900 – 0% (2 modules)
    • Certification – DP-900 – 50% (14 modules)
      • 50% of this is studying the general material
      • 20% is the focused review
      • 30% the test
    • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25 (2021 puzzles 4)
    • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25
    • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25

    Projects

    My projects were in these areas.

    • Support Local Events (or whatever the data platform one day event thing is)
      • Added 3 events manually in 2021
      • Managed to get SQL Saturday set up as an independent charity, a US 501.c.3 corp
      • 2 SQL Saturday events in 2021 (1 in-person, 1 virtual)
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
      • Spoke at 2 groups. The third hasn’t had meetings.
      • I did speak at 4 remote user groups
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
      • Semi-failure. There wasn’t much interest in either, but I did get my session to the user group to be hybrid, and some people appreciated this.
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – Didn’t complete this, but it’s working for kids and parents to see some stats.