In 2021, many companies had employees leave positions. The number of people resigning from their jobs was so high that the term "The Great Resignation" began appearing in many publications. A number of industries were affected, and there are no shortage of pundits and experts analyzing why. This happened primarily in the US, but the UK is concerned. This doesn't appear to be happening in Europe, but there are concerns in Asia and Australia as well.

The term feels misleading to me, as workers aren't forgoing work. Rather, they're changing jobs and looking for new positions, either at a better position in their field or leaving the field altogether. This is disruptive for firms, and costly, as finding new employees can be challenging and time-consuming. We also see a great loss to teams as the more talented employees find it easier to leave and replacing those people with less-skilled workers impacts their productivity.

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I saw an article about automating responses to security issues being a marathon not a sprint. The articles gives a few examples of different levels of automation response to situations, noting that each of this is a different level of maturity in the organization. At early stages, the response is mostly alerting a human to take action. Later, the automation will make some changes, but still defer to a human for more actions. The final example is automation handling most of the issue itself. Note, none of this means humans are unaware of what responses are being made.

The idea is that improving security with automation is something that takes place across time, as the organization matures and becomes more comfortable and trusting of automation. It's a marathon, where we push, but we know this will take some time to get to the end. It's not a sprint where we make a quick fix and get a result.

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I ran across an article on Zoom fatigue and new tech that was written in July 2020. That month seems like ages ago, and at the same time, not too long ago as the world seems to have still been in some sort of suspended animation for much of 2020 and 2021. However, one thing that has remained since that time is a regular stream of Zoom and Teams meetings that I attend.

I've been dealing with video meetings for over a decade. For most of the time I've worked for Redgate, I've had regular meetings every week with various people that are in Cambridge, UK. I'm in Denver,  US, and while I enjoy going to England and visiting the office, that's a few times a year. Across the years, we've tried a number of platforms, and various different configurations, including a dedicated conference room with extra mics and sound-absorbing padding on the walls. None of this made for a great experience, though I have to say our adoption of Zoom across the last 2-3 years has been the best experience overall.

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I would guess that many of us think we're good at our jobs, or at least that we do a good job. Whether you're a system administrator or software engineer, I'm sure you think you earn the compensation you get.  I wonder if others in your company would see you this way? If they know what you do as a job, and understand the role, then you should hope they see you a good engineer/admin. Perhaps you should even ask a few people if they do.

There is a good thread about software engineers, talking about some of the things that make a good developer. It's from a longtime engineer, and the thread talks about the things that you might consider important in a good software developer.  Actually, I think most of these items would apply to admins and even other business people.

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DevOps has become somewhat mainstream in that many companies, perhaps most, are talking about it or trying to implement some of the principles behind this software development approach. However, even as I talk with people that practice DevOps, I find the idea of what DevOps actually includes can vary widely among developers, even inside the same company.

There are lots of definitions, and this one caught my eye recently. It says, among other things, that there should be "increased collaboration among not only developers and operations staff but users." I like that there is some emphasis on working together, which is often the hardest part of changing how we build software. I find that many customers struggle because they end up adopting the technology tools, but fail to change how they communicate with others. Culture change is hard, and DevOps requires a culture change.

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I have seen a few people call for raising the RAM limit in the Standard Edition of SQL Server. In 2016, Aaron Bertrand voiced this, and for 2019, Glenn Berry asked that the limit be raised to 256GB. In the last newsletter of the year, Brent Ozar asked Santa for a 256GB limit.

I wonder how many of you would really take advantage of that. In the Azure SQL Database pricing table, to get beyond 128GB of RAM, you need to go to 32 cores. For Azure VMs, you need to purchase even more cores.  AWS EC2 VMs require 32 cores to get to 256GB.

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I saw this study recently, where most people think they are better-than-average drivers in the US. I thought about it myself afterward, and I think I'm maybe average. I do pay attention most of the time, I try to be more careful when it's wet or snowy and give myself more time to slow down. I  try to be aware of the other cars and obstacles on the road. I also usually have a drink (coffee, soda, water) with me, and I certainly mess with the music player. The Tesla reminds me constantly when I've strayed near a line, so a few months of driving seems to tell me I'm not great. Certainly not above average.

I would expect that most of us think we've done a good job with security for our systems.  We don't expect to get hacked or deal with ransomware. I don't know how realistic that is, as a recent set of penetrations tests shows the vast majority of networks are vulnerable.

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Every year I'm responsible for a portion of the Database Weekly newsletters. I used to do half, but right now Kathi, Grant, and I are on a rotation. Our boss puts out a schedule each year, which tells me the weeks for which I am responsible. Each January I then set up a recurring appointment for Mon/Wed/Fri on my weeks to remind me to curate articles and write an editorial.

Each year I also think about whether or not I can automate this. Last year I spent a few hours looking into the Exchange APIs for creating appointments, at the C# code, and PoSh (which is a nightmare). I spent a few hours, got frustrated, and gave up, just manually creating appointments.

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At some point during my career sharing files and links in email became a security concern. There were all sorts of malware problems and issues that spread throughout organizations because someone unknowingly clicked on or forwarded a malicious item. At a couple of large organizations, we had to turn off email for days while we cleaned out systems. Fortunately, antivirus and other types of scanning software improved to prevent most of these problems.

It seems that not all developers learned the lessons of the past. Microsoft Teams has a few vulnerabilities inside it based on link sharing in the chats. One of the issues is that the preview features aren't well implemented, though Microsoft security doesn't think this is a problem as a user would notice the link would be incorrect. I think that's a huge leap and not a very safe one to make.

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In my life, I've mostly dealt with people that speak English. I tried Latin in high school and Japanese in university, but I wouldn't say I learned a lot. This past year I've been working on Japanese (konichi wa) and French (Bonjour) on a regular basis, but I'm still fairly uni-lingual. At least compared to many of the people I've met in my travels that speak multiple languages. I'm mostly just trying to read a bit, and that's quite hard.

In my career, I haven't met many technologists that only know one programming language. Even the SQL professionals know a little C# or a scripting language. Quite a few people know a bit about many languages, and some are very competent. I used to think it would be good to master one language before moving on, but I find that trying different languages can give you an appreciation for others, or even an appreciation for your primary one. Comparing and contrasting code might even help you learn faster.

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