Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • 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.

  • Hit Refresh

    thI read Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh recently, and it was a very enjoyable book. He’s had an interesting journey and I do think he’s dramatically transformed Microsoft. The book is recommended.

    Anyway, the Microsoft MVP Program asked is MVPs would share a refresh moment from their lives, so here’s mine:

    Hitting Refresh, Over and Over

    I think I’ve started to wear the finish off the refresh button, but it’s been a great life and career.

    When I entered university at 17, I expected to study computer science and spend a career writing code for some organization. This was the era before the Internet when terminals were hardwired to mainframes, printers were housed in a separate room (with a page budget each semester), and my 300 baud modem allowed me to watch the screen slowly fill with characters. After two years of learning new languages and solving relatively simple problems, I hit refresh and decided finance and business were the direction for me.

    I completed a degree in economics, but injured myself playing rugby during my final year. I hit refresh again, not wanting to spend most of my life draped in a suit and tie, pouring over financial documents at a bank. I took a year off, working, playing volleyball, and surfing at the beach. Midway through this year, I became bored and hit refresh a third time, returning to school to study computer engineering.

    A year later, after securing an internship writing code and managing a Novell network, I hit refresh again, abandoning my schoolwork and going to work fulltime. I discovered SQL Server and hit refresh yet again. I moved into the data world, spending the next fifteen years working with SQL Server in a variety of industries and positions.

    I hit refresh again after starting SQLServerCentral.com and having that become successful enough to support me in a fulltime role. I left employment for my own venture, which was a completely different type of work from writing code for an employer. I became an educator and journalist, seeking to help others grow their SQL Server skills. I was honored to be recognized as a Data Platform MVP by Microsoft for my work here.

    Finally, I hit refresh one last time when Redgate Software purchased my business, and I became an evangelist for them. Today, I continue to educate and train others in Database DevOps, and hopefully won’t hit refresh again until I retire.

    This post is part of the collection of #HitRefresh moments. Read more at
    www.hitrefreshbook.com

  • Certifying Schools

    We’ve debated the value of schools in technology careers plenty of times on this site. I have been torn on the value of schools, and I tend to go back and forth as to whether I’d recommend them for many people. Right now I tend to shy away from schools, mostly because I think the ROI is hard for a college. Working in technology can be a great job, one that pays well, but the cost of a degree seems high. Especially when there are plenty of ways that you can learn the same skills.

    I’m not saying that university makes you a better or worse developer or IT professional. I think that really depends on the individual. Plenty of smart people go through a university curriculum and go on to build great systems and applications. The same is true for self-taught individuals that learn on the job. Ultimately, you need to take responsibility for your own career, your knowledge, and your education, both in getting started and continuing as long as you work in this field.

    However, I do think that your responsibility also extends to researching and learning about the way in which you choose to learn. If that’s a school, be wary of their claims. I ran across this piece about a school that was fined for their marketing. They didn’t quite lie about the results from the curriculum, but they were deceiving. I think everyone should understand that finding a job can be hard in your area, especially when you are getting started. Whether you come out of a school of some sort, or you’ve been building your own projects. Ultimately, you need to convince someone you can do the work they need done in a competent manner at some reasonable price.

    Education has become a business, one where the profit and loss seem to be more important than the results experienced by their graduates. Some of the lack of success by schools is because students don’t make enough of an effort to become good at their craft. I see plenty of evidence of that, even in professional places, where workers aren’t learning to become better at their craft over time. That’s something we can all do, and it’s something I ask you to do on a regular basis throughout your career. However, some of the issues are inherent in modern curriculums.

    As we look for more secure coding practices, ask for more testing, and still see frameworks and platforms continue to advance, I don’t know if schools can keep up? I’d like to think that there are enough professional teachers that could update and alter curriculums on a regular basis, perhaps even every semester, to adapt to the changing workplace. I’d like to see more practical projects, still taught using basic, well known principles in computer science, but using modern platforms. That might change the nature of the professor in colleges, but perhaps groups of colleges should jointly develop curriculums and keep them current over time. There’s still a place for teachers to learn and bring their skills to teaching, but using information that is evolving too rapidly for one person to manage.

    I don’t know if we’ll get there, but regardless, each of you needs to look to improve your skills over time. Don’t expect that what you knew last year will be good enough for next year. Continue to learn, grow, evolve, and question the ways in which you build software and systems.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.