Grinding Away: Mary Spender

Posted on January 13, 2025 by way0utwest

A few years ago I stumbled on this video and loved it.

That led me to Mary’s page and this cover of John Mayer’s Stop This Train:

Since then I’ve been following her, watching this musician build a life around her music, her videos, and more. Her site is at https://www.maryspender.com/ and I was sad that I wasn’t in the UK during her tour last fall. However, I still follow her videos, where she describes how she approaches the music business, or song writing or her craft, etc.

Making a living as a musician has been her dream and while that slightly pivoted, she still works in and around music. She is making it, though I’m not sure she’s getting rich or living the easy life. My view from the outside is she grinds away every week at producing content and music that will allow her to continue doing so.

This might be a treadmill of sorts, but it’s also the one she chooses and enjoys. Music is her passion and finding a way to make a living doing something you love is admirable.

However this takes work. It’s a grind. Maybe an enjoyable one for her, but still regular work.

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Simple(r) Coffee

Posted on January 13, 2025 by way0utwest

Starbucks has too many order combinations. This article about the challenges for their new CEO notes there are over 170,000 combinations of things customers can order. As someone who has visited a store often and stood behind someone placing an order, that sounds like an accurate number. Sometimes I hear people order things to drink that I had no idea were even possible.

When there are too many choices, sometimes there can be a delay as the person tries to process the information and make a decision. Some people can’t make a decision. Others enjoy the variety and keep making different decisions each time. That’s fine if you’re visiting a restaurant, but it’s less useful if you’re building software.

I have worked with people who struggle to decide on an approach to solving a problem. In the C++ world, I’d see people struggling to organize classes and members, sometimes spending too much time researching and comparing different methods. They debate when is private or public appropriate, when do we need a superclass or subclass? We would see some paralysis by analysis from certain developers who are endlessly searching for the optimal approach.

Other developers might change their approach constantly, resulting in a lack of consistency across the codebase. In the modern world, I sometimes see users experimenting with different libraries or packages (or data stores) with each new project. They might be consistent within a project for a period of time, but since many teams often shift to different projects over time (or maintain them), how helpful is this? If each new project looks different, we spend a lot of time on developers getting familiar with the technology.

I have tended to adopt the philosophy of strong opinions, loosely held. In other words, I’ll pick an approach/platform/technology/etc. and stick with it. Moreover, I’ll ask everyone on the team to stick to a similar method of coding. If we need to change, then we can evaluate the proposed change, performance test it, and if we decide it’s better, we all adopt this and slowly work to refactor old code as we have time. We never have time, so we only refactor when we have to touch old code for some fix or enhancement. However, when we do touch old code, let’s improve it.

My preference is to allow a limited set of technologies in our company at any point in time. We need a process to add or remove something, but this ought to be a decision made to limit our range of technologies and required expertise. I’m not against Python or PowerShell or MongoDB or any other technology, but I don’t want things adopted because an individual prefers that technology or thinks it works better. They need to prove that there is a good reason to others, and as a group, we agree that the value of adding a new technology is worth the burden.

Otherwise, we end up in the situation I see often in job descriptions: with a requirement that new hires know dozens of technologies at an expert level because we don’t have that person on staff.

And we’ll never find them.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

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Friday Flyway Tips: Chaining Commands for State-based Deployments

Posted on January 10, 2025 by way0utwest

One of the cool things I’ve seen with the new Flyway CLI is that I can combine multiple actions together in one call, which can make the process of writing automations streamlined.

I’m not sure I love this, but I’ll show how this works.

I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.

Making a State-Based Deployment from the CLI

In a previous post, I showed how to use the new prepare and deploy verbs to create a deployment script and then apply it to a database. This is a great way to handle simpler deployments if you want to work in a state-based fashion with Flyway.

That post showed two different CLI calls, which are shown below:

flyway prepare -prepare.source=schemaModel -prepare.target="env:qa" -prepare.scriptFilename="deployments\FWState__deployment.sql"
flyway deploy -scriptFilename="deployments\FWState__deployment.sql" -environment=qa -executeInTransaction=true

Easy enough, and I like this structure as I’d likely build a pipeline that looks like this, where I prepare the script, then have a manual approval step to check this before deployment:

2024-12_0228

However, you might argue that someone would check the script in a QA or other deployment, so maybe you streamline things later, or you use this as a QA/test deployment and want everything to run smoothly after a PR.

In that case …

Chaining Commands

I can run this code instead.

flyway prepare deploy …

Let’s see this work. If you look, I have a couple of changes that I can see in Flyway Desktop. There is a table alter and a new stored procedure.

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I can streamline the automation of these two changes in the CLI with the code style above with this code:

flyway prepare deploy -prepare.source=schemaModel -prepare.target=”env:qa” -environment=qa -executeInTransaction=true

Here is the pre-execution look at my database:

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The execution, which didn’t use a transaction. I’ll have to figure that one out:

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And the post database view with the table and proc changes deployed.

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I built and deployed the script in one command, and it also appeared to have added my script to the deployments folder. No idea why that happened either.

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If you want commands chained, you can do it.

Summary

This post showed how you can chain your prepare and deploy commands together in one command, which might be preferable in some situations.

I don’t know if I like this, or would do it, but it’s not a bad idea. Ultimately, I’d really like this deployment script to be saved back to the repo so I could track it, but that’s going to be some work, and likely that means not chaining commands.

Flyway is an incredible way of deploying changes from one database to another, and now includes both migration-based and state-based deployments. You get the flexibility you need to control database changes in your environment. If you’ve never used it, give it a try today.

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The Lesser Used Functions

Posted on January 10, 2025 by way0utwest

Recently, I reviewed an article that examined the bitwise functions that were added to T-SQL in SQL Server 2022. As I was looking over the article, I started to wonder if anyone was using these in production code. I used to do bitwise work early in my programming career, when memory and space were tight. However, it always felt like I was hiding some information that a subsequent developer (or my future self), might easily miss.

I looked through some other changes to the T-SQL language in the last few versions and made a list. This week I wonder if any of you use these functions in production code?

There are some interesting changes in here, and I can see the use for these functions, but I suspect these are specialized functions built for specific situations (or customers). I don’t expect many people to use them outside of those situations, but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps some of you like doing bitwise operations, you like the logical CHOOSE/IIF, or maybe you can stomach approximate calculations.

I’m glad that the T-SQL language continues to grow. I would like to see more changes that ease the development of database code, though I would like Microsoft to ensure these new functions perform well. Some of the changes added in the past haven’t done so, especially when a dotNet function is wrapped with T-SQL. Performance matters and many of these functions will be called in queries that need to compete a result with thousands of rows.

Let us know today if you’ve found these functions useful in your work, or if there are changes made in the past that you would like to see improved.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

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