Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Back From Vacation and Ready To Go

    It’s been a good holiday for me. I had a week’s vacation with just my wife, a nice holiday with kids, and a relaxing week where I’m trying to get a few things done. I’ve been away from my home office for two weeks, and it often takes a few days to get used to focusing again at the computer, but I’m getting there. It doesn’t help that the office, err, house is full of people with my kids away from school.

    The year is coming to a close, and it’s a slow week, as I noted yesterday. However, I’m refreshed and recharged. Getting away on an adventure, without a computer to spent time on was great. I did no work and just enjoyed the time away. That’s how a vacation should go, and it’s the type of trip I need to take more often.

    Now it’s time to move forward again. As I wrote about in my goals post, I’m planning on spending some time thinking how to achieve my learning goals in 2018. Today is that day, with an hour set aside to do a little research for resources and attempting to build some sort of calendar with milestones that will help me move forward. Those are the personal items for my career, tangential to my work.

    The other part of today is really digging into where I want SQLServerCentral to go next year. We need to be mobile friendly moving forward (thanks for the push, Google) and that means some code changes. I want to be more involved here, along with upgrade plans to get us onto more modern platforms. The old SQL2008/WS2003 system works, but it’s not ideal, and we can’t take advantage of newer technologies and opportunities that Microsoft has released. My thought is to add new content and new sections to the site, including some better quiz/test/assessment ways for people to check their skills and work towards their own goals. If you have ideas, let me know.

    It’s been a great year at SQLServerCentral, and I hope you feel the same way. Now, on to 2018 and let’s see where we can go.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Making Choices

    I wrote about shutting down some travel for the foreseeable future. Its been a long couple of years for me. If you look at my speaking schedule, I’ve presented at an average of 20+ events for the last few years. This year was a few less, but I’ve had more travel outside of that. By the end of the year, I’ll have spent 9 weeks outside of the US. While some of that is vacation, it’s a lot of time away from home. In addition to the events, I’ve had other travel for work that doesn’t appear there, as well as some vacation time for volleyball (my daughter competes) and family time.

    Lately I’ve been seeing all the tweets and posts about SQL Bits 2018. I won’t be going, which is sad for me. I love the event, it’s my favorite and my wife would love to go with me sometime, maybe in 2018. As I see speakers submitting and the excitement building, it feels like I should just send in a session, but I realize I need to stick with my decision.

    Making choices is hard. For a couple years I’ve been saying  I need to travel a bit less, but I haven’t done a good job of slowing down my travel. I find that I’ve done that with other work demands in the past (and personal ones), and I see plenty of other people doing the same thing. This fall I made the commitment that I’d limit travel next year, and I talked to my manager as well. We agreed on a plan, and she’s holding me to the plan, even when I get a bit excited about new events.

    My current job allows me some flexibility in how I work, but in past jobs I’ve had similar ways that I could change my job, if I made the effort do so. Your employer will ask a lot of you, and often keep asking. I’ve certainly had some bosses that were unreasonable and demanded too much, but most were willing to work with me. It took me a number of years to learn to push back and say no, as well as learn to make choices among different situations. I find if I don’t make choices, I’ll tend to over commit and under deliver, while being disappointed in myself that I couldn’t make it all work. Or I become a little burned out, spending too much time trying to keep all the balls in the air and running myself ragged.

    Balance is important, not only between work and life, but also within work. I find that the more I make choices and stick with them, the better adjusted I am in all of my life. I’m a little sad that I won’t speak at as many events next year, but I’ll pick and choose a few, and hopefully get some things done at work that I’ve been putting off. I’m also hoping that life will seem less chaotic and busy in general, with a little more time to relax and smell the sawdust.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #098–2018 Goals

    tsqltuesdayA great topic for T-SQL Tuesday this time from @sqlmal. It’s Setting Learning Goals for 2018, and it’s a topic I both loathe and love. I hate making commitments that I can’t keep, and I constantly find that a chaotic life will get in the way of learning over time.

    As an example, I tried reading the Powershell in a Month of Lunches book. I managed to get to Day 19. It’s not that I don’t like PoSh or have given up (I still blog on the topic). It’s that the setup was more complex later in the book (really need a domain) and I became busy at work.

    Goals do have a way of focusing a person on a task, and they’re good in that sense. With a year of less travel coming, this was a timely topic for me and forced me to stop and think a bit about the way I want to drive learning in 2018.

