Category: Uncategorized

I have a friend, he’s a technology guy and fairly savvy with hardware and software. We were talking recently and he said that he didn’t see the point in performing backups or even buying software for his machine anymore. He runs Windows and *Nix in various places, but uses GMail for messaging, Google Apps and Docs to store things, Picassa and Flickr to store photos, and Yahoo’s Calendar service (he’s been with them for years) to manage things. He syncs to his phone, and I think he’s even trying out Google Voice as the phone number management issue. When they start offering hosted servers or VMs, he’ll be looking to host there as well.

I questioned him about backups and he said that Google just does a better job than he could do. They have redundant everything and they have more knowledge about how to better store things. He trusts Google to do the job for the foreseeable future.

I’m not sure I’m quite there. I have lots of stuff stored at Google: various blogs, my calendar, my contacts, I use google Voice, etc. I have pictures up on various places, and I do think that having the cloud store my data makes sense. It allows me to sync things across multiple machines, as well as my phone.

But I don’t completely trust Google. There have been issues with GMail, and recently with the Sidekick servers at Microsoft. I still think I need to keep copies of things on my machines, and as backups.

I’ll just say the various cloud services, especially Live Mesh, make it easy for me to keep multiple copies, giving me an instant backup in multiple places.

I’ve got a conference to attend in a few weeks, and needed to get some things out the door. Every year we give away a lot of shirts and prizes at a party, and typically I have the person I order shirts from send them to the conference. However this year I wanted to re-use a bunch of shirts.

So I counted out my supply of shirts after my run today. At first I got nervous when I went through the first 4 boxes. It seemed like I might not have enough shirts, but it turned out OK. As I packed them up and counted them, I sent away

• 75 XL
• 50 L
• 19 M

And I still have about 10-12 XLs and 3 Ss sitting in the basement. With about 4 dozen S, XXL, and XXXL shipping from the supplier, I think I’ll be shipping shirts back home again, but at least I won’t have a big inventory for next year.

Now if I can get rid of some books….

There is an amazing debate occurring on Brent Ozar’s blog where he interviewed Matt Morollo. Being a little out of touch this week, it’s incredible to me there is so much passion about the election, but not so much on most other issues. Even the East Coast v West Coast location doesn’t generate this many comments, though maybe that’s because we don’t vote on it?

On one hand I feel somewhat hypocritical weighing in on this topic because I’m not running for the Board of Directors. I feel guilty for not doing so, but it’s not my time. Maybe in a year or two, but no promises.

But it has alternately annoyed, irritated, and concerned me, so I needed to weigh in.

On Matt Morollo

I’ll post this comments in the debate, but here’s what I see.

Matt isn’t a DBA, he has a different perspective, and he brings a fresh look at things to PASS. He actually reminds me of a past board member that viewed the world in a different way. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, because, as Brian Kelley pointed out, a fresh view can help, or cripple a board.

I agree with Andrew Kelly that we don’t need to just elect SQL professionals, and in fact, I’d like to see one non-SQL person on the board to stimulate debate. In fact, on many corporate, and other boards, the people are not necessarily engaged in that business. They might have a tie, but they work in other areas, typically non-competitive.

That being said, I worry about Matt’s personality. I have not met him, but the responses I have seen to the interview concern me. A number of them seem to be taken as personal attacks, and the responses seem to shift arguments.

I can’t tell if Matt’s answers in the interview and comments that mention his company are going to be a problem, or a conflict. They’re part of his experience, and they might be analogies to make a point. Or they might be plugs to push in the future. I can’t tell, but they raise a (small) flag for me.

Did I vote for Matt? I can’t say as I don’t want to influence people. I’ll disclose my votes after the results are in.

The Board of Directors

This is probably worth a separate post, but here’s what I’ve seen over the years with PASS.

The board has to work and manage.

PASS is relatively poor. They seem to have struggled to survive at times, by their own admission, and board members have had to manage projects, and even participate (note Rick Heiges’ participation and work recently on 24 hours of PASS), at times. This isn’t a board that meets a couple times of year, talks about direction, and then lets management do all the work.

I like the direction of the current management company, and the group seems to get things done, but the board has to work as well. Otherwise where is that 5-10 hours of work I week I’ve seen bandied around during the "should I run" process? Board members have to manage projects, manage areas of work in PASS (marketing, finance, content, speakers, etc.).

In my mind we need a variety of companies (no more than 2 from any entity), experiences, and backgrounds. I like the idea of someone from media/marketing. I like the idea of a developer. In my mind, maybe we should seek out well-respected people from INETA, or other areas that would be willing to serve on the board and bring ideas.

I also think that we might need to have a group of other volunteers, that we elect or they agree, to handle some work for a year. They commit to run things and let someone on the board actually to less work, and more thinking.

The Nomination Process

I think I’m going to upset a few people here, especially as I know some of the nomination committee. And again, I feel like a heel for not participating in this process. I should commit to it next year since I’m going to open my big mouth.

The nominating committee is making mistakes.

