Category: Learning

Pete Warden picked a blog post title I couldn’t refuse:

This script came to mind as I was thinking back over the year for a few reasons. One of them was that I spent a non-trivial amount of time writing and debugging it, despite its small size and the apparent simplicity of the problem it tackled. Even in apparently glamorous fields like machine learning, 90% of the work is nuts and bolts integration like this. If anything you should be doing more of it as you become more senior, since it requires a subtle understanding of the whole system and its requirements, but doesn’t look impressive from the outside. Save the easier-to-explain projects for more junior engineers, they need them for their promotion packets.

The reason this kind of work is so hard is precisely because of all the funky requirements and edge cases that only become apparent when code is used in production. As a young engineer my first instinct when looking at a snarl of complex code for something that looked simple on the surface was to imagine the original authors were idiots. I still remember scoffing at the Diablo PC programmers as I was helping port the codebase to the Playstation because they used inline assembler to do a simple signed to unsigned cast. My lead, Gary Liddon, very gently reminded me that they had managed to ship a chart-topping game and I hadn’t, so maybe I had something to learn from their approach?

I am a huge fan of the concept which, made brief, states that if you do not understand why something is the case, don’t change it. If you do understand it, maybe change it but be prudent about it. It’s also something I have often trouble with, as my natural inclination toward code bases is to use the cleansing power of fire to burn it all down.

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Buck Woody has a great post on learning how to learn:

In this new world of fast-paced learning, you’ll often find that you have to “throw away” what you’ve learned, meaning that a new language or tool is out now that requires your attention, and you won’t return to the one you know now. That doesn’t mean your hard study was wasted, because you’ll often find that new technology builds on the one you just learned, but I find that Type-A technologists are loath to drop something they just learned. You’ll have to get over that – it’s the way it is.

However, it can be true that once you learn something, it may be in an area that you just had to come up to speed on quickly, or it has “staying power” and will be around for a while. In that case, take this same process, and repeat all the steps, taking time to fill in the gaps and go much deeper in the areas you didn’t spend time on during your speed learning.

I really liked this post. The first thing it reminded me of was Sir Francis Bacon’s Of Studies (pdf, but with bonus content from Samuel Johnson), specifically the part about how we should superficially breeze through some books, but that others we must digest. The same goes with technologies.

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Melody Zacharias takes us through five areas where DBAs are important in the SQL Server 2019 world:

Databases are the beating heart of digital transformation. Businesses increasingly realize that having a unified view gives them a competitive advantage in a world where data is king. The task of breaking down those silos will fall to highly skilled DBAs using cool new technologies such as PolyBase [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/polybase/polybase-guide?view=sql-server-ver15]. Although it was introduced in SQL Server 2016, PolyBase got a whole lot more interesting in SQL Server 2019 with the ability to query external SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, and MongoDB using T-SQL. Our world just got a whole lot bigger!

Read on for the full set of reasons. My agreement with this comes with one caveat: DBAs are important insasmuch as they are willing to grow, try new things, and develop skills. If you’re a stodgy type who hasn’t learned a thing since SQL Server 2008, you’ve got a shelf life.

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Grant Fritchey has thoughts on certifications:

However, you frequently see people, usually the ones with 47 certificates, going on and on about how, just one more cert, just one more, this time, I’ll get the job I want.

Nope.

Let me break the news. Experience, a proven track record, and knowledge are what get you jobs. And yes, I understand, how do you get experience without first getting a job? That is indeed the hurdle. I’m just telling you that certifications are not the rocket in your bottom that will throw you over that hurdle.

Also connections (which Grant also points out in the post which you should read). Connections land many more jobs than certifications. Most certifications are as much noise as signal, which greatly dilutes the value of the thing. Once again I lament the loss of the MCM, one of the few certifications with a near-zero percent noise rate due to how difficult it was and how many things you needed to understand to get past it. But even with it, experience and networking will get you much further.

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Brent Yorgey spends some time thinking about good coding style:

What is good code style? You probably have some opinions about this. In fact, I’m willing to bet you might even have some very strong opinions about this; I know I do. Whether consciously or not, we tend to frame good coding practices as a moral issue. Following good coding practices makes us feel virtuous; ignoring them makes us feel guilty. I can guess that this is why Yom said “I don’t think I could bring myself to be satisfied with partial functions” [emphasis added]. And this is why we say “good code style”, not “optimal” or “rational” or “best practice” code style.

It’s an interesting post. There are some bits on competitive programming which don’t apply in general, but there’s a lot to unpack there.

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Kevin Chant has a few things you should check out if you’ve got several days of downtime:

Install and learn Docker
You can take the time over the Easter weekend to download and install Docker to see how you can use it. In addition, there are multiple posts online by people online that you can use as a starting point.
However, to start with you can read how to download and install it in detail here.

There are some good things on this list. Even if you don’t have a long weekend ahead of you, pick up some of these items gradually.

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