Man, I tell you brothers n sistahs, it has been one HARD week of coding. The more kindhearted of you might not have noticed, but it's been a lot of "soft" blogging around here recently…a restult of my brainfry-ed-ness. Well yeah, the T-SQL for the Absentminded DBA post was pretty awesome, you're right. Anyway.
My fellow devs, I believe, will empathise when I say that my confidence has just been SHOT this last week, and it's a hard thing to be under deadline like that. And to put together good technical articles or blogs on top of that? Yeah, no. I have been reassured – just as I have reassured others in the past – that this is what we do. It's easy to get the focus wrong: either you're looking too closely at one particular part of a query, and forget the big picture, or you've got the wide-angle lens on and the problem seems insurmountable. That's been me, for about week.
This got me thinking about our first DBAs @ Midnight video, by the way, on How to Study. There was an awesome moment where we cracked ourselves up over the idea of code slumpbusters – that's right, I said it. It starts at right about 13:55 if you're interested, but I digress.
So how do you keep the right focus? How do you pull yourself back from a stretch coding that you're making way too difficult? I'm still working on that, but I suspect it's going to be getting back to basics: Outline, tech specs (of some sort), pseudocode, pseudocode-to-code, test.
-Jen McCown, http://www.MidnightDBA.com
(Links – hopefully – fixed now…)