Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Practical Web Scraping–More Reading

    As part of my learning goals for 2018, I wanted to work through various books. This is part of  my work with Python.

    It’s the end of the month, and I’m behind. I know it’s a short month, but it’s not that short. I had time to read the last couple week and I did some reading, but I didn’t get much practice.

    First the positive, then the excuses.

    Reading

    I did manage to read through the basic tutorial in Part I for how to use he BeautifulSoup module to read through an http page. This provided more ideas for finding sections of code and extracting out sections.

    I started Part II, which talks about more in depth http, with forms and posting. I’m still inside that one, and as of this point, I’m only 30% through the book.

    The plan for this weekend is to stop and practice a bit from BeautifulSoup and see what I can accomplish by reading a few web pages.

    Life Gets in the Way

    This month I had two long events on weekends that ate into my reading/working time, as well as a work project. I’m in the middle of volleyball season, and February brought me two 3 day tournaments to coach or watch. One was coaching a 13 year old team, and that occupied a lot of time. The evenings were spent with other coaches and I didn’t bring a laptop because I knew time would be limited. Add to that the need to get a few things done before and after the trip and I couldn’t practice web scraping.

    The second trip was for my daughter, and apart from watching her, my wife was in charge of team activities and I had to help. I had my laptop, but again, no time. I also chose to enjoy some time with my wife in the evening, which was worth it.

    Work was busy. We’re trying to migrate SQLServerCentral to a new platform and I’ve had to test things, as well as try and get other work done. As a result, I’ve been busy during the week and couldn’t even make time to incorporate any web scraping into my job. I also had to get other work done, so it’s been too busy to do much learning.

  • A Good Benefit?

    I’m wondering what you think. Is the idea of trading some paid time off (PTO) for student loan debt relief a good idea? That’s what Unum, an insurance company, is offering. They give their employees 28 days off, which is quite generous. I don’t know many people that get than many days off. If employees wish, they can trade up to 5 days for the equivalent salary, which is used to give them money for their student loans, or their children’s.

    It’s a creative offer, and one that doesn’t force people to forego vacation, as they’d still have more than four weeks of time to take off. In the US, most people don’t take their entire vacation allowance when it’s over two weeks. This gives them a chance to pay down some debt with minimal impact on their work life balance. At least, minimal for me. I struggle to take my 25 days, so this is a trade I’d make.

    The downside, to me, is that there may be plenty of employees that don’t have student loan debt. They don’t get a choice here, which feels unfair. I’d much rather the company offer employees the chance to sell back up to five days and use that payment for anything. After all, plenty of people have debt that isn’t related to education. Why not give them a chance to reduce other obligations?

    I am not quite sure of what I think of companies becoming more involved in employee’s personal lives. We are in a more freelance, gig economy where people change jobs regularly and often may work remotely. For me, I tend to favor the approach from Basecamp where the company treats people fairly and create an environment where employees are respected and want to work for a long time. While I know this is hard for many companies, and certainly hard to change, I do think more organizations could improve their culture and treatment of employees.

    I’m very lucky in that I work for a company that’s amazing. Redgate Software is the kind of company I’d want to create if I built another organization, and I have a fantastic set of co-workers, managers, and benefits. We are growing and hire here and there, and if you’re interested, I can’t recommend this organization enough.

    Can you say the same thing about your employer?

    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.

  • Practical Web Scraping–Getting Started

    As part of my learning goals for 2018, I wanted to work through various books. This is part of  my work with Python.

    After going through a few first chapters, I decided to start my February learning with Practice Web Scraping for Data Science, which looks at data acquisition using Python to pull data from the web. I found the book interesting and also this would be a nice setup for two of the other books (Power BI and natural language processing).

    Like many people, I find lots of data on the web, but I’m constantly struggling to get it into a database. I find myself going through gyrations at times to get data. Even with the cool features of Power BI, it hasn’t been as smooth as I’d like to get data, so I thought this would be a good book.

