Office FOMO

Posted on April 23, 2021 by way0utwest

There are plenty of companies that are starting to consider bringing people to the office. A few are tentatively making plans, Microsoft has opened campus with the option of 50% time at home. Google is aiming for Sept 1 and requires you to request remote work for more than 14 days a year. A few other friends are starting to go back 1-2 days a week at their companies, with the idea that this may increase over time.

Redgate has still extended full time remote to the end of 2021, and I have no idea what things will look like after that. I’m curious, and anxious, as I want to go back to the office. Like mentioned in this piece, I am missing others, along with the interactions and the chance meetings. Grant wrote about things we miss recently, and that was my response. Not necessarily the office, but just missing the chance to interact with adults and talk tech.

The bigger issue that I see, is that many of us may feel forced back into the office to take advantage of opportunities. The chance to get visibility with people outside our team, especially those that might be in management positions and can impact our careers. The face time, especially casual encounters outside of meetings, are a chance to impress others and give us an advantage over others.

To me, this is the challenge of remote work when not everyone is remote. Out of sight, out of mind is an apt expression. While you might constantly contact those that you work with, who are the people that may give you a raise, a promotion, or a spot on a project that everyone wants to work on? Or the people that might decide who gets let go? If these are people you contact often, great. If not, that’s a problem, and in my experience, I don’t often get the chance to sell myself to them unless I’m in the office.

These days I’m not as ambitious in my career, so I worry less about impressing others. I do want to see people, and that is what I miss the most during this pandemic. I do hope I can go back to the Redgate office and see people this fall, and I am hoping some events start to take place in person, perhaps with limited audiences, but in some way that allows us to have those chance, serendipitous interactions.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
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Daily Coping 23 Apr 2021

Posted on April 23, 2021 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 make time to run, walk, bike, swim, dance, cycle, stretch, or some other activity.

I’ve been trying to do more outside as the weather changes. Some chores, but also moving some exercise outdoors. I was lucky with an extended summer last year that had yoga and swimming outdoors, but since that ended in early October, it’s been mostly indoor yoga, weight lifting, and biking. The few times I have hiked, walked, or biked outside, it’s often been chilly or overcast.

With that in mind, I decided to go walk to the mailbox for a few days. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but my mailbox is a half mile from my house. I took dogs, leashed them when we left the property, and had a few nice jaunts, even in not great weather.

A nice break in the middle of a couple days.

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T-SQL Tuesday #137–Wrap Up

Posted on April 23, 2021 by way0utwest

I hosted the blog party this month, with the invite to write about notebooks. These are a neat technology, and I’ve written about them at SQLServerCentral.

This post is a wrap-up of the various responses to my invitation. First, quite a few people give credit to either Aaron Nelson or Rob Sewell for their writings and work with notebooks, so check out their blogs.

With that, Rob’s post this month has a number of links to his notebook work and a list of how he has used them with clients.

Aaron has kids, lots of them, and they keep him busy. However, he asked his entry this month to be a video where he discusses parameterizing notebooks.

Rob Farley talks about executing a notebook from Powershell, which to me is one of the key components that makes notebooks usable for something besides teaching.

Glenn Berry has a fantastic set of diagnostic DMV queries that are incredibly useful for anyone administering a SQL Server instance. He writes about his queries being bundled up in a notebook.

Chris Johnson was disappointed his organization didn’t adopt notebooks, but found another use. He makes notes to help learn new T-SQL features in notebooks and has a Github repo with them in it.

Benni De Jagere is rewriting some scripts into notebooks (with the help of PoSh and Bing), starting with extracting Power BI logs into csv files. Hopefully we’ll see him give a presentation on this process sometime in the future.

Deepthi Goguri writes about how notebooks work, including giving us some magical commands that you might consider adding to your notebooks.

Barney Lawrence uses notebooks often at work on a regular basis. One of his tasks is a notebook to run git commands for branches. He has also converted a series of blog posts on XML into notebooks that you can use to follow along with his posts.

Andy Cutler writes about testing the flow of presentations in a notebook. He embeds images near the code to help walk through the process of setting up Synapse.

Deborah Melkin writes about her challenges getting started, similar to mine. She is using these for some PoSh scripts, but the challenge of running some cells to set up variables and then other ones to do some work. The big win is keeping similar scripts together and documented with text around the code cells. She would like to see some things like execution plans, and I agree.

Justin Bird has played with them, but not much use in practice. He did some research and learning after the invite and shares some thoughts.

Julie Koesmarno tells us how she challenged herself to work on Python and microeconomics to build a chart that displays some data. Notebooks help her quickly get hands on and become a better learner. A great use of notebooks.

Martha Clancy has a few ideas to make notebooks a part of your daily work. Some good tips in there in her humorous flow, which doesn’t sound great, but it shows there is some value in thrashing around a bit.

Chris Voss tells us the best use he’s found. He puts a number of scripts together with documentation, even  when he can’t run the the code. A colleague can. He also would like to see execution plans in notebooks.

Mikey Bronowski gives a few scenarios where he has found notebooks to be useful, notably learning and improving processes.

Hugo Kornelis takes the approach that Microsoft is pushing notebooks a little too much, even in places they may not be appropriate, but he has a few use case: production support, data analysis, and presentations. Another vote for execution plans in notebooks.

VR expert Todd Kleinhans uses notebooks to work with GPUs, SQL Server on Linux, containers, and RAPIDS. Quite a technical list.

Linda Kovacheva discovered how powerful notebooks can be with Azure Machine Learning.

Kevin Chant has been using notebooks for a number of things in the Azure Data Engineering Services at Microsoft.

That’s the wrap. If I’ve missed anyone, let me know and I’ll update the post.

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Essential Operations

Posted on April 22, 2021 by way0utwest

It would seem obvious, but IT Operations staff are often essential to ensuring that systems and business can keep running. From websites to email to VPNs, many of the companies in which I’ve worked don’t have systems that will run without someone keeping an eye on them. Sometimes many eyes on a daily basis if we want to ensure that clients can log into applications and use them.

The pandemic of the last year has shown many organizations that workers can get their jobs done from any location. Very few of us actually touch the physical hardware that we might manage, but we do need access to those systems across networks, in a secure way. That might not have been as big a challenge as getting the rest of a company online, but it was a lot of work.

I don’t know how many people prioritize or consider IT operations an essential worker. This article makes a case that anyone working in IT Ops ought to be classified in the same way that health-case workers, teachers, and more. These workers were needed to keep the world moving forward, so why not recognize the importance of IT Ops along with these other types of workers.

I do agree that Operations staff need to be treated as important pieces in an organization. Even if you use a lot of DevOps automation, GitOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, and cloud resources, you need staff to track, configure, manage, monitor, and adjust the way things work. There likely isn’t any organization that has an infrastructure they can run without any humans involved on a weekly basis. Likely something would break in that time and you need some staff.

While you might consider the operations staff to be more replaceable and less valuable than developers or others, keep in mind that bringing someone up to speed on existing systems and ensuring they can run without service interruption isn’t as simple as just grabbing a new worker from some temp agency.

If you use computer services from your company, remember that someone is ensuring they continue to run smoothly for you, even if you don’t realize what they are doing. Remember there is someone that is behind the scenes, often during nights and weekends, patching, upgrading, and monitoring equipment. Thank them, send some appreciation, and acknowledge their effort the next time you have the opportunity. I’ve done that job, and I know it can be thankless. I’m going to take a moment and drop a note to my own staff, who really make my life much easier.

Steve Jones

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