Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • 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.

  • Remote Sharing and Learning

    Lots of technical people have spent time learning something on a computer. The idea of remote learning isn’t new to many of us that have watched events online for some time. Many of us have had the chance to watch some remote session from Microsoft, Redgate, or some other software vendor. We might learn online from some site like Pluralsight, or maybe we even attend some of the virtual chapters that PASS supports.

    At this time, more of us than ever are remote from others, not just for learning, but most of our daily work, meetings, reviews, discussions, and more. Learning to be effective, and ensure you still perform at the level your employer expects, can be a challenge. I ran across a piece on how to run great workshops, which I think contains some good advice for many meetings, not just workshops or training sessions.

    Much of the advice in the piece revolves around prep and practice. You should ensure your tools work, have documents available, ensure everyone can connect and access the technology. Things we probably should do for in person meetings.

    We tend to do a lot of group work in my company, and I’ve found that being remote is sometimes a challenge. Everyone is now remote, which makes this more equal, and we’ve adapted well. I attend some of the group standups and reviews, where each team shares some progress. We’ve gotten good at switching presenters and keeping things on track, though this is more a one-way delivery of information rather than a discussion.

    While we can share documents, it is hard to sometimes tell what other people are looking at or referring to when they are speaking. Asking them a question is helpful, but it can also be intimidating for some people to ask for clarification, especially if three other people have already asked at different times before. Communication is a challenge when people are remote, and over communicating can be important. Explain what you’re looking at or doing, and ensure you have a summary or a recording to re-watch. This can be invaluable in ensuring that everyone can access the same information.

    I attended a conference a little over a month ago that used a shared whiteboard, which I thought was a great idea. I wonder if that would be useful in some of our meetings. Having someone take notes is good, but being able to review to ideas on a whiteboard is something I’ve often appreciated. I’ve used whiteboards to explain or clarify things in live meetings in the past. A virtual one might be nice to use, though with some easy way to tie together thoughts from different individuals. We sometimes group edit Word or Excel docs, but that often has us looking at different sections of the document, not the same one. Likely a communication issue, but still an issue.

    We need to learn to get better and working together remotely. It’s a skill that will matter more and more over time. After this pandemic ends, I suspect many more organizations will adopt more remote work, which means more remote meetings. Learning to effectively present and absorb information from virtual events of all sorts is going to matter more in the future.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Smarter Design

    I have build a lot of PowerPoint decks over the years. Many of presentations, some for explaining a process, and once in awhile, I use it to create an image that’s simple, but beyond my skills. Even putting some geometric shapes together in a clean, aligned manner, is something I’ve found easier to do in PowerPoint than Paint.Net.

    Some of you may have noticed the PowerPoint Design Ideas that pop up when you create a new slide. At first I didn’t pay much attention, but I’ve started to take advantage of the ideas at times. The way that slides are put together is often much more visually appealing than any I’d think of by myself. Sometimes I take an idea and modify it slightly. At first I thought most of these were just standard templates, but Microsoft is starting to use more ML in the examples that pop up on the side.

    There’s a good AI Show episode at the bottom of this post that explains some of what they do. From image recognition to intelligent cropping to natural language processing, they are finding ways to make better design ideas available. the episode is only minutes and worth watching if you want to know more about how they use technology in their recommendations.

    To me, this is a good example of how technology and humans work together. Someone needs to come up with some good designs, based on certain situations. Users then provide them feedback on if they’re useful or not, and they can modify things. I even learned how to change the icons for the designs if I don’t quite like them. My changes (and yours) get fed back to new models as training for the future.

    Would this make all presentations look alike? I think there is some danger here that we start to coalesce into certain patterns. We might see lots of slides with dates become timelines, but they won’t be exactly the same, and there are different ideas based on content. Even the words in the titles. I made two slides, same content with a different title and I got slightly different recommendations.

    I think AI and ML have good futures, but not as the sole decision makers for how to react to data. Instead, I think humans constantly providing feedback, input into models, changing weights, and yes, helping with more complex things like design, will improve the results that more of us get from our tools.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.