Daily Coping 1 Mar 2023

Posted on March 1, 2023 by way0utwest

Today’s coping tip is to call a friend to catch up and really listen to them

Actually a friend pinged me to ask about a call recently. I made some time and set up a call.

I’m glad I did. A friend is having changes in life and wanted to talk. I feel similarly, and in this case, we had some similar challenges that we could talk about, support each other, while enjoying catching up.

Worth the 15 minutes of my life to do this.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

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Daily Coping 28 Feb 2023

Posted on February 28, 2023 by way0utwest

Today’s coping tip is to thank three people you feel grateful to and tell them why.

This is something I tend to do privately, thanking people who’ve impacted my life. I’ll do that, but in general, here are the people I want to thank.

Friend 1 is someone I’ve known for many years in Denver. We get together periodically for lunch or dinner, but I’m always happy to have an ear to vent about life, kids, marriage, work, etc.

Friend 2 is someone I’ve known from my work and community experience who has been a friend and support system in many ways over the years. We’ve had the chance to share some tough times and help each other, which I appreciate.

Friend 3 is a friend at work who’s been someone that has supported and helped me grow myself as an advocate.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

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A Corporate Wellness Day

Posted on February 27, 2023 by way0utwest

Today is the corporate Wellness Day at Redgate. It’s a day off for almost everyone in the company, unless they have something that can’t get moved. A few support people, a few others, like me, that are traveling. We, however, will get another day that we can take off.

When we revamped benefits for 2023, one of the things that we wanted to encourage was health and wellness. We added a couple days off, like this company holiday and a birthday day off. We also reduced the ability for employees to get out of vacation by not buying back days and emphasizing that managers should ensure they work with people to take their entire allowance. We can carry over 5 days, but no more.

I like the idea of this day off, as it means people take some time away and won’t come back to a bunch of emails or other things that people sent during their break. Instead, the company is essentially shutting down.

I don’t mind missing today for travel. I’ve got things to do and I’m looking forward to working with a customer tomorrow. However, I also value my days off and I am looking to try and get a day later this week or next and get up to the mountains.

Whether you think this is a good idea or not, I would hope you admit that it’s nice that the company is trying to ensure employee wellness. Last week had a number of meetings for Mental Health Awareness Week, and to cap off those efforts, we close today.

I’ve never had a corporate closure like this as a benefit. I’m looking forward to next year and taking the day off with everyone else.

I hope.

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Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?

Posted on February 27, 2023 by way0utwest

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort.

There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it’s impressive, I don’t know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the Top 5 Dream Dinner Guests. The tool isn’t that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends.

I look at Ayende Rahien’s blog often, and he recently had some thoughts on this topic, experimenting with ChatGPT and coding. Some things worked; some didn’t. In general, to get good code, you still need a subject matter expert, which is also the case with humans. We have plenty of people writing code that aren’t great at their jobs. We do see a lot of bad code, but we also have some great coders that help others to learn or just refactor their code later.

So is ChatGPT better than a below-average developer? I don’t know. While the tool will get better, one advantage with people is we can complain to them, or send them problem queries, and they’ll learn to paste better code in from the SQL Server Central forums or StackOverflow or somewhere else. Perhaps ChatGPT will learn, but will it learn to improve and refactor code? I’m not sure how easy it will be to teach the system to edit something rather than just produce new code.

I do think that the assistance features of AI, suggesting ways to complete sentences or lines of code, can be very valuable. They are a great productivity tool that can enhance your ability to get work done. If they learn to work in your style, suggesting the things you’ve done in the past, then these tools will help. As with most tools, they aren’t a replacement for your knowledge, but merely a lever to make you more efficient.

Steve Jones

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