Tip 1: New Posts

The forums are getting very busy and it is harder to keep up with all of the threads that have new posts. However, there is an easy way for you to see every post that has not been read.  Once you have logged in to the forums, simply click on the "New Posts" link inside of the navigation bar towards the top of the screen. This link will show you all posts that you have not read.  his is how I get through reading each and every post on the forums.

Within the Church ICS Department, we have a menu of technologies that are available to a team when working on a project. I call this menu the "technology buffet." Here is how the menu works. 

There are three general categories that govern each of the product categories. Those general categories are as follows:

Contained

Items within this category are technologies that are currently in use at the Church but that we no longer wish to use to implement new solutions. We will continue to support these technologies as long as the products that depend on them are in use.

A few weeks ago Joel warned you that there would be occasional guest posts - I am the first volunteer. The brief bio on tech.lds.org should provide you with some understanding of my experience and biases. In this post, I leverage those experiences and biases to offer some observations about complexity.

Scale. Reliability.

When you’re in enterprise I.T.  you care a lot about those words–sometimes too much.

Like most I.T. shops, we have a very complex environment: multiple hardware, os, database and programming languages. You’d expect a fair number of outages.

Maintenance. Call it bug fixing. Call it “keeping the wheels on.” Call it warranty. Call it whatever you want.

Use great prototypes to narrow the “gap of misunderstanding” between you and your customer regarding scope before you start development. The practice we’re trying hard to implement is having Interaction Designers 6-8 weeks ahead of development before ever entering a Cycle/Milestone/Sprint/Release (or whatever you want to call it). So our “agility” comes from working back and forth with the customer on high fidelity prototypes. This substantially reduces the number of times a customer comes back after you’re already done, asking for some new feature they thought “was going to be included from the very beginning.”

Test, test, test! Don’t under-invest in your QA team or in automation. We made the mistake of under-investing for a long time and felt the pain. We’ve staffed a high quality QA team with many engineers who could easily be developers in our shop. We find many, many bugs before our customers do. We can do much better, but the improvements in QA have materially decreased the amount we spend on maintenance.

• The carrier (e.g. Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) upon whose network the device would run.
• The OEM who would make the hardware (Dell, HP, Motorola, etc.).
• The kid who would use it.
• The parent who would buy it for the kid.
• The department(s) within Microsoft which might profit from services sold through the device.
• The random executive or product manager who had an opinion of what features should be on the device.
• And of course: ourselves!

So which are the customers? Answer: All.

Who uses instant messaging? Reads blogs? Publishes blogs? Uses MySpace? Who buys stuff online or downloads videos?

Kids, right? 

Piper Jaffray recently executed a survey of a sample of the 232 million Internet users in North America. By extrapolating the data, they estimate that over 100 million use instant messaging, over 100 million read blogs and almost 100 million participate in one or more social networking sites.

Over the years working as a DBA, I've come up with some simple suggestions that make life as a DBA easier.

1. "Right" and "wrong" choices apply only to moral issues. In database administration, remember that “your way” and “my way” are just different ways, and neither may be right or wrong. 


2. Normalization is a must. Avoid having data stored in more than one place. A database that is properly constrained and indexed will seldom have performance problems due to normalization.


3. Integrity should be independent from the applications using the database. Data corruption is a database administrator’s worst nightmare and can ruin an application. Properly constrained data cannot become corrupted. It’s that simple.
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In one of our wards in Seattle, a family’s house burned down. Of all the needs that family had, the one that I remember was a request for people to come up with pictures of the family members.

This prompted many discussions in the ward and community about how to protect pictures, journals and keepsakes in the event of a fire.

We’re faced each day with a growing, and increasingly more dangerous, threat to our personal memories: digital media. Digital media isn’t just for techno-hobbyists anymore. Billions of pictures are being amassed on the hard drives of people all over the globe. The only trouble is that too many people aren’t being careful.

Are any of you using metrics on a daily basis to determine the success of your day and the work that you perform? I certainly am.

I guess the root cause of my sickness began as a youngster in a small Idaho farming community. It seemed that metrics were used to determine the success or failure of almost everything we did. How many bales of hay could be rolled in the field in one hour, how many sprinkler pipes could you move before you were eaten alive by mosquitoes, how many aluminum cans could be collected per quarter mile, how many fish could be caught with just one worm? I know...it doesn't seem like an interesting way to spend your childhood, but it did help to establish a strong foundation for my future, and perhaps punishment, for the IT support staff who feel the results of my childhood learning.

I have been employed at the Church for almost twenty years now and have focused primarily on the support side of the business and the last six years as the Director of Support. I eat, sleep, and breathe customer support concepts and ideas every day. Exciting? Absolutely; because I get to meet often with customers and help them do their job faster and more efficiently. ICS is focused on being fast and on-time in our services to our customers. That statement alone tells me that measurement is critical to our success. In order to improve our speed to delivery we need to have metrics in place that make a significant difference, and that help us identify the potholes in our information superhighway.