Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • 100 Hours

    How long does it take someone to learn to be good at building software in some language? I’m sure many of you have heard of the 10,000 rule that notes the truly gifted in a field need 10,000 hours of practice to become experts and master their craft. There’s some debate about how true that is, but certainly becoming an expert takes tremendous dedication, certainly years of time.

    I ran across a piece that referenced a slightly shorter rule, the 100 hour rule. The rule is fairly simple: “for most disciplines, it only takes one hundred hours of active learning to become much more competent than an absolute beginner.”

    One hundred hours is nothing. That’s a long week or two of active learning to get good at something. But how good? If we look at software development, what can you accomplish in 100 hours? After all, absolute beginner is a low bar. That’s the level my Mom is at and I’m not sure how much I could teach her beyond “Hello, world” in a few hours. Even in 100 hours, I’m not sure she could solve many problems.

    The good thing is that most of us aren’t absolute beginners, especially in software. We have frames of reference for many parts of how computers work. I suspect that 100 hours of deliberate, guided, practical (meaning typing and practicing skills), would turn lots of people into a good junior developer, maybe even a mid level developer. I think many senior developers would be very competent in a new language in a few hundred hours, because they’d learn the syntax translation quickly and then start understanding the tips, tricks, and gotchas that experts in that language might know. The algorithms and problem solving skills are often the same between languages.

    For most of us looking to grow our careers and improve our technology skills, I would guess we could learn a new skill every year, becoming competent, with 100 hours of practice. Reading books and articles is good, but the hands on practice is most important, and that’s what really drives home active learning. That’s something I’d encourage many of you do, with exercises, puzzles, or maybe even start a small project that help you learn. It will help your career, by improving skills, and might even be fun along the way.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Adios, IE

    The first browser I used on the Internet to find information was the text based lynx browser. This was quite an improvement (at the time) over Archive and Gopher. When Netscape released their Navigator browser for Windows, I abandoned those old tools, moving on to a new way to access information across the world.

    However I primarily worked in a Microsoft world as my career grew and that meant using Internet Explorer, or IE. In fact, I remember thinking all the ActiveX extensions and the bundling on installations of Windows meant that the browser was convenient. It was even nice to program on, since it dealt with poorly formed HTML fairly well. However it had plenty of issues and was a never ending source of calls from customers that had stability and security issues.

    In fact, sometime around Windows XP, I moved to Firefox and never looked back. I only had IE installed on my systems because Microsoft included it with the OS. The last 5 or 6 years, I’ve run Chrome and Firefox together, only using IE when a few specific sites required it. Even then, I’d give an inward groan each time I clicked on the familiar “e” icon.

    However times have changed. This month, on January 12, Microsoft ends support for all versions of IE prior to 11. While IE will still be run for many years by some people, just as Windows ME and NT 4.0 still exist in places, Microsoft won’t provide support or patches, and we can only hope that people switch to another browser quickly.

    I haven’t been thrilled with the Edge browser in Windows 10, as it hasn’t worked in some sites I use regularly. That seems strange to me, but alas, the idea of a Microsoft browser not working the same as other browsers is nothing new. I can only hope that Microsoft fixes the issues in Edge rather than having web developers include code to handle the finicky nature of Microsoft’s browser technology.

    The death of IE shouldn’t matter much to us, as data professionals, but I wonder how many of us still have applications using web browser controls based on IE technology. I suspect quite a few, and it’s entirely possible moving forward that we’ll continue to deal with issues of poor rendering of data from our databases through web controls for many years to come.

    Steve Jones

  • A Bit of History

    This is a bit off topic, away from the world of databases, but it certainly does touch on the power of computers.

    I had a great 2015 holiday season, taking not one, but two vacations. Our family had their annual ski trip to Steamboat Springs, which is always enjoyable. However before Christmas, I took my 17 year old on a birthday trip to Florida. We’ve gotten away from parties and gifts, instead trying to give kids memories.

    In this case, we journeyed to Cape Canaveral, spending a few days at the Kennedy Space Center viewing exhibits and going on tours. My son was thrilled to see real rockets, especially the Saturn 5, and also tour one of the launch control rooms. In fact, we could see the countdown clock active for the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on our tour of the Launch Control Center.

    That was exciting to see. I’d tried to schedule the trip near a launch but couldn’t get away during the launch dates with school and work commitments. However the day we left, I saw the announcement that the previously TBD SpaceX launch had been scheduled during our trip. After a scrub one night with wind and rain, the launch took place our last night in town.

    The official video is better than mine, which I recorded from the Cape Canaveral causeway, about 5-6 miles away. It’s an amazing piece of history. Other than my wedding day and the births of my children, this was the most amazing thing I’d seen, even from a distance. I’m interested in space and technology, but not a big space geek. However I was definitely giddy at seeing this bit of history.

    Computing technology has helped us achieve some amazing things, and in conjunction with incredible engineering, as humans, we’ve managed to accomplish some amazing feats with rockets and space travel. I look forward to seeing what will happen across the next few decades as more companies and countries tackle new challenges in space.

    And if you ever have any doubt about the power of the computers we use, it appears the Falcon rocket uses x86 processors, like so many of us.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Rulebreaking Developers

    The VW emissions scandal fascinates me. Maybe because it’s a case of software being used to fundamentally alter a product to deceive us. Maybe because I’m a car guy and have a soft spot for VW and the old Scirocco I used to drive in college. Maybe because we have blame being passed between management and software developers that could potentially affect our industry.

    In any case, the latest news I saw was of a press conference where the upper management of VW seems to indicate that the software developers on the project decided to alter the software. Certainly I’m sure some managers were involved, but I still fundamentally find it hard to believe that a small team engineered these changes independently. Even if they did, I think that ultimately upper management throughout the company has to take responsibility. After all, they took credit for the sales.

    There are a couple interesting points made by the company. First, they are upgrading IT systems to track work better. I’m hoping they’re moving to more of a DevOps practice, with transparency and openness, as well as lean processes that can be changed quickly. I suspect they might be moving to more overhead and auditing, but time will tell.

    The other interesting thing is that the company noted that even when technical solutions were available, they weren’t used. To me, this directly points to the problems so many of us face as technologists. When we have better solutions, or we can correct deficiencies, management doesn’t want to spend the time or effort to do so.

    That is one of the fundamental things that makes software so powerful. We can make changes, we can improve things, we can implement better security in a way that’s a fraction of the cost of making similar changes in the analog world. However it seems that even smaller efforts aren’t worth making if there is a little more profit to be squeezed out. At least, that’s what managers seem to think.

    That’s a part of business culture that I’d like to see evolve. Let’s look to continually improve things, making them better, more secure, and less bug ridden, even if it slightly slows down new enhancements or costs a little money.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.