What I did for the week ending 2018/06/16

I have finished watching the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 presentations on YouTube that caught my interest. If you have any interest in applied PowerShell, I suggest that you have a look at their playlist. there are nearly 60 presentations and I'm sure that something in there will interest you. If not, PowerShell.org has many other presentations.

After finishing up the PowerShell presentations, I went looking for some good tutorials on Jira. I found a lot of marketing, but I didn't find much on useful, implementable details. Some of that seems to be due to Jira being flexible enough to do whatever you want. That's great, but my problem is that I'm not at the point where I know what I want. I will just endeavor to persevere on this front. 

For the past week or two, I've been spending more time with Trello than I had been. I had a ten minute look at Kanbanflow, which seems like a worthy competitor to Trello. All of this activity is the fault of my reading The Phoenix Project, which re-ignited my interest in thinking about work strategically.

The fact of the matter is that you can turn many information tools into a rough Kanban-style task manager. I use OneNote to do task management. I have been using methods based on GTD since I read David Allen's book many years ago, but I've been moving towards Kanban. (A benefit of using OneNote is that my notes on my tasks become part of what I search when I say to myself "Didn't I do this before?". If something is buried in Trello, I might not find it so easily. I might not even think to search Trello.) You could use text files in some folders for a crude task list. The web sites start to shine when you need to work as part of a team or need better reporting.

I also did a little DFS research, because I am curious as to how that works even though it isn't really my bread-and-butter. One of the things I learned was that DFS was introduced in Windows Server 2003. I thought that DFS was a more recent innovation and (maybe Windows Server 2008). It is good to know things. 

I've started looking through the SQLPASS Summit 2016 presentations. I identified about 60 presentations that looked interesting. I've started going through them. The stand-out presentation so far is Agile Development Fundamentals: Continuous Integration with SSDT, which was presented by Jon Boulineau. This is my new favorite "How to do SSDT" presentation. It covers SSDT basics, testing and deployment. I have been using SSDT since the days of "Data Dude" back around 2008 (or earlier) and I need to improve my use of SSDT to match Jon's.

(I can't publish direct links to the SQLPASS site because of the way their site is built. You will just have to log into the SQLPASS site and search for Jon's work.)

I have said this before, but I'll say it again: If you have any interest in SQL Server, you should join SQLPASS. They don't bother you very much and you will get access to hours and hours of free SQL presentations. Yes, much of the content is "old", but SQL Server doesn't move that fast and "older" doesn't mean "obsolete". I would avoid anything earlier than SQL Server 2014, unless you stuck on an older platform.The quality and focus of the SQLPASS presentations tends to be better than what you find randomly searching around on YouTube. Additionally, you don't have to weed out as many introductory presentations for newbies. Even if you are "just an analyst", there are enough presentations on reporting technologies for you to find something that you can use.

I am still finishing up Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. I found the chapter discussing the 1976 Swine Flu incident interesting as I kind-of-just-barely remember that time.