I saw a short post on meetings, which made me chuckle. The post said that meetings are work, and sometimes they get in the way of other work. I think that's a sentiment that many people have, especially when they are pressured to write code or manage systems and their daily calendar gets cluttered with meetings.

I find meetings to be very hit-and-miss for my job. Some are valuable and helpful, with plenty of others being unnecessary and an impediment to getting things done. It is hard to know when a meeting will be helpful or a waste of time, but often I find status meetings to be not worth the time required to attend. They very often are not worth the amount of attention they require, which has me wishing that I could just update status in a system or email rather than listening to others and presenting my own report.

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I got a taxi at Heathrow in the UK recently to go from one terminal to the other. I know, there are buses and trains, but it was late, I had my wife with a lot of luggage and I was worried the restaurant in the hotel would close before we managed another method of transport. As we were making our way over the driver noted there was a £5 charge to drop off at a terminal. That sounds silly, but I saw a billboard noting this and there is a link that this charge applies to almost all vehicles entering the airport terminal areas.

You might agree or disagree with the charge, or concern yourself with whether the airport authority or local government can (or should) add this as a little tax to those that drive to terminals. That isn't my focus today. Instead, I thought this was a somewhat amazing, DevOps experiment of how the digital world is remaking the real, analog one.

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I ran across an interview with Big Boi, a music musician and producer. It's an interesting look at someone that has had a lot of success and continues to work, mostly because he enjoys it. I'm sure the compensation matters somewhat, but that doesn't appear to be his driving force. Whether you like his music, it's an interesting look at someone who lives by his creativity.

As I read through the interview, a lot of the themes and quotes could be attributed to software developers. We constantly need to learn more and evolve how we write code if we want to be more successful. We have ideas, and often the code we write today isn't the way we'd write code to accomplish the same task last year. At least, I hope that we would learn, grow, and write new code.

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There have been a number of attacks in the last few years on source code. In fact, I saw a new one this week for an e-commerce Wordpress plugin. This time hackers got access to the distribution server for the company, Fishpig, and altered the plug-ins that their customers download.

A few years ago this was big news, with the SolarWinds exploit. There was also an attack on PyPy, a popular Python package that many people include in their code.  There have been no shortages of problems in npm packages as well. I'm sure this has happened in other software packages, which is scary. In the days of DevOps where we publish code from a repository, an exploit against your developers might go unnoticed. Then again, maybe not.

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I do a little cloud work, but mostly I end up working with customers that are trying to build and migrate their systems to the cloud. The transition to cloud-first took place quicker than I expected, though certainly the pandemic of the last 3 years has continued to accelerate the moves by many organizations. While not all systems will move, for better or worse, many organizations consider the cloud for everything and then decide to accept or reject the notion for individual cases. That's the cloud-first world I see.

At a recent event, I had numerous people telling me that their groups were mandated to move many systems to the cloud in a lift-and-shift fashion, and many of the technologists weren't happy. That's a conversation for another day, but listening to them and others has taught me a few things. Some of these are experiences I've learned myself, and some are things from others, nuggets gained from their hard experiences.

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Last month Brent Ozar posted that September was community tools month. He had a number of posts that highlighted tools and a number of other people (Francesco, Erik, VladDBA ) did as well. I didn't do any blogging because, well, it was a busy month for me. I was gone from home for 21 days, so a bit harried in life.

As a part of this effort, I saw Ken Fisher write about being a Script Magpie, which is an interesting analogy. A magpie is a bird that collects various shiny objects. Ken collects scripts in the same way. Things that catch his eye are added to his repo of scripts that he keeps handy.

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There was a short but interesting post on the value of seniority. It's written from the perspective of someone that gets a new co-worker, but the co-worker is from the future. In fact, it's the future you. The post is actually titled senior engineers are living in the future.

We (hopefully) are more capable and impressive over time. I would hope most of us are learning more each day and our work reflects that. The code you write today should be better than what you wrote last month or last year. The choices you make, the bugs you solve, the experience you bring to work often does reflect your seniority. Not always, but often.

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When Microsoft started to talk about Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) before SQL Server 2017, I wasn't sure what to think. There was a diagram with 20 things on it, and only 5 were highlighted (you can see that in the article linked). That felt like something, but barely something. Over time, as we've gone through SQL Server 2019 and now 2022, the diagram now looks more filled in. In fact, now there are a lot of things filled in.

When I think about new features of SQL Server, I don't often spend a lot of time on the IQP stuff. First, I don't have to live with people yelling at me every day about slow performance. If I did, I might be more anxious to test and evaluate the changes. Second, these are mostly just hidden things that come with the product and (fingers crossed) improve my workload.

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Most of us are used to a database that lives on a server somewhere. It might be in our data center or a VM that exists somewhere, but it's really an on-premises type of infrastructure. Even if the VM is in AWS or Azure, this is a single system on a server that we control. We can add HA capabilities to this system, but the model is the same as if the database were on our development workstation.

Note: this doesn't matter if this is an RDBMS like SQL Server or PostgreSQL or a NoSQL type system, such as MongoDB or Neo4J.

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Recently a friend started a new job that didn't have Slack used as a communication vehicle. The new employer was considering Teams, but most of the communication among employees was done through email or a live meeting.

At Redgate, we use Slack extensively. I also use Teams for some work with Microsoft, and in general, I find I prefer Slack. That might be because I don't spend enough time in Teams, but regardless, I find myself preferring email for discussions with MS employees over Teams. That's my preference, but really, what I value is the instantaneous, yet async, nature of using messaging tools over email.

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