You Are A Coder

DevOps, Professional Development
So, you say you're a DBA. I say you're not. You say you're a system administrator. I say you're wrong. We are all coders now. Every single one of us. You are a coder. Put down the brick and let me explain. Automation There was a time when I would give a presentation to a room full of people and ask, "Who is using PowerShell right now?" and get, 15 hands out of a hundred. Last week at SQL in the City in London, the same question came up and most of the room raised their hands. What's changed? Automation. Automate all the things!!! The simple fact of the matter is, anything easy, repetitive, and quantifiable is, has been, or shortly will be, automated. You should not be spending your…
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The Curse of Relational Databases

Professional Development
Let's face it, none of Information Technology is easy. Oh yeah, there are those few geniuses that have an absolute grasp over some small aspect of the stack, or those other geniuses that have a very shallow knowledge level, but understand the entire stack. But the stack itself, it's vast, deep, wide, utterly unfathomable. So what do you do? You cheat. You take shortcuts. You ignore things you don't like/understand/appreciate. And then there's all the things you just don't know. Or, you cheat another way, you get experts that have drilled down on a particular technology so that they'll provide you with the knowledge you need. Ah, but then you have to listen to them and what happens when your local genius (deep or wide) doesn't agree with your hired…
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Do Be a Gatekeeper

Professional Development
I read this fascinating blog post called "Don't Be a Gatekeeper" by Julie Zhuo. Please read that first. It really resonated for me in a lot of ways. Everything she said is 100% applicable to our jobs as data professionals. Work to make things more robust. Create processes and structures and an environment where you don't have to be the hero all day every day. Yes, absolutely. But... ah, there's this nagging little voice at the back of my head. Let's ignore it for a moment. Are you a gatekeeper for your developers? Why? Get out of their way. Listen to what Ms. Zhuo has to say. Your development team doesn't need you squatting on their servers preventing them from moving as fast as they can. In fact, they need…
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