Do What Hurts

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Do What Hurts

  • This reminds me of the following video. The original video this is cut out from esports, but most of the talk is about doing the hard practice and how to actually improve. Some parts of it are esports related (most of 2nd half) and dont make much sense in SQL content, but the way he talks about actually practicing to improve is done quiet well in my opinion.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfchdqGtsts

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by  ktflash.
  • I find a lot of this in sports. Certainly when I coach we look to spend more time on things we don't do well than things we do. Hard to sometimes get athletes to think that they need to improve their weakest skill.

     

    About the same with developers and DBAs

  • We used to dread environment rebuilds.  Painful, likely to break and time consuming. It hurt.

    We are not quite at the stage where it is "click of a button" but are getting there.  Addressing the pain rather than mitigating the pain through draconian restrictions has definitely been the right thing to do.

  • My background in high school days growing up on the farm taught me that if I couldn't do something either I was too weak or wasn't trying hard enough.  I remember carrying 80-100 pound bags of chicken feed up a steep stairway to the second level of a barn to keep my 750 laying hens fed.   But the payoff every week was when I took a number of 30-dozen cases of eggs to the local wholesale grocer and picked up the money.  That made it possible, with my parent's help, to get my education, albeit not in IT, because there wasn't any available back then.

    My IT training came from winning a job as a programmer by taking an aptitude test when I had only even seen a computer once.  Then I had one course of a few days in INFORMATICS Mark IV, an early report generator software.  From that it was onward to learning Assembler and COBOL by night after night of studying the IBM manuals at home without the benefit of any hardware because there were nothing but the mainframes at work to learn on.

    Many thanks to Bob Maple at Bendix Corporation, Brake and Steering Division who gave me the break I needed to begin a 42-year career.

     

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • At least in the realm of IT, if you find a task hard or tedious to do, then there is probably a better way of doing it.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • Eric M Russell wrote:

    At least in the realm of IT, if you find a task hard or tedious to do, then there is probably a better way of doing it.

    Eric, agree with you on that.  And again, maybe one did not try hard enough to find that better way before giving up.

    Further, often we find that our first solution is not the best, and we need to go back and do further analysis.  I remember decades ago when I was raising rabbits in my Dad's barn.  I decided it would be easier to clean  if I installed wire flooring and let the pellets fall through.  First couple days were OK, but then I figured out that I still had the clean the floor UNDER the cages so I had to add sliding shelves above the floor.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • David.Poole wrote:

    We used to dread environment rebuilds.  Painful, likely to break and time consuming. It hurt.

    We are not quite at the stage where it is "click of a button" but are getting there.  Addressing the pain rather than mitigating the pain through draconian restrictions has definitely been the right thing to do.

    True, but my experience with 'project managers' was mostly that mitigating was the norm and eliminating was rarely allowed.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

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