Presentations

Been a weird year….

And you’re probably going to see a ton of retrospective posts going live soon from a variety of authors. I’m struggling to write… well, anything…. That being said, I’ve had a few key successes over the last year.

  1. Presented several times virtually, particularly as a Friend of Red Gate. DevOps Enterprise Summit, PASS Summit, and DPS. I also presented for Georgia DAMA and for the Nashville SQL Saturday (my last in-person presentation).
  2. Job is good; learning lots of new stuff with Powershell and OCtopus Deploy, as well as Azure DevOps.
  3. We got an awesome dog. Meet Conway.

Of course, lots of other stuff happened too. COVID decimated travel plans, and as most of you are aware, it killed an organization that I’ve been a long-time member of (PASS). It also cancelled the SQLSaturday Atlanta for 2020, perhaps indefinitely.

Top it off with some health stuff, and frankly, I’m exhausted. However, I do have this urge to make the most out of the next year, and the only way I know how to do that, is to get back in the habit of writing.

More to come.

#DevOpsDays #Nashville in the books

Headed back home after a successful Ignite presentation at DevOpsDays Nashville. This was an awesome conference; I’ve blogged in the past about some of my concerns with the single track format, and finding speakers that manage to reach a very diverse audience of engineers, managers, coders, analysts, etc. I had no such concern this time around; I feel like I got something out of every presentation I heard. Very well done.

On a personal note, IGNITE TALKS ARE HARD, Y’ALL. 5 minutes, 20 slides is tough to pull off, particularly when you have a penchant for verbosity (editing is NOT my favorite thing to do). I originally proposed this as an Ignite talk because I’m just really starting on my DevOps journey, but in hindsight, I spent WAY more time editing and preparing for this discussion than any SQL Server presentation I’ve ever done. The plus side is that I can reuse a lot of this material in educating my team when discussing the depth of these directions.

Headed home with lots to think about.

Managing a Technical Team: Act Like a Good Developer

This is one of my favorite pieces of advice from my Managing a Technical Team presentation that I’ve been doing at several SQLSaturdays and other conferences: act like a good developer, with a different focus.  Most new managers, especially if they’ve been promoted from within (the Best Operator) model don’t know how to improve their management skills.  However, if you were to ask managers what makes a good developer, you’ll probably get a series of answers that are similar to the following broad categories:

Good Developers have:

  • a desire to learn,
  • a desire to collaborate, and
  • a desire for efficiency.

I could probably say that this is true for all good employees, but as a former developer, I know that the culture in software development places a lot of focus on these traits; system administrators usually have different focus points.  However, all technical managers SHOULD emulate these three traits in order to be effective.  Let me explain.

Desire to Learn

Let’s imagine Stacy, a C# developer in your company; by most accounts, she’s successful at her job.  She always seems to be up on the latest technology, has great ideas, and always seems to have a new tool in her toolkit.  If you ask her how she got started programming, she’d tell you that she picked it up as hobby while in college, and then figured out how to make a career out of it.  She’s an active member of her user group, and frequently spends her weekends reading and polishing her craft; while not a workaholic, she does spend a great deal of her personal time improving her skills.  She’s on a fast track to managing a team, in part because of her desire to learn.

One day, she gets promoted, and is now managing the development team; she struggles with the corporate culture, the paperwork, laying out a vision, and can’t seem to figure out how to motivate her team to the same level of success that she was achieving as a developer.  The problem is that her desire to learn no longer syncs up with her career objectives;  Stacy needs to invest her educational energies into learning about management.

Ask a new IT manager what books they’re reading, and typically the response will be either none at all, or a book on the latest technology.  We tend to cling to that which is familiar, and if you’ve got a technical background, it’s easy and interesting to try and keep focusing on that background.  However, if you’re serious about being a manager, you need to commit to applying the same desire to learn that you had as an employee to learning more about management.  Sure, pick up a book on Big Data, but balance it out with a book on Relationship Development.  Podcasts?  There’s management ones out there that are just as fun as the development ones.  Webinars? Boom.

