Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Spookiest Year

    Last Halloween I was in Chicago, in one of the biggest cities in the US visiting a customer. This was near the end of a very busy travel year, where I’d been to England 5 times, Australia twice, and was returning home for the weekend before heading back out on a trip to Seattle for the 2019 PASS Summit.

    This year I expected more of the same, even into early February, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Since then, much of the world has changed, certainly travel, conferences, SQL Saturdays, and most other types of gatherings have changed. Not just work events, but work itself, with many of us, perhaps most, working from come. Concerts, comedy, sporting events, and more have been cancelled or changed to taking place without spectators. While some things are starting to come back, they’ve forever changed.

    I have started coaching volleyball again, and while we’ve started competition, we do so without spectators, which is a very strange experience. As I sat between matches recently, my wife and I noticed how quiet it was and how calm. In a good way, but also a strange feeling for us.

    Perhaps one of the strangest things is watching media more than in the past, and seeing people without masks, in crowds, living life in a way that I assumed would always exist a year ago. It’s certainly jarring, and I wonder to what extent we’ll return to that world in the future.

    Tomorrow is Halloween, and while it’s not an event I’ll participate in, I’ll think about the spooky feeling of this entire year, where nothing seems to have gone in the way I’d have expected. I hope that does change in 2021, but for now, I’m assuming we have at least seven more months, through at least April of 2021, living in the same world. Hopefully, I’m wrong.

    Steve Jones

  • Building Quality In

    I heard someone at the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit conference say that quality needs to be built in. That’s something that many, or hopefully most, of us believe. Everyone ought to do quality work and build it into their daily tasks. However, the person speaking went further and defined this in a way I like:

    “Building quality in means we don’t pass quality issues along to others.”

    That’s a much better definition for me. This implies that there are effects if I don’t do a good enough job. If I knowingly pass along an issue, that’s a problem. I haven’t done quality work. I’d likely say that if I don’t bother to test or evaluate my work in some way, I’m essentially doing the same thing.

    We all write poor code, or do a job poorly at times. Often this comes because of ignorance, naivety, or just a lack of skill. That’s understandable, and we can forgive a person not being able or ready to do a job at the same level as a more experienced person.

    However, that should be a learning and teaching moment. We don’t expect continuous quality issues, certainly not of the same type. A big part of the DevOps movement, and other modern software development methodologies is learning from our mistakes. Getting better. Improving the quality of our software.

    Don’t just get work done. Don’t just close tickets or move a sticky note. Learn to do better each time you make a mistake. Learn to write better code or implement better processes. Learn to build in quality.

    Steve Jones

  • Lean Coffee

    I read about the concept of Lean Coffee in Making Work Visible, one of the books I set as a goal to read this year. The idea is to have an agenda less meeting, but nevertheless get some things done.

    It sounds crazy, though the format makes some sense. The group takes a minute or two to write down some ideas on paper. Each person then gets two votes to place against the topics. The top rated items get discussed first for a period of time and at the end of that time, everyone votes on continuing discussion or moving on. This can repeat every few minutes.

    I got the chance to experience this at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit conference, where there were Lean Coffee breaks every day, with each having a topic that people wanted to discuss. One I participated in was fairly rigid, with the facilitator keeping to time, gently encouraging discussion, and rigorously calling for votes.

    While I enjoyed that, a second one didn’t use timers consistently or votes, and the meeting ended up being a rather free form discussion, which was OK, but it meandered and wandered without guidance in a way was somewhat annoying. It was a surprising experience for me, as I typically like free form discussions.

    I don’t know that I’d recommend Lean Coffee for all meetings, but I do like the format, and I think this can be a good way to focus on a few areas a team finds important, especially when there isn’t a clear set of priorities.

    I would encourage you to give it a try, especially if you get into a meeting without a clear agenda. Maybe it’s something I’ll try as a way to discuss and debate some topics at some event.

    Steve Jones

  • The Next Evolution of Big Blue

    When I was a kid, IBM built typewriters. I actually had one and produced some schoolwork on it. At some point I learned they were a force in large computing. Then they entered the PC market, and eventually the Thinkpad laptops were coveted items. Later I encountered them when a large company I worked for was looking at outsourcing our IT service for Big Blue to run.

    In over a 100 years, IBM has thrived, despite ups and downs, and re-invented themselves many times. Early in my career, lots of managers used IBM hardware and software, with the adage that “no one gets fired for buying IBM.” Whether it was the best fit or not, it was hard to get in trouble for using what many others had chosen.

    I haven’t heard a lot about IBM lately, but wasn’t surprised to see this article about them spinning off the managed services part of their business. I think that has always been a low margin business, though surprisingly a successful one. It made Ross Perot a very rich man.

    However, with the cloud world, margins are higher. The cloud isn’t necessarily cheaper for businesses. They pay more to have flexibility, less up front capital expenditure, and less commitment. While IBM doesn’t often come up when talking about AWS, Azure, and GCP, it’s listed as one of the top 5.

    I don’t know if it will catch the others, but I do know more and more companies are looking to cloud and hybrid infrastructure, and I would bet IBM will have lots of success here.

    Steve Jones