Category: Learning

Magda walks us through the Ctrl+D shortcut in a series of applications:

I found the CTRL+D shortcut key as an interesting feature in many programs. It can duplicate without using copy and paste. But not always. It is also D like DELETE, DISPLAY, or HIGHLIGHT…

It’s not quite as ubiquitous as Ctrl+C for copy or Ctrl+V for paste…but then again, Ctrl+C also means cancel in shells.

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Don Jones lays out the argument for why the term “advanced” doesn’t mean much for learning:

Let me share a little secret of the training industry with you: an “advanced” topic is any topic that you don’t already know.

Don’t argument is that the proper axis is around commonality of usage: most commonly performed to least commonly performed. It’s an interesting argument for sure.

I’m of two minds with the idea, however. I appreciate Don’s example and like the concept of commonality for differentiation. But there are things which are legitimately advanced topics, in that they would be difficult to understand even if they were common. In Don’s query tuning example, an example of something legitimately difficult to understand is the set of rules the query optimizer chose to test for a particular query. Yes, it is very uncommon to need to know this, but it is also difficult to understand if you do need to know, and explaining how and why the query optimizer chose the path and rules that it did requires a fairly deep base of expertise.

In short, I think there’s an endogeneity problem: things can be perceived as difficult because they are unommon (which is my reading of Don’s point), but also things can be uncommon because they are difficult to understand given some baseline of knowledge.

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Paul Randal is offering up mentorship time:

If I remember correctly, I think I helped 8 or more people decide to change jobs for a better work environment suited to their goals, and several people go it alone as consultants. It was hugely satisfying to help so many people with their careers and lives, in a non-technical capacity.

Now it’s time to do it again, as I haven’t done any public mentoring since 2015, so this blog post serves as a call for prospective mentees!

Please read the rest of this post carefully, so you’re clear how this works. We’re making a time commitment to each other so I want to be up-front about a few things.

I was one of those 54 mentees back in 2015 and can recommend it. I will say, though, that you get out of it exactly what you put in—this isn’t some “I want to advance my career” easy mode.

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Nate Johnson is a few months early for Festivus:

Another thing. This isn’t a “new update” thing; this is a long-standing “Oh my lord I can’t believe they DESIGNED it this way, WHAT were they THINKING?!?!” thing. Files. Sending & receiving files. I get an picture, like a screenshot, from a user (that’s NOT a OneDrive link, because that’s a whole ‘nother can-of-worms). I click to download it. It goes.. where?

OH RIGHT. It goes to my ‘Downloads’ folder. That dumpster-fire, where everything from anywhere goes into, and nobody keeps it organized, and nobody knows how to find anything unless they’ve gotten smart enough to sort by Date Modified descending. Right, that.

I can’t say I disagree about any of what Nate covers.

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Aaron Bertrand has a compendium of bad habits, anti-patterns, and Festivus-quality grievances to air:

Going back more than a decade, I’ve been writing and presenting about what I call “bad habits” – typically shortcuts or sub-optimal ways to do things in SQL Server. Often users just don’t realize these things are bad or that there is a better way.

Here is an ongoing list of articles that I consider to be along these lines – eradicating bad habits or at least promoting best practices. Not all are explicitly framed as a “bad habit,” but they do all present things I wish I observed less often.

Click through for a disturbingly long list of items.

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