Desire to Collaborate

Bob’s a data architect.  Everybody loves Bob, because he really listens to your concerns, and tries to design solutions that meet those concerns; if he’s wrong about something, he’s quick to own up to the mistake, and moves on.  He works well with others, acknowledging their contributions and adapting to them.  In short, Bob is NOT a jerk; nobody wants to work with a jerk.

Bob gets promoted to a management position, and he too struggles; he’s still hanging out with his former teammates, and is still going to the same conferences.  Everybody still likes Bob, but he’s having trouble guiding his team in an effective manner.  He hasn’t really built relationships with his new peers (other managers that report to his director), and hasn’t found ways to manage more effectively.  He’s collaborating, but with the wrong people.

As a new manager, you should continue to maintain relationships with your directs, but you need to build a relationship with your new team of peers.  Understand their visions, and find ways to make your team valuable resources to them. Reach out to other managers at user groups and conferences; build a buddy system of people based on your management path, not just your technical one.

Desire for Efficiency

If you sat down and had a conversation with any development team that was effective and producing results and asked them about their methodology, it wouldn’t be long before they started talking about frameworks.  Efficiency in development is derived from reusable patterns and approaches to problems; they’re tough to implement at first, but the long term gain is enormous.

As you’ve probably guessed, there’s management frameworks that can be very effective in a technical environment; investing time in implementing them can yield great efficiencies when faced with making decisions.  In my current environment, I use three:

  1. MARS – my own self-rolled approach to system operations; it’s not perfect, but it helps focus efforts.
  2. Kanban – allows me to see what our WIP (Work In Progress) is, and helps queue up items for work
  3. ITIL – we’re just starting to adopt this, but we’re working on isolating Incident Management from root cause analysis, as well as implementing robust change control processes.

The challenge with management frameworks is similar to that of development frameworks: bloat.  It’s too easy to get bound up in process and procedures when lighter touches can be used, but in most cases, the efficiency gained by having a repeatable approach to decisions allows you to respond quickly to a changing environment.

Summary

Management is tough, but it’s especially tough if you continue to focus on your technical chops as opposed to your leadership abilities.  Act like a good developer, and apply those same basic principles to your team.

Speaking at CodeStock 2014

So, this announcement’s way overdue; in about 2 weeks (July 11-12,2014), I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions at CodeStock 2014 in lovely Knoxville, TN.   I haven’t been to CodeStock since 2009, so it’ll be interesting to see how it’s grown.

The Elephant in the Room; A DBA’s Guide to Hadoop & Big Data by Stuart Ainsworth

DATE & TIME

Jul 11th at 9:55 AM until 11:05 AM

TRACK

LOCATION

400b

RATING (0 VOTES)

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Speaker(s): Stuart Ainsworth
The term "Big Data" has risen to popularity in the last few years, and encompasses data platforms outside of the traditional RDBMS (like SQL Server). The purpose of this session is to introduce SQL Server DBA’s to Hadoop, and to promote understanding of how schema-less data can be collected and accessed in coordination with the traditional SQL models. We’ll cover the basic vocabulary of the Hadoop platform, Microsoft’s integration efforts, and demonstrate how to get started with "big data".

 

Managing a Technical Team: Lessons Learned by Stuart Ainsworth

DATE & TIME

Jul 12th at 11:10 AM until 12:20 PM

TRACK

LOCATION

400b

RATING (0 VOTES)

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Speaker(s): Stuart Ainsworth
I got promoted to management a couple of years ago, and despite what I previously believed, there were no fluffy pillows and bottles of champagne awaiting me. My team liked me, but they didn’t exactly stoop and bow when I entered the room. I’ve spent the last year relearning everything I thought I knew about management, and what it means to be a manager of a technical team. This session is intended for new managers, especially if you’ve come from a database (or other technical) background.

