Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Challenging Yourself

    I saw this posted on Twitter recently: “If you’re always right, you’re not learning. If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching. The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed. But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” –@JamesClear

    I found that to be a very interesting view, especially as I think about moving my career, life, business, or anything else forward. I think about this in terms of the goals I’ve set for myself each year for work, or each season of coaching. In the past, I’ve sometimes tried to pick those items that I think I can accomplish.

    After all, it’s nice to check off everything at the end of the quarter/year and note I did everything I planned to do.

    However, is that playing it safe? Since I know roughly what my workload is, how busy I expect to be, am I just picking things that aren’t pushing me to do better? Or perhaps more importantly, should I be optimistic, push, and if I fall short, examine reasons why. Life sometimes changes in unexpected ways, and I don’t always have control over what things might come up in my schedule across a year. Heck, I might not anticipate everything that comes up this week, or even today.

    When I set my goals, I try to review these monthly and examine what I’ve done. Usually, across a year, I realize that some of my goals feel less important across time, or that they are such a low priority (nice-to-have’s) that other work or life constantly is more important. There also is the case that my mood changes and sometimes I just don’t want to do some things and keep procrastinating.

    My life often looks different in May than it did in January. It looks even more different in November, and as I write this, I think back to the decisions I made in January. I can barely remember the why, which is probably another hole in how I challenge myself. I ought to set out a basis at the start to remind myself of the reasons for these goals when I look back periodically when I assess my progress.

    I ask others to push themselves, so I ought to do more of that myself. Taking on a challenge is a good thing, and since life is more than work, I am looking forward to finding a better balance of challenging how I look to advance my career, as well as my personal life, and pick a variety of things that are both important to me, but are also in keeping with the spirit of balance. Time with my wife, hobbies, friends, and even myself are important as well. I don’t look to schedule those, but I do want to remember that while I want to challenge myself, I also need to balance that with living and enjoying my life.

    Steve Jones

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

  • DevOps is Culture

    DevOps is a culture shift in your organization. Technology enables things inside of this culture, but the culture is important. If you don’t know how to build a new culture and support individuals as they adopt it, often you’re just renaming an existing broken process inside your organization.

    Often, I think the failure to reach the efficient levels of a Spotify, Capital One, or any other DevOps success story is because of a failure of management to change culture.

    There are any number of anti-patterns for organizations wanting to adopt DevOps. Renaming teams without changing how they work together, including incentives and punishments, doesn’t help. Just buying technology without process and culture is just spending money on new toys. Keeping your existing organizational constraints in place without encouraging and supporting teamwork, changing incentives, eliminating silos/fiefdoms for managers will ensure that you will struggle to make a digital transformation that enables your organization to realize a return on their efforts.

    What things do help with culture change? Certainly, many changes start with a team or two, learning about how to build a better software pipeline, both with better code and more automation. They have to be allowed to fail fast, make some mistakes, and review issues without blame. Management must support this.

    We need to optimize systems, meaning the flow of code from developer to production system, without optimizing the effort in any team. People need to put theie name on work, owning failures, and celebrating the success of others. Collaborate and pitch in to work together, regardless of the title, position, or responsibility you have been assigned.  If someone needs help, they need to be supported and not punished. We need psychological safety to do the best we can, but understand we all need to ask for, or be ready to give, help at some point.

    DevOps is teamwork. It’s coordinating and collaborating to agree on the best code and process that gets code to production quickly. Safe, secure, performant, and high-quality code of which everyone is proud. If we’re not, then we ought to be working together to make the code better or agree an exception is allowed for some reason.

    Above all, we need to respect the autonomy of individuals and teams. Trust them to get the work done their way and take responsibility for it. Most people are accountable, especially when they can accept and help fix their mistakes without punishment. We all make mistakes, so let’s do our best to move forward and help everyone avoid repeating mistakes with learning, not yelling.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Life Organization

    For years, those of us in technology have often worked outside of the core working hours for the rest of our organization. Whether this is being on-call, staying late, or coming in when asked. It’s not uncommon for many developers and Ops staff to work 60, 70, or more hours to get things built/deployed/supported for our customers. Often we do this while juggling lots of tasks on a to-do list. While many things might be in a ticketing system, often I find there are tasks on a project plan, requests from team members, and other items which don’t fit neatly into a ticket. I’m juggling more than one to-do list.

    The line between work and personal life has often been blurred for me. I’ve taken work calls on the golf course, in an airport, late at night in my bathroom, while shopping with my wife, even at kid’s sporting events. I regret not pushing back more to a few managers early in my career, but I also recognize that I (and many of you) are sometimes in poor cultural situations and we don’t have a choice if we want to keep employed.

    A quick example of why I feel this way, and perhaps why some of you do. I had a boss paging me on a Friday night while I was at a comedy club with my wife. I walked outside to take the call during a break and was told that I wasn’t responding quickly enough to the page. The emergency? A test of how quickly I’d respond on a Friday night. Note that we were not a 24×7 business. After pushing back Friday night that I wasn’t answering any more pages that weekend, I was asked to resign on Monday. I was happy to do so.