    Part 1

    The first few chapters of the book are about the basics of web scraping. We learn what this means, and get a little bit of a tutorial on who uses this technique, with some specific examples. We also get a basic python tutorial, which I skimmed. I know a bit about Python and this was a very basic, getting started.

    The next part of the early book deals with the basics of what http transport looks like and how some networking works. This is interesting to me, though not sure it matters for scraping. We’ll see. There is some discussion on GET and the http standard, so perhaps that’s helpful. It is good to at least know what codes might come back or what headers or parameters you need to use.

    The third chapter starts to get code working.  It opens with a discussion of HTML and how you can examine the structure of pages in your browser. This is a good reminder and basic tutorial of some of the web page developer tools that exist in your browser and that you might want to use when trying to build applications, especially those that scrape pages. There is also a basic CSS tutorial, which was good as I needed a little refresher. I rarely deal with CSS stuff, leaving that to others.

    The last part of the chapter starts with the BeautifulSoup library, which is built to parse out text, and specifically, makes working with HTML easier. The examples are with a Wikipedia Game of Thrones page, but I added some examples, trying to translate this to a sports page. It worked OK, and I learned a few things.

    The last part looks at Regular Expressions with BeautifulSoup and how you can search out elements and then start to copy data. It’s more complex and tedious, but then again, lots of programming is tedious. Once it’s working, it’s amazing.

    Experimenting

    I started to work with this in Azure Notebooks as a different way of tracking some work in Python. I’ll want to store things in a file at some point, but for now, this lets me start and stop learning and keep track of where I am without worrying about files and names.

    Not sure if anyone can access it (it’s marked public), but my project and notebooks are here: https://notebooks.azure.com/way0utwest/projects/web-scraping-with-python

    I ran some of the early scripts, which are just getting you used to working with Python and accessing web pages. I then copied some examples from my Calibre view of the book and executed them. I even tried to experiment a bit.

    One note: copying the code seems to leave some invalid character in there for Azure Notebooks, so I ended up editing the beginning of every line to remove the offensive character.

    This got me the basics of working with web scraping. Now to try and grab some data from another page and see what I’ve learned.

  • What is my why?–T-SQL Tuesday #111

    tsqltuesdayThis is an interesting question from Andy Leonard for T-SQL Tuesday: What Is Your “Why”? He is this month’s host and asks us to talk about our motivation, our passion. The question is: Why do you do what you do?

    Why I Do What I Do?

    I have had a great career in technology. Moving from developer to system administrator to developer to manager, and back through various incarnations. I have had success in lots of positions and helped improve systems and code, teaching and mentoring others along the way.

    Almost twenty years ago, I participated in a user group and helped someone solve an issue. That inspired me to start writing articles that detailed how to build solutions that had helped me and my employer. Over time that led to SQLServerCentral and regular speaking and writing.

    My career in databases really started for the money. I worked with a DBA that was better paid than any sysadmin or developer, and began to study and work with SQL Server. As I earned more, I thought I’d made a good decision, but over time I realized that there was a point where money was less important to me.

    Time became the most important thing to me.

    There have been many times where I would have traded more time for less money, though that isn’t quite the case now as I have two children attending college next year. Still, in the middle of my career I wanted to, because of the value that I placed on time with family and friends and living my life.

    I started to give back with writing, speaking, teaching because I had people do that for me, and because I wished I’d had more. I wished that more people had shared solutions and ideas with me earlier in my career.

    I also believe that we fundamentally ought to help others in life when we’ve been helped or been successful. We ought to pay it forward where we can, but more so we need to pay it back. It’s a bit of a social contract with others, a bit of a desire to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and a bit of a moral obligation I feel to help the world because I’ve been blessed with success.

    Everyone walks their own path, makes their own decisions, and follows their own moral code. I try to follow mine, and I hope to inspire others to help others where they can.

    It’s why I do what I do, and I’m lucky that I’m able to do so, both as my job, but also because I am able to help others.