Steel City SQL Users Group–March 18, 2014– @SteelCitySQL

Next Tuesday, I’m loading up Big Blue, and driving over to Birmingham to present at the Steel City SQL Users Group.  I’ll be talking about the Agile DBA.  Should be fun!

http://www.steelcitysql.org/

Featured Presentation

The Agile DBA: Managing your To-Do List

Speaker: Stuart Ainsworth

Summary: Agile development is all the rage, but how do the principles apply to database administrators? This presentation will introduce the basics of the Agile Manifesto, and explain how they can be applied to non-development IT work, such as database administration, maintenance, and support. We’ll cover scrum (one of the most popular development methodologies) and kanban, and identify some of the common struggles with implementing them in an organization. This is an interactive discussion; please bring your tales of success and your horror stories.

About Stuart: Stuart Ainsworth (MA, MEd) is a manager working in the realm of financial information security. Over the past 15 years, he’s worked as a research analyst, a report writer, a DBA, a programmer, and a public speaking professor. In his current role, he’s responsible for the maintenance of a data analysis operation that processes several hundred million rows of data per day.

PASS 2013 Summit Evals are out!

And I didn’t do too bad; wish I had done better.  I said that when I was done, I felt like it was a “B” level presentation, and it was; I got a 4 out of 5 on my evals.  If I had been a less experienced speaker, I would be thrilled with that; as it stands, I’m a little bummed.  I know that it’s tough to get accepted to speak at Summit, and I feel bad that I didn’t hit this one out of the park.

However, it was a great experience; 73 people attended my session, which is a big audience for me.  I struggled with my demos throughout (I don’t even want to listen to the audio because I’m worried about how bad it was), and I should have worked on finding ways to better connect with my audience.  The feedback I got was really constructive:

Was a good intro, just would have liked to have seen some broader examples. For example converting XML into relational tables, not in detail but just at a high level.

Lots of demos geared towards people who have already written a lot of XQuery. This should have been a 201 session. A discussion on why you’d even use the XML datatype would have been useful. What problem does the XML datatype even solve for people?

I think I would have benefitted from a hard copy (gasp) of the XML data.  I would have been able to see the data and compared it to your on screen results

Way too fast, too ambitious for a 101 session

Well put together and paced. Very clear and coherent

Scale back expectations if it really is a 101 level session

So it sounds like I didn’t do the best job of making my abstract clear; people had different expectations than what I had for what a 100 level course was supposed to be.  I do agree that it was too much content, and if I present on the topic again, I’ll be sure to go back to splitting this up to focus on the basics of XPath, and save a discussion of FLWOR for later.  Also, I really should have used demos much more judiciously; I kept running code and trying to work the magnifier, when I should have just used slides for the basics, and then done a much more thorough demo.

So what did I learn?  Connect with the audience first and foremost.  If I could have kept them engaged and entertained, I may have covered less material, but may have inspired them to do more research on their own (which in the end, is the point of this whole exercise).

Couple of upcoming presentations

I know; I suck at blogging.

Anyway, I have a couple of upcoming presentations this month, so I figured I needed to get back and gear and at least post a notice about them.  First, I’ll be presenting at A Bunch of Devs (http://www.meetup.com/A-Bunch-of-Devs/) on the Red Gate development suite of tools.  Funny story; I actually work in that building.  The organizers reached out to Red Gate to see if they had a Friend nearby.  I guess I qualified.

Next, I’ll be back at SQL Saturday Atlanta to present on Biggish Data; this is the first Atlanta SQL Saturday that I actually had almost nothing to do with (as a chapter leader, I helped with some basic decision, but very little).  I’m excited that it’s continuing to thrive.  Says a lot about the infrastructure that PASS puts behind these events; they just need a little help from the local chapters, but they don’t rely on the same person getting burned out year after year.