November 26, 2017 at 6:36 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Practice Until You Don't Get It Wrong
November 27, 2017 at 4:50 am
I really like this quote from your article...
"amateurs practice until they get it right, but professionals practice until they don't get it wrong"
I definitely like to think that I repeat things until I don't get them wrong - at least most of the time! On the other hand I'm constantly being told by IT professionals to use the principle of Don't Repeat Yourself!
November 27, 2017 at 5:13 am
The version I heard is "..professionals practise until they *can't* get it wrong"...
Thomas Rushton
blog: https://thelonedba.wordpress.com
November 27, 2017 at 6:33 am
You can practice all you want! I would suggest that if you can't get it wrong then it can't be that complicated (maybe not worth doing)!
November 27, 2017 at 7:40 am
As professionals we all get a lot of things wrong, just ask your wife, husband, significant other! Back to the safe world of SQL, even the 'professional' following a carefully thought out script can miss something that should have been added or changed. An amateur may miss the the subtle error and continue on or be panicked by an unexpected error message into an incorrect response. Hopefully, the professional would immediately recognize any error and recover smoothly. As the proto-typical accidental DBA, I've lived and learned on the amateur side of this problem.
November 27, 2017 at 7:45 am
I have never heard that and would dump any coach dumb enough to say it. Sorry, there is no such place as where you don't make a mistake. I have studied enough piano for a music major and still made mistakes in my music. I go to a concert and can often hear the mistakes. And for sports, can you really point to any place where mistakes aren't made?
Steve gets it right when he says mistakes will be made. Good practice will teach to keep going and correct the problem when the mistake occurs. But I would argue that practice isn't enough. You should script the event. While scripts will suffer failures, they won't inadvertently put the wrong credentials in.
November 27, 2017 at 8:57 am
kiwood - Monday, November 27, 2017 7:45 AM"In sports and the performance arts, I've heard asaying that says: amateurs practice until they get it right, butprofessionals practice until they don't get it wrong."I have never heard that and would dump any coach dumb enough to say it. Sorry, there is no such place as where you don't make a mistake. I have studied enough piano for a music major and still made mistakes in my music. I go to a concert and can often hear the mistakes. And for sports, can you really point to any place where mistakes aren't made?
The quote isn't saying no one makes a mistake. You're misreading it.
Professionals go beyond just getting to the point where they make a couple free throws in a row, they push to 10, or 100 or further than the simple act of getting something right.
November 27, 2017 at 10:19 am
As a musician and DBA, I would differentiate between the two activities.
As a musician, I practice so that I am able to express artistically what the composer has written without being hindered by my physical ability to play the instrument. My practice allows me to express the music in a way that is artistically unique but true to what the composer has written. With jazz improvisation, it is more about individual expression within the context of the musicians I am playing with, but still requires mastery of the instrument. In either case, any two performances may vary, but still be "artistically correct".
As a DBA, I practice so that I can repeat the activity (e.g. restore a database) exactly the same way. For this, a script that I follow is necessary, even if I think I have practiced enough to remember all the steps. I better understand and practice the script so that if something has changed in the environment, or something has happened outside the script, I can adjust to achieve the desired result. In the case of a database restore, the end result is not about artistic expression. Its correctness is measurable and unyielding - in my case, 100% of the data up to and including the last committed log backup.
Software development is a bit of a hybrid between the two, with parts of the process allowing for individual expression and other parts being objective and unyielding.
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