Bringing Redgate Streamed Down Under

Posted on June 24, 2020 by way0utwest

Next week is the Redgate Streamed APAC Edition, on July 2. At least, July 2 in Australia. I’m still not sure what time it will be for me, and I am double checking all the schedules since Australia and New Zealand make me feel more disconnected from everywhere else in the world. I loved my trip last year, but crossing the dateline was a weird experience.

You can register for the event and attend. It’s 0800-1430 in AEST, but I’m not going to try and figure out where that is anywhere else. You’re on your own for that one.

This time I’ll be presenting and hosting the event from Colorado in the US. I also get to do a short interview with Troy Hunt, who is in incredible expert in his field. I follow his blog, have watched his presentations, and am somewhat disappointed I don’t get to meet him in person. Maybe next year.

We also have some other amazing speakers:

  • Damian Brady, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft
  • Steve Jones, Microsoft Data Platform MVP & SQLServerCentral Editor
  • Greg Low, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and founder of SQL Down Under
  • Hamish Watson, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and founder of SQL Down Under

I’ve been blessed to be on the stage with each of these experts, and I am looking forward to learning more from them next week. We’ll be talking security, DevOps, compliance, and more. Register today and join me next week for some learning, inspiration, and excitement.

As a  plus, Redgate is donating to the Australian Red Cross and the WHO for each person that attends, so be sure to tune in.

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Taking a Break

Posted on June 22, 2020 by way0utwest

A week’s holiday. Something I took for granted in 2019, and something I wasn’t sure would happen a month ago. However, some places have reopened, and we’re going camping.

I’m spending a week in the Keystone, SD area, not likely near people, but enjoying the outdoors with family.

See you next week.

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Moar Azure

Posted on June 20, 2020 by way0utwest

There are a number of choices for working in the cloud, aka, renting resources, but there are three big choices: Azure, AWS, and GCP. These three dominate the cloud services, though arguably AWS and Azure are way ahead. All three have lots of services, and all three can likely meet your cloud or hybrid needs, even if you work in a regulated industry or government.

This week there was a piece on the work Microsoft is doing to increase their capacity. Between the 0365 Office services, Teams for collaboration, and their regular PaaS/IaaS workloads, they’ve grown quite a bit this year with the COVID-19 pandemic. As they try to increase their resources, they’ve had people working round-the-clock to add new servers. I’m sure they are still using containers, but likely they are struggling to fill these with new hardware.

They’ve also been adding bandwidth, which is a bit need between the data centers. I had no idea they have their own undersea cables, but apparently they do. I suspect Amazon and Google do as well.  There is a note that they’re also coding, trying to improve efficiency. After all, while you can throw hardware at a problem, many of us know that bad code can overwhelm those efforts. We see it in our jobs every day. I would hope that many of our organizations that might be depending on software more realize that better code is an advantage for us and our customers.

I know Microsoft runs a lot of their own stuff on Azure, including development work, and they’ve had to reschedule their internal workloads as well as move other work outside of regions. I think that’s fine in many cases, but with different laws in different countries, I hope they’re extremely careful about what moves. Data sovereignty can matter.

If you read through the article, it seems that Microsoft has learned a lot about adapting their work methods, both with people and systems, to meet the increased workloads. This is one area that I hope we see some detailed technical blogs, which might help others learn how to better manage their own resource challenges, or even learn to code better. While some of this might be proprietary, with the move to having many things open source, why not share ways to improve application resource usage.

Steve Jones

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Evaluating Life at Work

Posted on June 19, 2020 by way0utwest

One of the more interesting things that we do at Redgate is regularly ask workers to evaluate their environment. We use a company, called Thymometrics, and periodically employers as asked to rate various factors, both in terms of how important are they to us, and how satisfied are we. I tweeted the general dashboard, but essentially there are a series of sliders we use to rate things, between a max and min. No scale, just a visual choice of are things more or less important. Am I more of less satisfied.

The range is factors are here:

  • Work Environment
  • Wellbeing
  • Salary
  • Benefits
  • Culture and Values
  • Giving Something Back
  • Leadership
  • My Manager
  • Personal Growth
  • Recognition
  • Redgate’s Purpose
  • My Team
  • My Role

When I log in, I can see how I last set things. I can also reset everything to the middle and re-evaluate how I view the world. Usually I look through and see if I want to change my satisfaction. Rarely do I think that some part of my job situation has changed in importance. However, at least once a year I do reset things and start over.

While I know plenty of people see this as a pain in the sitting part of the body to go through, I appreciate it. This lets me evaluate how I feel about my job situation, and about my company. I get to think for a few minutes about whether I am truly satisfied with my position and how I am treated by this organization.

This is a somewhat formalized process. I checked with the team that looks at this and they get anonymized rollup of data, unless someone puts in a comment and asks for a reply. Even then, they don’t send the raw data to managers, but attempt to mediate if there are issues. It’s a good idea, and really, this is what I do and recommend for others.

At least once a year I take a serious look at my employment situation, in conjunction with how my personal life is going and think about what I like and don’t. I think about my other options, and discuss this with my wife. Is this the best way to live my life? So far it has been every year, since I think I have one of the best jobs out there. That doesn’t mean I should assume there aren’t other options or ways that I might want to change my job.

I think you should do the same thing yourself, at least once a year. Honestly evaluate your situation, ask others about theirs, and make the best decision for you. After all, you only get one chance to go through this life. If it’s not working, plan to make a change.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

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