Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • You’ve Changed. Has Your Employer?

    This past year has been one to remember. It’s disrupted lives and changed the world in many ways. Whether you have been cautious or fearless, scared or angry, the pandemic has changed you and the world. There’s an interesting read at Fast Company about life during the pandemic and how life has been turbulent from one point of view. 

    While I related to some of what the author wrote, I didn’t relate to a lot of it. I also know I’ve been lucky, and relatively lightly affected by this pandemic. I’ve published, and needed, coping tips at times, but I’ve been able to live my life, get outside, still coach youth, still visit some restaurants and take some limited vacations. I’ve looked back periodically, recording how I feel about life. I’ve changed, and I’ve struggled, but I’ve also been able to do things and I didn’t have the lockdown, and the limited life that some tech pros had, and I certainly didn’t have the struggles with security and finances that many less privileged dealt with.

    I’ve also had a great company that recognized issues last February and started preparing us, even before the UK went into a lockdown. While I haven’t visited with fellow employees in person, we’ve adapted and continued with some level of success for over a year. We hire and onboard people, software is getting written and sold, and business moves on, in many ways a reasonable facsimile of what we did in 2019.

    We’ve also changed. Remote offices have closed. A limited, experimental opening has few people actually taking advantage of going to work in a group. We’ve adopted and abandoned some of the early coping meetings and are looking for new ones. We’ve promised people they can move away from a city with an office, though remain within a reasonable travel time, for the rest of the year. All to provide some stability and allow employees to make concrete future plans for more than the next few months.

    We are experimenting with remote first, which is an attempt to adapt for the future to a distributed workforce, including our annual reteaming. I suspect trips to the office for many, including me, will be rarely scheduled, and used more for team building and brainstorming, with less tactical, let’s do something for today, work. I’m hoping we still do get together, but time will tell.

    I wonder how many of you will see your work change. We’re the privileged group, working in a field where we can accomplish tasks without physical interaction, but one where many of us might find that we do crave some sort of social touch. Maybe the world has changed it, and maybe it’s changed some interactions, but I also suspect some companies are looking forward to returning to the world as it was in 2019.

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

  • Growing Outside of the English World

    The CEO of our company is English, and he likes to remind me (jokingly) that there was a long time when the sun never set on the English empire. I will jokingly remind him that one country has set foot on the moon.

    One of the things that has changed me in the last decade is travel. I’ve been lucky enough to visit many countries around the world for work, and a few more for personal trips. In this time, I’ve often engaged with local people and tried to experience life a bit from their perspective, rather than be a tourist and just look at a thing or place as an outsider. I’ve often read a bit or researched an area to learn some history or get some context.

    That’s changed my view, and helped me understand how different the world can be. While I do find most people are similar around the world in many ways, cultures vary, and the emphasis placed on one thing vs. another can be much different.

    I also see how the wealth and privilege in the US makes many things quite easy compared to other parts of the world.

    This is something I am think about often as I try to restart SQL Saturday and think about events in different parts of the world. It’s something I think about as I deal with customers in other countries as well, understanding that their database problems are the same, but the way they work and interact can vary.

    Stepping outside my own US-centric view also helps me think about my past and how I may not have respected or treated others equally when their culture was very different from my own. Growing up involves learning more than you already know. In my mind, it also involves some empathy, appreciation, and respect for just how different the world can be for others. Something I am trying to do more and more often, especially with those outside the US/UK/ANZ world.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Republish: I Hate To Send This Email

    My first plane flight in over a year. Out in Philly today, coaching youth volleyball, so you get: I Hate To Send This Email

  • Poor Software Testing

    I am a big advocate of testing your code, including your database code. I like repeatable testing, especially unit testing. I think this has contributed to the increase in quality over the last ten years as more developers have incorporated unit testing into their work. That, along with the increase in standard frameworks, seems to have resulted in less crashes and instability in much of the software I used today.

    That being said, the client ultimately decides if software works as expected. Certainly there can be logic errors, but there also could be errors in how specifications and requests are interpreted. This is one reason we need humans to do some QA testing and clients to ensure there is some user acceptance review.

    Apparently that didn’t happen with one election machine. There is a hash that is supposed to be used to verify that the correct version of software is installed. However, if that reference hash isn’t there, the machine still reports things are fine. Certainly an issue that is a problem, though not necessarily one that users would detect. We would expect someone that purchases, updates, or administers these machines to check for the correct version.

    That isn’t an issue here because the acceptance testing was done by the vendor. While I am a big advocate of developers checking their work, there needs to be independent evaluation by a CI process, and there ought to be some QA review by another group. Certainly a client ought to be able to double check the software as well, and some client should have done acceptance testing here.

    As the world moves more towards DevOps type software development, we need better testing, and that likely needs to include some independent testing outside of the developers and testers. I certainly could see the need for clients to submit some tests and get some verification that those tests passed. Automated CI/CD systems can do this, and provide detailed logs of what happened.

    Ultimately we may still have bugs, either because we don’t have enough testing, or we don’t quite write the code that does what client expects. We may also have performance issues, but that’s another testing issue.

    We can get better, but we have to work to do so, learning from our mistakes, ensuring we are always improving testing, and listening to feedback.

    Steve Jones

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