Stay relevant and marketable

It has been a while since I wrote some of my best practices posts. I decided to revisit these posts again to see if anything has changed, I also wanted to see if I could add some additional info.

Whenever I interview people for a DB position, I always ask what the latest version is that they have used. I will also ask if they have used the version that is in beta now. More often than not I will get an answer that they are still running something that is two versions behind. Then I ask if they have installed the latest and greatest on their home computer. The answer to that question is usually no.

This to me is crazy, surely you can't be in this field just for the money, where is the passion for discovering new things? Imagine you are a person who makes tables, after a while you will become a master and there is not much more for you to learn. The curse and the blessing of technology is that it is changing, and it is changing rapidly. If you don't invest time after work, before work and over the weekend to discover new things, play with the newest versions and sharpen your skill you will become obsolete, there are many people like that, they fall apart during the interview process.

But I have no time to do all this additional work

People will complain that they don't have enough time to do these additional things. Here are some things you can do if you are short on time. If commuting by public transportation read a book or download the latest papers about the newest versions of the product and read them. If you workout try listening to podcast while doing your aerobic exercises. Perhaps you can set the speed on your player to be 30% faster, this way you can get more podcasts in the same amount of time.

Ask yourself what will help you advance, having up to date skill or being up to date with the latest episodes of Billions, Narcos or American Gods? Another option is to watch the shows on the train on a tablet and then do the tech stuff at home.

Attend an launch event or go to your local usergroup meeting, there are usually sessions on the latest and greatest versions of the software. Youtube also has tons of free sessions.

Here are the Amazon AWS re:Invent 2018 breakout sessions https://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/playlists?shelf_id=33&view=50&sort=dd

The Microsoft Ignite sessions can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJmfAGQ5K81XQ8_od1iTg

The Google Developer sessions can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers

Database related sessions: Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure SQL Database and SQL Server sessions from the Build 2018 conference

Do you eat lunch? If so,  instead of going out for lunch, bring your lunch to the office. While eating your lunch at your desk, watch some of the sessions listed above or read some documentation or books about technologies that you are interested in. If you prefer to read and you want to learn about SQl Server Execution Plans? Head on over to Hugo Kornelis' SQL Server Execution Plan Reference site

Step outside your comfort zone

Try out some other things, become a polyglot programmer. If you are a Java developer, give Scala or Clojure a try. If you are a .NET developer then try out F#, IronPython or Boo. If you are a SQL Server guy why not start playing around with Oracle, PostgreSQL or perhaps even a flavor of NoSQL, take a look at MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra and other solutions.

Have you looked at Big Data? This is already getting big and it will only get bigger. Ever heard of Hadoop? No, heard of facebook? Sure you have, guess what, facebook claims to have the biggest Hadoop cluster, It is over 100 Petabytes and it grows by about half a Petabyte per day, and you thought your database was big :-)

Trends are cyclical, every 10 years or so something new and big comes along. In the late 90s this was data warehousing, OLAP cubes, dimensions, fact tables. Every company these days does some sort of data warehousing. Now it is big data, data science, AI and machine learning that is new and shiny. Take a look at some of that stuff

Finally have you looked at the cloud yet? If you have not... I beg you to take a look. 

If you think that you need to have money to get started, this is not true

You can start with the free tiers to get some experience. All 3 major could providers offer free tiers

Here are the links to these free tiers in order of cloud vendor by market share

Amazon Webservices

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Microsoft Azure

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

Google Cloud 

https://cloud.google.com/free/


That's it for this post.... happy learning.....