Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Blogging for the Tech Professional at Denver Dev Days

    For those that attended my talk at Denver Dev Days, here are the slides: BloggingFortheTechPro.pptx

    A couple interesting questions that I need to add to the deck.

    What do you recommend for a student? (or someone early in their career)

    This could also apply to someone changing careers or fields. If you don’t have experience, does blogging help?

    It does. A blog is your portfolio and it’s a good way to showcase what you are learning, have learned, what you are interested in. This gives you some way to show “experience” even if you don’t have any.

    Build a project, explain how you learned something, document your journey. I might think about a wider set of topics rather than deeper on one here, as it’s hard to know what you want to do early in your journey. It’s also a time when you don’t want to limit opportunities, so showcase a lot of different things you’ve worked on.

    How do I get better at blogging?

    Build a network of people you trust. Let them see drafts, get feedback, and incorporate the feedback into your writing. I would do that in two different ways:

    1. Am I correct in my technical details? To do this, get quality feedback from a subject matter expert. Think senior skilled person evaluating your work here.
    2. Am I explaining things well? Get feedback from anyone on spelling, phrasing, grammar, and flow. Think English teacher feedback here.

    How do I justify the time to blog when I’m busy at work?

    This is an investment in your career. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. need to work on their careers outside of work. Chefs, mechanics, plumbers do this as well.

    Technical people can do this. Take 15-30 minutes a week to do this. Over time, it’s a great way to add richness to your resume and stand out from others.

    Do you blog at work?

    In general, I make notes and sketches of things at work. 3-5 sentences, some bullet points. Then I would spend time outside of work fleshing out my posts. For examples of how long I spend on things, check out the SQL New Blogger series. If you’re starting out, double my times for yourself.

  • What’s Your Job?

    There are a lot of technology people looking for jobs these days, especially after all the layoffs that have occurred in 2023. At the same time, I have a number of friends and clients that are struggling to hire qualified people. They get lots of candidates, but they are dismayed at how little the candidates they interview seem to know, or at least how little candidates know in the areas that their organization has needs.

    Today, I want to help people get better at growing and managing their careers. Therefore I’m asking those of you that are employed to describe your job. Give us your title in the comments and then list 5-10 things that you’ve done lately. What types of queries have you written? What tasks did you complete with SQL Server or Azure SQL? Have you needed to research something to solve a problem? What knowledge or concepts helped you complete a task?

    The idea is to share some of the skills or concepts a person should have to grow their career. Hopefully, some people will then read descriptions and build skills from this list. They’ll try to accomplish the tasks you’ve had to finish, hopefully documenting or blogging about their work.

    As an example, I’ll give a few tech things I’ve seen lately from clients. These are practical things someone needed to finish, or something they asked someone else to do.

    I was working with a client and there was a need to find all the logins whose passwords were not set to expire. How can you do that?

    Another had a table had a lot of duplicate data, and all duplicates but the row with the latest date needed to be deleted. What does the DELETE statement look like? Caveat, what if I need to update all but the first row (newest) with a new value in some column to mark them as inactive?

    A client needed to get a list of all the servers from their central management server (CMS) and then extract that list as a CSV file. They were using this for some audit purposes.

    At another client, a developer needed to clone a git repository and then open the .sql files in Azure Data Studio. Can you show how to do this?

    A DBA wanted to decide whether you choose a clustered or non-clustered index for a table that contains sales information and is often queried for a few rows based on a date. Why would one index be better than the other?

    Don’t answer these questions, as this is homework for others. However, if you could share a list of things you would expect your new coworker to know or solve, that will help us raise the bar for what we expect from our colleagues.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Summit Launch Pricing Ends June 7

    The PASS Data Community Summit is back in Seattle this November, the 14-17, 2023. It’s in person only, and if you can come, you should register today. Launch pricing is discounted and ends next week, June 7.

    Complete pricing is on the site, but next week the prices rise, not only for the event, but the pre-cons as well. $500 for a pre-con is a great price, and it’s not something you see from many of the experts when they run private training. The conference is also 30% off now, so let your boss know now is the time to register.

    You can see the pre-cons listed, and a number of sessions on the schedule as well. There is a lot of learning and more to come. This isn’t a complete list of sessions as the volunteers on the program committee are still making their final decisions.

    If you need to make a case for your employer, there is some great information on the site about what you can learn and why it’s worth attending. The networking alone, which let’s you meet and talk with experts, can be worth a lot later. One support call and the time spent could be avoided with a new colleague that you can query.

    I hope to see many of you there. I don’t know if I’m speaking, but I am going and helping run the event. Come to Seattle this fall (and SQL Saturday Oregon the weekend before) and grow your career and get excited about being a data professional.

  • Denver Dev Days

    I’m going to attend the Denver Dev Days 2023 in June. I submitted a few sessions and got two picked. I’ll be doing these talks:

    • Blogging for the Tech Professional
    • Architecting Zero Downtime Database Deployments

    These are both sessions I enjoy.

    If you’re in the Denver area, this is a fun developer learning event at the Microsoft office in the Tech Center. You can get more information here: Denver Dev Days 2023. Hope to see you there.