    With the pandemic and many of us data professionals working from home, the line between work and personal life has blurred further. In many cases, our work isn’t bound by a clock, and we might easily move some work to personal time to take personal time during working hours. Trading an hour after a kid’s bedtime to work so that you can lunch with them during the day seems like a good thing all around.

    However, what I’m wondering today is how we start to manage and juggle all our tasks when we might not easily be able to separate all our time into work time and personal time? We might have work deliverables, which are already on multiple to-do lists. Our partner might ask us to handle some items around the house, we have scheduled events for kids or friends, or even ourselves. Perhaps we volunteer at the user group, a church, or another place and we have various deliverable items we’ve agreed to handle. On top of the myriad of tasks, some of these repeat regularly and might not have due dates.

    How do you handle keeping track of all the things in your life?

    I’ll admit I don’t do this well. I put most things with specific deadlines on a calendar as meetings. These include speaking engagements, travel, meetings, doctor’s appointments, and coaching events. If I need prep time, I’ll often schedule a few earlier meetings to either prep or remind myself I have something coming.

    For other To-do items, I sometimes put them on a list, but I find the lists growing out of control, and I don’t have a good handle on how to think about tracking UTV oil changes, vacation planning, getting a package to my daughter, fixing a fence post at the ranch, reaching out to a UG to speak, and more. I don’t have a good way to track, visualize, prioritize (or re-prioritize) these items in a busy life. I usually struggle to juggle two calendars, work and personal, as it is. In some sense, life is somehow out of control and chaotic, and I tackle things when I have time and think about an item. Or I respond to a crisis.

    Someone asked me how I keep organized, and I realized I’m not very organized. I do a good job with many things, but there are plenty of tasks that aren’t well organized. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of need to have these items tightly scheduled, and like technical debt, I can let some of them go for days or weeks (or months).

    If you have ideas, suggestions, or you suffer from the same issues, I’d love to know what works for you, or just that you feel things are out of control in your life.

    Steve Jones

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

  • From Compass ’99 to Data Community Summit 2022

    At this year’s Data Community Summit 2022, I am a part of the day 2 keynote. I’m excited to deliver some thoughts and memories of the event. I’m mostly excited the Summit still exists, and I am looking forward to seeing many of you in Seattle in person again. If you haven’t registered, think about it. This is the best place to meet other data professionals, network, and not only get knowledge from the experts, but ask them your question in person.

    Someone brought to my attention the original event from PASS wasn’t the Summit, but was the Compass ’99 conference. I saw a recap of the event on the ITProToday site, which brought back memories. I had attended the event early in my career, convincing my boss that this data specific event would be good for both them and me. It was, and it led me to unfathomable success throughout my time working with databases, along with great personal joy. I also learned something that helped me solve a few problems at work.

    I don’t remember Mr. Flessner delivering a keynote, but I do remember the late Jim Gray. He talked about storage costs and how we’d see the cost of a TB come under USD$10,000 in a few years. Today I see 1TB mobile phones for around $1000 and external drives for USD$20.

    In the early years of attending the Summit, I spent time in sessions, taking notes, and learning everything I could. I’d ask questions of Microsoft developers and our community experts. I was then, and am still now, proud of how gracious speakers are, willing to take time to help others, and share knowledge with them.

    However, the Summit has grown to encompass more than listening to speakers. While you can walk up to a speaker and ask them a question, the random conversations with others waiting their turn near the stage, or walking in the hallways, are the real benefit. I get inspired by what other attendees say. I learn things from them, and I get new perspectives that I might never think about. Whether in the convention center, on a #sqlrun, walking to a hotel, or even out socially at night. Talk usually revolves around data, databases, careers, and how we can grow ourselves as data professionals.

    It might not even be technical knowledge. Someone might give you a thought on how to better communicate with others, how to tactfully point out a problem, or even how to find a different job. Perhaps you just get a sympathetic ear in which to vent your troubles and frustrations at work. That alone might help you recharge and go back to work feeling better the next week.

    I’ve been blessed to attend most of the Summits, both in Seattle and around the US. I’ve been to conferences all over the world, and there is something special about the large data conferences, focused on the craft that we practice. We get the best and brightest in the world coming together to create synergies we get nowhere else. The #sqlfamily is on full display, with introductions taking place alongside greetings by name, handshakes, and no shortage of hugs.

    It’s a little less than a month until the Summit. There is still time to register and join us, either in person or virtually. I recommend in-person as the benefits outside of the sessions far outweigh the travel costs. I’ve gotten knowledge to save my company far more than the cost of a flight and hotel. If you have a vexing problem, you might convince your boss that you could easily cover those costs by being able to troubleshoot on a whiteboard with Microsoft experts or industry gurus.

    I hope to see you there, and please feel free to stop me for a handshake, hug, picture, or a short chat. If not this year, then somewhere in the future. In the meantime, I hope many of you are as excited as I am. Now, to work on that keynote…

    Steve Jones

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