First, we have too few candidates. I know that you looked for qualified people, and interviewed them, but I think you

a) set the bar too high

b) aren’t necessarily qualified to set the bar

You’re DBAs. You’re not professional managers and directors for the most part. Some of you run small companies, but you’re not hiring people here. You don’t have the final decision.

But you can stack the deck. And that’s what I feel has been done in the past. I’m not sure about 2009, but honestly, I cannot believe that Tim Ford, a passionate person that volunteers, that is committed to PASS, is somehow not qualified for the slate. If he didn’t interview well in your mind, so what? He displays the ability to want to work, he’s open and engaging with the community, something that a number of board members haven’t done.

That’s what we need in the PASS Board.

The committee doesn’t choose the board members, so why set much of a bar? Maybe I’m missing something, and you don’t want to disparage anyone that applied, or prevent people from considering it in the future, but I think that’s a mistake. Some good, honest feedback about all the applicants and why someone was chosen would be refreshing.

As Andrew Kelly said, this isn’t rocket science. None of the current board is a group I would consider much more qualified than any of the candidates or even people I know that submitted their names. They just aren’t. They make decisions that most of this community could make.

Get more information out about candidates, more interviews like Brent Ozar did, or let the candidates post the information Brian Kelley mentions, but don’t take the nominating committee too seriously.

I heard about the Stackoverflow Dev Days earlier this year and thought it was an interesting idea. We had talked about doing a similar type event for SQLServerCentral, or even at my other company, SQLShare, but the logisitics and costs are substantial. As a way of researching the due diligence of such an event, I headed to Austin on Tuesday for the Austin Dev Days on Wednesday. A quick, 36 hour trip for me to see some great speakers and see how the event is run.

I had never been to Austin, and after a morning run (day 400!), I walked over to the Monarch Event Center. It’s a small facility, with about a 200 seat movie theater, an open space with a stage that could likely seat 300, and a few other rooms. I counted the numbers during the keynote and got to 162, and it seemed that a few more people walked in as the event was going on.

The format was a series of 50 minute talks. There were breaks between sessions, as well as a break for lunch. The doors didn’t open until just before 9, and everyone milled around in the lobby before then. No coffee, or food, provided then, so I had to duck around the corner for a cup of java.

Registration was simple. I’d bought a ticket on the web, and got a copy in email. I printed it out, and it had a bar code on it, which had me expecting some cool application to track who came. Instead when I went to the desk, someone looked at my ticket and marked my name off a list. Not so high-tech! Still it worked, and I got a DevDays bracelet and a blank name tag that I filled out with a sharpie. It was a low budget event, with limited SWAG and sponsors. Fog Creek Software and SmartBear had tables set up with a few people explaining their products.

The speaker list was interesting. I hadn’t heard of most of the speakers, which isn’t surprising since I’m not in the developer community as much as the SQL community. I wasn’t sure about some of the topics, but I was surprised in a few cases. Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software, opened up with a humorous keynote that had people laughing. I’ve followed Joel’s writing for years, and heard him speak a few times. He’s funny, and interesting, and worth going to see if you get the chance.

The first talk was on Python, by a local Austin developer that does a lot of scientific computing. I wasn’t sure if I’d like the talk, but I found it interesting. The focus was on a 21 line snippet of Python code that implements a spell checker and suggests replacements for misspelled words. It’s kind of amazing to walk through that code, which was written by Peter Norvig of Google. It’s worth reading through his essay, and I was amazed. The talk was an intro to Python tutorial, and I found it very interesting. It finished with a demonstration of a real-time application analyzing the speaker’s voice in a few graphs written in Python. Very impressive. An image from his talk:

Other talks during the day were on various topics. CouchDB, which probably has a place, but I’m not sure is a great replacement for many relational engines. There was one on iPhone development where the speaker built a small clock application. It seemed that it isn’t much harder to target the iPhone than other platforms, but it does require working through some hassles with Apple. There was a talk on ASP.NET MVC, which seems like a good idea, but I’m still wary of the data binding. Joel also have a talk on FogBugz and Kiln, a new source control product they are hosting, and a short talk on StackOverflow. A good overview of jQuery was slipped in as well.

There was a talk at the end of the day on code reviews, which I almost skipped. I haven’t done them in years, and in some discussions with people at lunch, many others didn’t do them either. The speaker works for SmartBear, which sells code review tools, but the talk wasn’t about their tool. Instead it gave some good reasons why code reviews are good, and I found myself surprised by them. It was an entertaining, and informative talk.

There are lots of tweets about Dev Days, along with some pictures, if you’re interested. There are more events coming the rest of the month in other cities.

Overall it was a good trip, and I had a good idea of how the event might work for SQLServerCentral. I’m not sure if we’ll do one, but we have some things to discuss. We, meaning SQLServerCentral and Red Gate, plan to continue to support SQLSaturday, DevTeach, and various other events all around the US and other countries. We’ve sent speakers and money to both free and paid events, and hope to do more next year.