Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Investing in Speed

    While most of us might not want to start our own company (or maybe we do), we can learn a few things from those that do. Building something new, being efficient, effective, and quick are skills needed when starting a company. I’ve read a lot about how companies are built and entrepreneurs work. Lately I ran across some advice from Daniel Gross, the founder of Pioneer, a former partner at Y-Combinator (from David Perell).

    Many of us are financially careful. We often are careful with how and where we spend money at home. I find lots of tech professionals frugal at work as well, often being careful with their budgets, or even with the requests they make of managers. That being said, here is a great quote:

    “Overbearing frugality prevented me from spending any money, which creates inefficiencies. Spend like a king on speed, like a pauper on everything else. Faster computer? Go. Faster Internet? Go. Better sleep? Go. Expensive dinner? Stop. Expensive dinner to close a candidate? Go. If you can, use your capital to move faster. Your competitor is taking the shorter flight. Book it.”

    Often I see companies get caught up spending or not spending based on some ideas that don’t have anything to do with efficiency. They don’t invest in things that improve the business, but invest in things they like, or avoid things they don’t like. I see this with choices as well, where a professional or manager may want to change a tool/platform/etc. because they like one over the other. Often without any good fundamental reason.

    Spending money isn’t bad if you are investing in driving your business forward. Learn to make that distinction and don’t be afraid of making good investments. It’s fine to indulge in anything, but in moderation. That might be the key to success for many hings in life.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Rolling Back One Bug for Another

    I was working with a customer recently that develops software for use by their clients. They work in a DevOps style flow, regularly completing work and sending that to their clients. In one case, they released a hot fix quickly to resolve a bug in their software. In this case, the developers received the report, triage’d the bug, and released the fix in less than a week. Their clients were happy with the response and speed at which the fix was delivered.

    Unfortunately, they also released another bug with the fix. The new bug was in an unrelated area of the software, created by separate changes to the code. Now they had a dilemma. The hot fix helped some customers, but the fix also broke some things that other customers cared about.

    What do you do here? If you were in charge of this software team, how do you decide what to do? You can pull the patch, but that means some clients might have broken software. You can leave the patch out there, but then you risk other customers being upset by a new bug.

    There isn’t a good solution here, and the more clients you have, the more likely that you have a large split of customers wanting version 1 versus those wanting version 2. You could rebuild the hotfix to remove the new bug, or you could make another patch that just addresses the second bug. The latter idea is what DevOps would suggest, with a roll forward to a third version of the software. The idea being you keep improving things and fixing bugs as you continue to develop new features. You will release some bugs, but you can fix them quickly.

    The downside of this is that if you release too many bugs, customers are loathe to upgrade. When this happens, you start to find yourself having to support many versions of your software. If you respond to customers with special patches that only fix bugs without adding features, you may end up with many more versions than you can track, which can be a real nightmare for developers to manage.

    How do you deal with patches causing bugs? I recently re-read a piece by Eric Sink in which he recounts releasing three maintenance versions to his customers in a week. Embarrassing for a version control vendor. It’s a good (but long) read, and one that might give you some perspective. We can’t squash every bug, and we can’t test for everything, but we can work to continue to improve, chasing the dream of bug free software. Or at least, regression bug free software.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Challenge of Chat

    I’ve followed 37 Signals (now Basecamp) and Jason Fried for years. I think they’ve built an amazing company and have a philosophy on business and life I admire. They’ve written books, and they blog often. Recently I saw a post on chat, which is something that I’ve struggled with at times. Even before this work-at-home-at-scale experiment we’re all living, the challenges of everyone reaching out have weighed on my mind.

    Without an office that physically concentrates many people together, many of us are only communicating electronically with our coworkers. We’ve had email for years, and video conferencing is growing in use, and some of us have had instant messaging for years.  It seems that chat has become more pervasive and the ability to reach out with live, interactive chats is something that has become expected in many organizations. Whether this is on Slack, Teams, or some other channel, there is some good and bad with the medium. I think the post highlights the bad outweighing the good, and it mentions a few things I hadn’t thought about.

    I do have Slack running most of the day, and initially I found it to be exhausting and distracting. I think I also knew chat might create some implied consensus and lessons deep thought, but I hadn’t thought much about before reading this post. Chat has been a great quick tool for questions and answers. I often use it to pose a question about how some feature in our product works, not necessarily getting an immediate answer, but also having this work better than email as a developer can pull the question rather than it being pushed to them. It works well in threads, but not very well if responses aren’t tied to questions.

    At the same time, there are enough distractions for most of us, and having more of them randomly appear throughout my day has been an issue. Over time, I’ve learned to utilize some of the advice in the piece. I ignore lots of channels and just mark them as read often. I’ll take bigger discussions into email or a meeting, and I’ve learned to not check this all day. I use it at times, but I’m happy to drop out, and even ignore direct messages if I’m concentrating. It helps I have most notifications turned off.

    Attention is limited, and like time, it’s a valuable resource. As you work alone, there might be more of a need to interact and engage with others, but recognize it for the productivity drain it can be.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Taking Quarantine Holiday

    On one hand I’m tired of writing about the challenges of working under this pandemic. On the other, it’s not going away quickly, and I know there are many people struggling much more than I am. I don’t in any way want to minimize the hardships that some of you are going through. I know there are many more important things than this topic for you.

    That being said, I wonder what some of you are doing about holidays and vacation this year. For many of us, any plans we might have had for a flight, a cruise, even a drive, might be derailed by closures and limitations. My wife would like to take a horse and go ride at a park, but many are closed. Other plans I had are completely up in the air for now, with no real idea of what to do instead.

    My employer has asked all employees to take 60% of their vacation allowance by the end of September. It’s a decision made for two reasons. One is that people need to avoid burnout and they need to get away from work, even if they can’t go anywhere. Employees need to find some way to recharge.

    The second reason is that assuming the world opens back up this summer or fall, we might have a large number of people wanting to take a few weeks off during the fourth quarter. Most businesses do expect more vacation during holidays, but they can’t function well if too many people are gone at the same time. We have very liberal and generous policies at Redgate, but I’m not sure we want most of the company trying to take the entire month of December off.

    I know I need to get a break, and I’m looking at starting to take some long weekends most weeks across the summer. If I can make plans with my wife, I might try to get a week or two off in a row and go somewhere, anywhere. We have a camper we can use, so if there’s a place to park, we’re thinking of just packing up and disappearing for a bit.

    Let us know what you think about vacation during this pandemic. How will you handle it? Or can you just bank holiday time until next year? Maybe nothing changes for you if your normal holiday plans are still possible.

    Whatever you do, be careful of burnout when your home and work lives are this intertwined. It can creep up on you if you are not careful.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.