Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Goal Progress for April 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    As I look at goal progress for 2021, I’m going to follow a similar pattern as last year. I’ll give myself a current grade and report on overall progress in of the areas where I set goals.

    Current Grade: C

    I haven’t spend enough time on things. Life has gotten busy as I get into the thick of volleyball coaching, spring chores, and then some coping. I have been reading a touch more, but not enough. I should be done with this book and I’ve let it drag.

    Reading

    The goal was 4 books (3 non-fiction, 1 tech). Here’s the current progress:

    Technical Skills

    I’m solving the Advent of Code three times.  I’m also studying for certification. In terms of work here, I did do some coding, but not enough. I’m behind here and #7 is daunting, which slowed me a bit.

    • Certification –  AZ-900 – 5%
    • Certification – DP-200 – 0%
    • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 5/25
    • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25
    • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 5/25
    • Skills – TBD

    Projects

    I had a few projects for myself. Most of January was supporting SQL Memorial as well as doing some SQL Saturday/Data Saturday stuff. So far things appear to be working fine.

    • SQL Saturday Foundation – 70%
    • Support events: I’m speaking at an event and submitted to more.
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation – 0%
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual – 10% (conversations)
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 20%
    • SQL Memorial – 80%

    The SQL Saturday stuff has eaten some time as I try to plan, work with a lawyer, and more, but it’s not moving enough.

  • Getting Started Remotely

    My middle kid is about to graduate from college and is starting to look for a job. I suspect he won’t have too much trouble, as an aeronautical engineer near the top of his class, but I do think that it’s going to be more challenging to find employment than it was two years ago. Though likely better than last year.

    While my employer has continued to hire people throughout the last year, we definitely know it’s been a challenge for some of them to get up to speed, build relationships, and get productive. It’s likely easier for technical people, especially for those with experience, but not necessarily easy for those just getting their careers going.

    If you were starting your career now, I’m sure many of you would be better prepared than when you did begin. I’m wondering if there were things you might recommend to those getting started if they were doing your job. Tips, tricks, or habits to build?

    I was listening to a few people recently talking about this topic, and they gave advice that I followed early on. Keep working on your skills, growing your knowledge and ability to be better in your field. If you’re a programmer, practice and learn more about how to better build systems. If you are on the admin side, be sure you are learning to script and manage with code, rather than GUI clicks. If you are in some other area, like marketing, learn to better analyze what you do and how to manipulate data.

    No matter what, the one thing I always recommend to others is to learn to present an idea clearly to others. Communication, both written and spoken, is a prized skill, and one I find lacking in many people. Being able to present something in a coherent and cogent manner is important.

    Along with that, I emphasize the other half of communication. Learn to listen well and process what others say. This is as important as being able to present your ideas, especially in today’s world where much of our communication occurs with fewer body language cues and less context.

    Steve Jones

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

  • No-code Software Engineering

    Low and no code applications have been around for a long time. In my career, I’ve seen Access, Delphi, PowerBuilder, and various 4GL packages used to build software for business users. Some worked well, some didn’t, and often many didn’t scale. Not all, but many.

    The problems in many of these tools, at least to me, was that many of the “developers” using them weren’t developers. They were business people trying to get something done quickly. Often these weren’t people thinking about performance or software engineering in the way that many developers think of those topics.

    Arguably, there are plenty of Java, C#, and other developers that don’t think things through either. However, many developers do want to solve problems and build interesting solutions. They don’t (often) want the drudgery of moving around UI elements or reinventing CRUD data operations.

    I saw an interesting piece this week noting that No-code doesn’t mean we avoid software engineering. The author praises some of the no-code platforms because they allow developers to do the fun part of building logic and solving problems without the tedious nature of writing an IF statement with the correct syntax. There are a number of reasons given, which sound good.

    I don’t know that I think that no-code is the way to go, but I do get the idea of using lots of proven and tested components, features, services, and more rather than reinventing them. I think that connections to database objects, RDBMS or NoSQL, ought to be easy, and lots of the mundane work of plumbing systems together could be centralized and reused. I certainly think that LINQ or simple query languages make sense, though likely having a way to more quickly and easily build/test/refactor and deploy database methods as well as make them more flexible (select col from @table, anyone?) might simplify database coding.

    I doubt we’ll get rid of C#, Java, or other fairly low level code anytime soon. I write about better programming languages recently, and I can see us moving to more succinct languages over time, but that will take decades. There is far too much invested in current codebases by developers and organizations to think about quick switches.

    The best way to build better applications is to have developers continue to learn, practice, test, and change their coding. They need to seek to be better, which I think most of them do, but management and leaders need to demand this and invest in staff (time and money) to help them improve. Then I suspect that whether you use lots of code or none, all your applications will work better.

    Steve Jones

  • Goal Progress–Mar 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    As I look at goal progress for 2021, I’m going to follow a similar pattern as last year. I’ll give myself a current grade and report on overall progress in of the areas where I set goals.

    Current Grade: B-

    I think I’m making some progress, and getting some items moving forward. I haven’t spent as much time on my technical skills, but I have been pushing project stuff forward a bit.

    Reading

    The goal was 4 books (3 non-fiction, 1 tech). Here’s the current progress:

    Technical Skills

    I’m solving the Advent of Code three times.  I’m also studying for certification.

    • Certification –  AZ-900 – 5%
    • Certification – DP-200 – 0%
    • Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 4/25
    • Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 4/25
    • Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 4/25
    • Skills – TBD

    Projects

    I had a few projects for myself. Most of January was supporting SQL Memorial as well as doing some SQL Saturday/Data Saturday stuff. So far things appear to be working fine.

    • SQL Saturday Foundation – 60%
    • Support events: approved a PR or 2 this month, helped with feedback on the Data Saturday logo project, and started conversations about events this year with a few people
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation – 0%
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual – 10% (conversations)
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 20%
    • SQL Memorial – 80%

    I added the SQL Saturday Foundation as a project, since this will occupy some time. I don’t plan on hiring anyone, but with me and some volunteers, I’m hoping we build a website. I spent some time writing a little PoSh this month to rip through the XML from the old site and rebuild an archive. I used the Data Saturday-ish site as a template and got something up with a few pages.

    However, I need to make this more maintainable until I get some help from others. So I’m looking at more themes and trying to get Jekyll to make this easier to update. The site is mostly working, though I can’t get a domain redirect until I get a privacy policy approved.