The Battlefield of Your Career

Posted on February 14, 2022 by way0utwest

Jeff Atwood has had quite a bit of success in his career, having been a founder of StackExchange and Discourse. He’s a fellow alumnus of the University of Virginia, along with Alexis Ohanian. Both of them have had a higher profile than me, and I admire what they’ve accomplished. I also think they’ve both been advocates for the technology industry, helping and advising others on how they can succeed in their own careers.

Jeff has been writing interesting posts about hardware and software for years, but the latest one struck me. It’s called Learning on the Battlefield, and it has a lot of the same advice that I recently gave someone. In the post, Jeff notes that approaching your software career is like learning on the battlefield. It’s like making weapons and coming up with tactics. You really need to test them on the battlefield.

Note, I wouldn’t expect that this means we test ideas in production, but rather, that we do test them in a live way, actually using the software. In QA, of course.

Jeff notes that the work of building software is more important than schooling. I agree. I also think that the closer you can get to simulating work, the better off you are when you interview, or even when someone examines your body of work. His advice is to get an internship, go to user groups, build OSS, publish articles, and blog.

All of these things are raising your brand. That’s a lot of what I’ve been writing and speaking about for over a decade. It’s the advice I gave someone recently who wanted to not build software, but become a DBA. Do the work, set up a test lab at home, in Azure or AWS, and then write about it. Blog about what you learn, how you do things, what others advised you about, and even the mistakes you’ve made.

Don’t be perfect, don’t try to show a hiring manager you know everything, but rather show them that you know some things and can learn others. We all make mistakes, even those of us that blog a lot. We can write about mistakes and still impress people.

Make your job search, your career advancement, or your desire for a raise/promotion/project, a battlefield. Do things and share your experience. Tell us about your first year of something, and more importantly, learn to practice communication. Add this to your CV/resume as a body of work, and I am sure that you will find it helps your career.

Steve Jones

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

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Daily Coping 14 Feb 2022

Posted on February 14, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

Today’s tip is to look for the positive side of a challenging situation.

Recently I had a kid that I coach get upset with the amount of time she spent on the court. She is a player that is weaker in some areas, strong in a few, but struggling to find a place on this team. To be fair, we coaches struggle to find ways to use her. We do, but not much.

She was upset at a competition where she didn’t play much. I know how hard this is, and could see her body language in talking to her father. I’ve been that Dad and watched my kid sit on the bench for long periods.

I decided to make this a learning opportunity. I went over to the Dad and asked him to meet, saying I’d like to try and salvage her time with us. He agreed, and we met the next day, trying to help this kid see the reality, learn to be a part of a team, and give her ways to improve that might help. However, we also were honest that things aren’t likely to change a lot in the short term.

I love this kid. I’ve known her for 4 years and this is my second time coaching her. I wish her the best, but I also had to give the hard advice I’ve given my daughter in the past. A very challenging time, but I think it was worth the effort to try and make it more positive.

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The First Tesla Ski Trips

Posted on February 11, 2022 by way0utwest

This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

After a bit over 4 months, we finally had a long road trip in the Tesla Model Y. As I live in Colorado, we went to the mountains to ski. This post covers two trips, a day trip and a multi-day trip.

Day Trip

My wife and I took a day off and drove to the Keystone on a Thursday for a day ski trip. I charged the Tesla up to 93% overnight and we headed up on a snowy day. A fairly heavy snow was falling as we left the house and kept falling until we were well into the Colorado mountains on I-70.

The snow tires worked well, and I felt the car was gripping well on the road. Traffic wasn’t too bad, and the drive went as smoothly as it had gone in other cars.

The one place where I was careful was driving through Dillon, CO, where the roads were snow-packed, and there are some substantial curves. I was careful here, as the Model Y is a heavy car and slips a bit more near the bottom

A few stats from the drive up (109 miles)

  • Power: 48% of the charge (93%->45%)
  • Cost: $4.81 (37kWh * $0.13)

The drive down:

  • Power: 38%
  • Cost: $3.64 (28kWh)

As a comparison, 110 miles in the X5 costs about $20 (at $3.50/gal). The Prius would have been about $9.20 or so.

We skied most of the morning in about 20-25F weather. We then left and headed home, having lots about 2% of charge while the car was sitting in the parking lot. We drove down to Idaho Springs, and at around 28%, we stopped at the Supercharger to add some power.

We spent about 10-15 minutes adding power (about 25%). We sat in the car, checked some email and chatted, though this location is walking distance from a number of restaurants in Idaho Springs. On another day we might have walked over to have a quick lunch and left the car, as many others did.

