Category: Learning

Julia Evans looks at what DevOps means in practice:

I enjoyed reading this article about devops at Etsy. One of the really key things about this article is – there is no devops organization at Etsy. It’s about how developers and operations people work productively together! Also, it was a slow incremental migration towards different practices. They did not wake up one day and become devops. I think this is the first talk that used the term ‘devops’?

It’s also not about “everyone is a software developer” – one of the authors of this book, Katherine Daniels, is a senior operations engineer at Etsy at Etsy. I don’t know any of the details of her job, but my impression is that she has a lot of expertise in operations. It’s not like “make operations so easy that nobody has to an expert at it”. Of course you need people who know a ton about operations! Probably those people write software as part of their job?

One of the scariest realizations that I’m slowly coming to (other than “Information Technology is people!”) is the sheer number of overlapping dependencies in the tech world.  A bit earlier in my career, I felt like I could be “a SQL Server guy” and focus on that while not caring too much about the outside world.  It seems like saying that you want to be “just an X” has become more difficult at the margin, and DevOps is just one example of this:  keeping an edge means going broader about more things while still trying to dig deeper in relevant areas.  That’s a tough balancing act.

If that’s not the academic version of a controversial headline, I don’t know what is…

Kendra Little finds a C# developer who wants to become a database administrator:

I’ve been a C# developer since year 2000. I want to move to be a DBA. I’ve started getting involved at user groups and SQL Saturdays but nobody wants to hire me as a DBA.

I have been trying to move to other companies but my resume is strongly inclined to show my C#, front end experience. I know for a fact that I’m really good on SQL as I keep solving problems in every other project but no one seems to pay really attention to the DB. I have noticed that when applying for positions I get called for my C# experience but not when applying only to SQL jobs.

Should I find a Junior DBA position and take a pay cut?

That transition can be difficult, but I think Kendra’s answer is a good one.

On the opposite side, Daniel Janik looks at developers who shouldn’t go down that track:

I recently helped out with a .NET MVC project running on SQL Server 2016 where I found some pretty interesting stored procedures. I’ve seen a lot of really creative SQL but these were completely puzzling.

The database included many to many tables for customers who have addresses and phone numbers. A “mapping” table was created for the tables so they could map to a customer.

Normally you’d think a simple JOIN would suffice to get a list of addresses or phone numbers for a customer. These was done a way that I’ve never seen before.