“All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” -Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.
Don't code lonely. Just don't do it…it's one of the major sins that will cause the gods of IT to unforgivingly smite you. You don't want to be smitten smited smote smoten, do you? Good then.
What do I mean by "code lonely"? I mean a lot of things, actually. You code lonely when you code in a vacuum – without good interaction with the rest of your team. When we do this, we run a very high risk of missing an important element to the module, or slamming up against some other module in a way that breaks the application. (Go ahaed, ask me how I know…) Talk to your team, attend meetings, send emails. Don't code lonely.
I also mean coding maverick style: Sure, you may be one awesome Top Gun, but no one is immune from random mistakes and oversights. (Again, ask me how I know.)I'm remembering Michael Bolton in Office Space, "I probably put a decimal wrong or something. S***, I'm always DOING that!" Implement code reviews and stick with them.
This is not the scene I'm talking about. Still funny though.
If you're reading this blog, you likely read other blogs. I'd say you're probably on Twitter, maybe Facebook or LinkedIn…so I'm preaching to the choir on this point. But just in case the MidnightDBA Blog is your only link to the world of SQL Server professionals, understand my third meaning of "coding lonely": It is absolutely invaluable, imperative (and lots of other "i" words) that you CONNECT with your SQL community. You have SO many options, and no excuses:
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Get on a social networking site and chat with data professionals, Microsoft MVPs, authors like Paul Randal and Buck Woody, and other bigwigs
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Read and comment on SQL blogs (more SQL blogs)
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Attend virtual user group meetings
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Attend physical user group meetings
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Attend webcast presentations
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Ask and answer questions on forums
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Read and contribute to articles on SQLServerPedia.com
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Attend and/or volunteer with code camps and SQL Saturdays
"We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we will all hang seperately." Ben Franklin had it right.
Happy days,
Jen McCown