It was an easy trip and a pleasant experience for our first trip into the mountains.

A (Cold) Three Day Trip

The next week we went back, staying up at Keystone for three days. I charged the car up to 87% and we drove to coach kids and then left from the gym for a late night drive up. It was cold, around 20F, and we again used about 50% of the power. In this case, 87->33% with a few stops  along the way.

The next morning, we were down to 26% on a night that dropped to about 8F. That was a 7% drop overnight. An interesting data point.

We drove over and skied, and then went to the Silverthorne Supercharger, arriving with 18% power left. Our plan was to get a cup of Starbucks while it charged, as the chargers are in the parking lot for Starbucks, but the store was closed. Not enough staff with a few out sick..

Sad smile

Not a problem. Rather than drive over to another place, we just charged and talked with our kids on the phone. Interesting, I pulled into charger 4B and plugged in. The car would say “starting to charge” and after 2-3 minutes it would say that something was wrong and I needed to unplug and plug it back in. I did that twice, and got the message.

I switched to a different flow and things worked flawlessly. The charger immediately jumped to about 50Kwh, putting around 240miles/hour of charge into the car. We spent about 25 minutes there, getting up to 75% before I decided to stop. I was hungry, so we left.

Overnight the temps were close to 0F, and we dropped about 15%of charge that night. The next night was –8F when I woke up, and we’d dropped about 18% of charge. Not insignificant, and I can see why people recommend waking up and charging in the am before a long trip.

If we were planning on a long drive, I’d have gotten up, gotten coffee and then gone and parked at the supercharger to eat, work a bit, and fill up. Slightly more cumbersome than a gas station, but really, I’d be moving some work time into the car rather than sitting inside and then hitting a gas station.

Overall, the car worked well under cold, winter conditions. We didn’t have any range issues, and easily charged up at the Superchargers along our route. I could pre-heat the car before driving, and I’m getting used to remembering to do this. Most of the time I think about this about 10 minutes before we pack up and go, which isn’t inconvenient. It certainly is nice to pre-heat the car as I’m paying a bill in a restaurant and have the heat going when we get in the car.

Tires worked well and gripped in the snowy conditions. It was informative to see how the battery faired driving into the mountains, as well as overnight in some of the coldest conditions I’ve seen in years. Not a lot of battery/range anxiety and charging was smooth and easy. Taking 15-20 minutes with a cup of coffee and my wife wasn’t a big interruption to our lives, and we didn’t mind taking a few breaks during our short holiday.

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Do You Still Use CHAR?

Posted on February 11, 2022 by way0utwest

I ran across an article, titled When to use CHAR, VARCHAR, or VARCHAR(MAX), which struck me as something I never do. I mean, I do use varchar (and nvarchar), but I can’t remember the last time I actually created a char column. The article is worth a read, and it sets the stage for you to think about your database design process and the choices you make.

It’s Friday, and if you take a few minutes and think about the last few times you’ve added columns to a table have you used CHAR as a data type? Or do you default to varchar of any size as a general rule?

I tend to do a lot of demo work, and I help customers with different situations. In many cases, we are storing text data, often not strongly typed data. As a result, I find most customers using varchar (or nvarchar), and I’ve built the habit of using the variable structures in proofs-of-concept and demos. I find it especially handy when someone asks me to enter some data they use and then show how it would be handled.

Early in my career, I’d often tag a zipcode as a 5 character field, or a state as a 2 character abbreviation. However, these days a postal code can be a 5+4, which is 9 characters or even 10 with the plus. Many companies work overseas and may want to account for longer postal codes. States (or regions), can often be 3 characters, but sometimes more. Often we just leave 10 characters for region abbreviations (or longer) as the data might be spelled out or need to accommodate something unknown.

For many business applications, it seems that there might be a definition for what the data should be, but since exceptions can abound, often using a variable-length data type just prevents issues in the future. Add that to the fact that often we are dealing with cheap storage, and it doesn’t seem worth the time to try and get the exact size correct. Even when knowing an invoice uses 10 characters, are you sure that you won’t exceed the ten-character width? What if you acquire a company that uses 12 character invoice numbers? Easier to set this to a variable 20 and move on.

If you work in data warehousing, then you might know what your data sources contain and be more likely to choose fixed types, but is the space savings worth the work in the event that source systems change? I don’t know. I tend to plan for sources to change and allow a little padding in my schema. You might feel differently, but are the space savings worth the potential hassles in the future? I’d be curious what you think today.

Steve Jones

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

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