Voice of the DBA

Tag: coping

  • Daily Coping 11 June 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s tip is smile and be friendly, even when you’re social distancing.

    I try to smile and wave a lot at people. I think that has been one reason I get through life with relatively little conflict.

    Wearing masks the last couple months has taken that away from me. I have tried to look at myself when smiling with a mark, and you see some of the signs, but wrinkle your nose in disgust and you see similar ones outside the mask.

    Instead, I’ve tried to send more kind words out, since I can’t smile. However, when I am without a mask, I do try to smile more, especially at service workers who are helping us all out with their efforts and their risk.

  • Daily Coping 10 June 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s tip is show your appreciation to those who are helping others.

    There are many people helping others these days. Healthcare workers, activists, and plenty of “essential” workers that have been risking their own health for income, for employment, and to provide for others.

    In my area, many of these people have to wear masks, by law (or decree), all day while working. I can see many of them sigh with relief when they can remove a mask.

    Paul Randal and Tim Radney have been printing lots of masks. Both of them have been graciously donating these to people around the US, along with plenty of others in the SQL Community. Redgate donated some money for supplies, and I donated some as well when I asked them to send me masks.

    I’ve been carrying these around in my car, bringing them into various businesses, groceries, gas stations, and more. I’m offering these to workers, including some nurses I know, to ease the pain of wearing masks all day long.

  • Daily Coping 9 June 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s tip is to think of 3 things you’re grateful for and write them down.

    This is similar to a previous tip, but this is a good exercise. As we often say in yoga, learn to practice gratitude.

    Thing 1

    I am grateful for my health. Despite a body that feels like it’s deteriorating as I get older, I am in good health.  I rarely need to go to the doctor, and I haven’t caught COVID. I can still snowboard, and while it feels really slow, I can still pull on the rowing machine at a decent rate. At 50+, I made it through a 5k row at a 2:05 pace. In college, I was doing about 1:56. Not bad.

    Thing 2

    I am grateful for Simon Galbraith, CEO of Redgate. For giving me this amazing job, for leading Redgate during times of struggle and success, for the culture and respect which he has implemented in our organization. He leads, and does so in ways that make me think, inspire me, and challenge me.

    I’ve said it many times, that the highest praise I have for him is that he has built the kind of company that I would want to build if I tried to start one.

    Thing 3

    I am grateful for the way my children drive the world forward. All different, all living life in different ways, with different thoughts and different actions. I am proud of them, and while I don’t always agree with their choices, I am grateful that they have chosen to be themselves, live their lives, and give me hope for the future of my community and this world.

  • Social: A Small Step to Address Poor Past Behavior

    Tl;Dr – This is about changing your main branch in git to main. However, please read and think about what I am saying here.

    When I started working with Version Control, the main branch was named trunk. I worked with code and we always branched away from trunk, which was our source of truth. I have no idea of the origin, though people seem to think this relates to trees. That makes sense.

    Then why master? No idea. The inventor of Git is Linus Torvalds. He’s been accused of poor behavior, though I don’t know I think he is racist. Git was supposedly chosen as it’s an unpleasant person in British slang. That makes sense.

    I followed him early on, and remember trying to get Linux 0.6 working on hardware. I was fascinated with his work, and I hope he chose “master” as the moniker for the main branch because of the verb definition rather than the noun. Who knows?

    In any case, technology is littered with the use of “master” in our terminology. Replication, especially, but HA tech and in many places where we distribute something from one machine to another. I would like to think this is idea of one with more/better knowledge (the master, in the Kung Fu sense), distributing that to others.

    However, there is the connotation of control.

    The IETF agrees and has draft terminology change recommendations. In line with that, I saw a note from Scott Hanselman on changing your git default branch, this after I saw a few people this weekend noting they were submitting PRs to make the change.

    I decided to do the same. I don’t know how to do this on GitHub without a local repo, so I’m following Scott’s process.

    git branch –m master main
    
git push –u origin main

    This moves all the code (all commits and history) to a branch called main. Then pushes this up and tracks it.

    Once it’s there, I need to go to the repo settings and change the default branch to main and delete master. This will cause some issues on laptops, but those are up to date, or they have minor unpushed demo changes that I can abandon. I’ll then pull down the new structure of the repo.

    Don’t do this haphazardly. Communicate with your team and ensure everyone is aware of the change. Then slowly work your way through the repos. It’s a chore but a small one. One I’ll be working my way through until I’m done.