Voice of the DBA

I’m a couple weeks late, but not nearly as late as 2020. In any case, I’m going to break these down as I did last year, but hopefully with a bit more focus. After a quick review last week, I am hoping I can do a better job in 2021.

The areas I want to focus on for my career are slightly different from last year, but still in a few areas.

• Reading
• Technical skills
• Projects

I am going to go back to a monthly check-in, with a reminder in the calendar, to review the progress I’ve made, and hopefully help me keep slightly more focused. I used Outlook to set this as the last Friday of the month, ending on 31 Dec 2021.

The details of each section are listed below. I’ve tried to be slightly detailed, but not so detailed that I don’t feel I have any flexibility.

Reading

I love to read. I’ve read over a 100 books some years, finishing 2020 with 82. I like the focus on longer reads in books, getting caught up in a topic, and I think this helps me to view the world differently.

For my career, I need to read some semi-technical or business focused books. Last year I aimed for technical (meaning code related) and non-technical (but non-fiction) books. I am going to do something similar this year, but also the realization slightly.

Goals:

• 3 non-fiction, career related books
• 1 technical book

I’d like to do something technical, and work through some project in a book, so I’ll continue to do this. I realize that 1/quarter is probably plenty. For now, I’ll leave a template here for my updates:

• Career – Project to Product – 3%
• Career – TBD
• Career – TBD
• Technical – TBD

Technical Skills

One thing that I’ve regretted slightly across the last year is that I didn’t focus on improving my career in a tangible way. Specifically, I need more Azure knowledge. I dabbled here and there, and could make things work, but not in a measured, focused way. I saw a few people work on certification, and I’ve regretted not going through some of the courses and work in the past.

I do want to go through some of the Azure certification paths, which have changed. Microsoft has changed many of the options, but there are some data ones, and I certainly would like to round out some of my Azure knowledge in new ways.

I also want to build more skills in these areas:

• T-SQL
• Python
• PowerShell

I find these to be the most relevant for my work, and I think these are areas that I use often. As a result, I have a couple of options here for the items that will grow my career. Here are my initial thoughts in a template:

• Certification –  AZ-900 – 0%
• Certification – DP-200 – 0%
• Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 4/25
• Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 0/25
• Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 0/25
• Skills – TBD

The Advent of Code is a good, and fun, way to exercise my skills and mind. I usually find 5-6 are easy and the rest challenging, so I’m going to try and work through these across the year. Already I find that when I start in Dec, that weekends and time with family get in the way, so I’m expanding these through the year.

I don’t know I’ve measuring improvement here well, but if I compete the skills test, that’s good.

I’m sure I’ll add something else, but this is a good start.

Projects

Building something is good practice for a career project, and it’s good documentation. I think that a few of my ideas have been more fun in the past, so I’m going to focus on more tangible items.

I want to do more community work, especially with PASS failing, so I’m going to aim here, especially in the local community. I also want to continue with a technical project of some sort, and certainly share some data.

With that in mind, here are a few items.

• Support DataSaturdays (or whatever the data platform one day event thing is)
• Added 3 events manually in 2021
• Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
• Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
• Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 20%
• ?? – TBD

This is the final look at my goals for 2020 and how I did. I am writing this a few days after the end of the year, and examining what I accomplished for myself.

Rating for the year: C

Details below, but really, I let the pandemic get me down, I didn’t focus, and I took lots of opportunities to get away from work and technical topics when I could.

That being said, I didn’t take advantage of the lack of travel to focus more on myself. I could have improved more skills in a focused way, especially around my goals. I also think that my goals were more of the “this would be fun” nature than carefully tailored around my career and the things that are helpful.

In short, I don’t think I thought enough about myself and where I am in my life when I started planning 2020, thinking about the practical aspects of moving my career forward, but in an evolutionary, not revolutionary way.

I’ll have to do better next year trying to set and work on goals.

Reading Goals

Here were my goals for the year.

• 3 technical books
• 2 non-technical books – done

Books I’ve tackled:

• Making Work Visible – Complete
• Pro Power BI Desktop – 80% complete
• White Fragility – Complete
• The Biggest Bluff – Complete
  
• Team of Teams – Complete
• Project to Product – 3%

I didn’t finish one technical book. I had a few ones I was looking at, but never really dug into any of them. They were easy to put off, with my constantly citing current work and the pandemic. To be fair, I did also read 70+ fiction books, which helped me cope with the year.

All in all, I am happy with my reading progress here, getting away from fun fiction or literature and doing some reading in areas that will help my career.

Project Goals

Here were my project goals, working with software

• A Power BI report that updates from a database – 30%
• A mobile app reading data from somewhere
• A website that showcases changes and data from a database – 20%

I did manage to get Power BI hooked to a database, and some minor visuals, but nothing like I wanted.

I did build a few websites, using data from a database, but as static sites. It was simpler to just get things working like this, and I was worried about costs and value. The whole PASS failing thing also threw me at the end of the year when I anted to focus more on goals.

Nothing done on the mobile app. I think this was an aspirational goal at the beginning of the year, a chance to just try something, and I never took the chance.