    Goals for 2018

    What do I want to learn next year? Here’s a short (ish) list, in no order:

    • CosmosDB
    • Python
    • Pester
    • Extended Events
    • Entity Framework

    I could try to tackle all of these, but that certainly won’t help me do well. This is too large a list to become strong at all of them, though I could spend time improving my skills a little bit in all these areas.

    Of these items, I could relate many of these to my job, which can make it hard to choose. In addition to these items, I’ve got other things that I know will be a part of my learning next year. Product changes, new integrations between our products and others, plus who knows what will come about.

    Picking Two

    If I have to say that I’ll spend 100 hours on something next year and try to get better, I’ll say that the two areas I’ll focus on are Extended Events and Python. While I may dabble in the others, I think that these two areas will be more important to my career as well as my job over time.

    I need a much better understanding of how XE works apart from trace, and I need a lot more comfort in gathering and analyzing the data.

    I also think that Python, with its addition to SQL Server ML and the popularity of the language in new packages and modules means that this is an area that provides some variety, excitement, and a relation to my job. Plus, it’s in SQL Data Generator, so I should have lots more examples there.

    My goals for these two are to spend 50 hours on each over the year, in a combination of course work (articles, videos, etc.) and practical work (building things and trying to use the technology to solve problems).

    Caveats

    There’s always something that comes up, and while I don’t want to start making excuses, I recognize that there are a few things that might derail my plan and make me change.

    First, GDPR. I have no idea how this will impact Redgate and my, but I might need to spend a bunch of time early in the year on this. We are getting calls, questions, and requests from clients, and as some of our new integrations and products come out, this might eat up time.

    Second, travel. I haven’t planned on much, but I’ve really only set the first 4 months of the year. After that, we’ll see. Who knows what might come up or what demands arise.

    Third, life at home. I never know what will happen here and how things might change, so that could change how I focus. Plus, I have a sabbatical coming, so we’ll see how that affects me.

    Getting Ready

    I’m doing a few things right now. First, I’m setting a monthly reminder to update my goal progress. I’ll try to write a post each month, for better or worse, on where I am.

    2017-12-06 17_22_15-Appointment Recurrence

    Second, I’m setting an appointment for myself to sit down and plan some things out the last week of December. That’s a good time to spend an hour or two and try to come up with a plan. It won’t be perfect, but it will give me a direction on which to start. I can amend this during my monthly review if needed.

    That’s it, thanks to Mala for a great topic, and we’ll see how it goes.

  • Pluralsight is Amazing

    I used to work for a digital learning company early in the modern Internet. We were ahead of our time and struggled to sell online learning at the turn of the millennium. Bandwidth limitations held back video courses from widescale adoption. I moved on when the company folded, but I’ve watched other companies start to build and grow video training across the years. One of them that I’ve been most impressed with is Pluralsight. In fact, I very much appreciate their customer service.

    I try to make time every week to watch something. I don’t always get to any bits of learning, which is the way things go. Life is busy, and some days I don’t have the mental energy. I do try to download a course or two to my phone for long plane rides and other travel. I’ve even had a few modules playing on long drives or in my headphones while skiing. Of course, I can’t watch the screen during those events, but I can listen and try to learn something on the go. I’ve even whiled away sessions on the stationary bike with a Pluralsight course playing in front of me. It’s not deep learning, but it’s a way of looking at something that I find interesting. I often will go back and try a bit of code later.

    I don’t focus too tightly on SQL Server with Pluralsight as I get plenty of that elsewhere, but sometimes I use their courses for investigation into other areas. I’ve listened to Chef and Puppet courses, C#, ASP MVC, Python, and more. I don’t always use the skills directly, but a little learning does help me understand the larger view of how technology works. I’ve found throughout my career that having some good general knowledge in various areas helps me troubleshoot and understand the larger picture, often helping me find an issue in a complex system quicker. I also get ideas on why I might consider some other type of technology as a way of improving an application in the future.

    I certainly hope that most of you continue to come to SQLServerCentral to get ideas, learn something, and get questions answered. My mission with this site is to help others become better SQL Server professionals. We may add some video to go with our written work, and certainly I think we could improve some assessments and testing. If there are areas you’d like to see more content, let us know.

    However, we can’t do what Pluralsight does with their long courses and variety of topics. If you get the chance, or have a subscription, check them out. They provide a great learning resource that I’d recommend.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.