A New Word: Lyssamania

Posted on January 26, 2024 by way0utwest

lyssanmania – n. the irrational fear that someone you know is angry at you, that as soon as you wander into the room, you’ll be faced with a barrage of questions that gradually escalates into a frenzy of outrage, for reasons that you don’t understand.

When I work with teenagers, I see lyssamania a lot. They often assign feelings and reactions to people before any situation occurs. They’ll assume others will react in some way without really thinking things through.

We know what assume means.

I’ve often felt this is am immature view of a situation that teenagers have, except that I see the same thing in business.

I have experienced this myself, though usually I have some idea of why a person might be upset. Usually I think I’ve offended someone, or I assume I have. Not always, and sometimes I have a variation of lyssamania with some idea of why there would be outrage.

Hopefully you don’t feel this, but if you do, get some counseling as this shouldn’t be your default view.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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A Great Place to Work

Posted on January 26, 2024 by way0utwest

I have had quite a few employers in my career. Of the ones that paid me for computer work, I’ll say that there were 3 great ones (1 I owned), 2 average ones, and 3 poor ones. I’ve had a few other minor times or contract situations where I didn’t really judge or care one way or the other. A lot of time is spent at work, but if it’s days/week/(few months), I can deal with most situations. That being said, even at the poor places, I learned a lot and I grew, so I don’t regret them or wouldn’t want them removed from my past. There are always good and bad things about any job. As I tell my kids, every job is a job some days, even my amazing position at Redgate.

Recently my employer, Redgate Software, was on a number of Best Places to Work lists in the US. We took 28th in the US (5th in Austin, 4th in LA, 10th in NY) with higher rankings when you filtered to mid-sized businesses. While I don’t work in those places, I do go to our offices, and I think we have an amazing culture, workplace environment, support, and training for staff. We’re a mid-sized company now with a bit over 500 people, which is amazing. I was person 146, but I’ve known the company since it was 8 people. As it’s grown, I think Redgate has done a great job under Simon Galbraith’s leadership of building a place to work that is productive and profitable, but enjoyable and interesting. Our current CEO, Jakub Lamik, has continued to help Redgate thrive, both as a business and as an employer.

Many of you reading this are data professionals in some way and likely work for someone else. Do you think you have a great employer? Are you happy with the workplace, be it in an office, at home, or some combination? Would you vote for your employer as one of the best places to work in your city? I didn’t here, but I would. We’ve regularly made similar lists in Cambridge, UK, where I’ve most often visited an office.

I worked at home for 5 years before I started at Redgate, and since then I’ve mostly worked at home. I regularly visit offices 4-10 times a year, mostly in Cambridge, but also in Pasadena, Austin, and New York. I appreciate that we built offices that are comfortable to use, with plenty of tech that makes life easy for employees. We are flexible with hours, and even the rules we set in place can flex or bend for individual situations. We hire smart, motivated people, and everyone learns how to both be supportive and accommodating while holding themselves and others accountable for work. I think we are sometimes too nice, but that might be my cut-throat US business upbringing compared to the UK style of work.

To be fair, Redgate isn’t for everyone, and we have had no shortage of people leave in our 25-year history. We’ve also had quite a few people leave and come back, realizing not only is the grass not greener elsewhere, there are plenty of worse places to work. I don’t love everything about Redgate, but I do enjoy working with a diverse group of people from many different countries and backgrounds, with a very wide variety of experience relating to databases. I learn from many, get ideas from different viewpoints, and get the chance to try and better explain databases (DevOps, monitoring, etc.) from my point of view and experience.

I loved working at JD Edwards, and I really enjoyed my partnership with Brian Knight and Andy Warren at SQL Server Central. Redgate is up there with those organizations as a great place to work and one I enjoy almost every day. Can you say the same thing? If not, hopefully, you find your situation more positive than negative.

Steve Jones

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

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So You Think You’re Agile… (Webinar Jan 25)

Posted on January 25, 2024 by way0utwest

I’ve got another webinar tomorrow. This one in conjunction with Clear Measure, who work with companies to build better software. This should be interesting as Jeffrey Palermo and I talk about the characteristics of organizations that are getting better at delivering software in general, with some specific focus on the testing and data side of ensuring your software works.

Register and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Consolidating Cloud Backups

Posted on January 24, 2024 by way0utwest

I am a big fan of the cloud. While I appreciate local storage and privacy/control/security, etc., that stuff can also go away locally. Plus, I like the convenience, and I think that many cloud services do a good job of making my life easier.

That being said, I’ve had a few things in place for the last few years.

  • Dropbox – files, sharing photos/video, presentations
  • Google Workspace – personal email, photos, docs/sheets
  • Amazon Photos – extra photo backup (free with Prime)
  • OneDrive – personal and business, syncing files
  • GitHub – repos of misc stuff.
  • BackBlaze – laptop/desktop backup
  • Notes – Joplin through DropBox
  • Passwords – Password Safe through OneDrive.

I have a few other minor things, but this is where I have a lot of stuff.

Recently I’ve been thinking that I need to consolidate a few things. Partially because of cost. Like 37 Signals, I realized that I was spending more than I’d like on a few things, and I’ve decided to try and reduce costs, but not reduce service.

Leaving DropBox

I’ve been paying for 1TB of space in Dropbox. I’ve also had 1TB in OneDrive. I essentially flipped a mental coin and decided to stick with Microsoft, partially because a lot of my work involves MS, and I have a number of things linked to a personal MS account where I use my OneDrive.

I was only using about 20GB of space in DropBox, so this was an easy move  for me. I dragged/dropped a bunch of things from one folder to another and let them sync. I cancelled the $10/mo for DropBox and I’ve reduced some cloud spend.

As a second backup, I’m going to start moving more of my talks to GitHub, keeping presentations there, along with copies in OneDrive, as this will ensure I have a couple backups in the event of some disaster.

Photos

I ran out of space in my Google Workspace for photos. I share this with my kids, and the plans to expand space are poor for an individual. They are geared to businesses, and adding more space would take my $18/mo plan to $60, which seems like a crazy indulgence.

For now, I’ve started using OneDrive as my backup for photos, still with Amazon, and I’ve kicked the can on this as my daughter is in her final year of Uni and doesn’t want to deal with any migrations.

Notes

I wrote about moving to Joplin from Evernote awhile back. It’s worked well, but I was synching things through DropBox. I had to move that to OneNote and it works well.

I saw a few people at work using other services, and I might investigate them, but for now, Joplin has worked well.

I still don’t like OneNote and prefer text or MD formats.

Email/Docs

Like the photos above, I’ve got a lot of stuff in Google, but they haven’t made it easy to manage. A lot of Google services are either personal or business, and there’s no crossover. For example, I can’t use Google Pay with my workspace account because, well Google has different divisions and they don’t talk.

I want to migrate my personal domain away, but for now, I don’t have a good plan, I’m sticking with Google and I’ll decide in the summer what to do.

Backup

Backblaze has been great for me. They’ve raised prices a few times, but I’m OK with that. I want a raise most years, so I’m fine with reasonable price increases.

Passwords

We have a service at work for passwords, but I’ve been hesitant to move to it. It syncs to the cloud and provides automatic entry into browsers and things, but I’ve been used to Password Safe and I am hesitant to change. I like having my own safes for passwords that I can manage the synching of through a choices of file sharing. Too many third parties have had breaches, and I worry that my personal file storage is less likely to be targeted than a third party managing passwords for corporations.

I’m sticking with Password Safe, syncing through OneDrive.

Summary

I love the cloud, but I’d be curious if any of you use/recommend/hate different services.

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