Blogs

A Letter to My 20 Year-Old Self

A Letter to My 20 Year-Old Self

By Kendra Little on June 11, 2019 • 4 min read

Category: tech-community

T-SQL Tuesday logo linking to the month's topic

This post is a part of #tsql2sday, a monthly community ritual where a topic is proposed by a community member and everyone is invited to join in.

This month’s topic is from Mohammad Darab, who encouraged us to: “Write your 20 year old self a letter. If you could go back in time and give yourself advice, what would it be?”

The advice I would give to my 20 year old self is the same advice I give to myself today, more than 20 years later:

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DBAs: Stop Denying Sysadmin to Developers

DBAs: Stop Denying Sysadmin to Developers

I recently chatted with some folks who have a permissions problem in SQL Server. The permissions problem isn’t technical: it’s a process problem.

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The Best Bit About SQL Saturdays: Nearly Everyone Interacts with Other People

The Best Bit About SQL Saturdays: Nearly Everyone Interacts with Other People

By Kendra Little on May 21, 2019 • 4 min read

Category: tech-community

Today I was looped in on an email thread about the pros and cons of attending a specific event. One person on the thread asked if any of us had attended the event in the past, and whether or not event attendees were engaged with presenters and vendor representatives.

My immediate thought was: of course the attendees were engaged, because the event is a SQL Saturday.  I’ve never been to a SQL Saturday where the attendees weren’t engaged.

But, I realized that it’s a fair question.

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How to Recognize the Early Stages of Burnout, and My Treatment Plan

How to Recognize the Early Stages of Burnout, and My Treatment Plan

By Kendra Little on May 14, 2019 • 9 min read

Category: tech-community

I recently realized that I’m in the early stages of burnout.

This isn’t an unfamiliar place for me, but it is new for me to recognize the early signs of burnout in myself before it becomes a full-fledged disaster. This time, I’m thinking about how I got here, and making an explicit plan to change course.

In hope of helping someone else out there, I thought some public journaling might be in order.

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Paying Down Technical Debt

Paying Down Technical Debt

One of the cool things that I do as an Evangelist at Redgate is to periodically visit company headquarters in Cambridge.

The other Evangelists and I get to meet with every software developer, product manager, and UX designer at Redgate over a series of meetings. We talk about features that teams have released lately and what teams are looking at doing in the near future. We get to give feedback based on what we hear from the community and from folks in the sales process. We also get to share what we think teams should work on.

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What Is Automation in the Software Development Life Cycle?

What Is Automation in the Software Development Life Cycle?

Today I got a bit closer to a meaningful definition of automation, as it applies to the software development process. I’ve been turning this concept over in my head for a while, which is partly related to the dreaded question of licensing.

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