(Note: I’m back on Twitter at @shebang_the_cat, so please re-add me if we were contacts before, or if you think I’m worth listening to. The bonus on this new name is that the underscores hopefully mean the username is no longer perverted-sounding to certain immature people I know.)
I did some coding this week at work, and it had been a while. This is actually my first DBA job that doesn’t require me to do any (besides the odd bash script, which doesn’t really count), and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.
I had to collect data from a bunch of database servers, each with a bunch of databases and each of those with a bunch of tables, and since grabbing all that by hand would induce homicidal thoughts rather quickly, I wrote a perl script to do it for me. I suppose I could’ve used a different language, but I know enough perl to be dangerous. Plus whenever I do use it I suddenly get this chorus of guys I know, who are a tad fanatical about the language, cheering me on. I don’t know what it is about perl, but I don’t get that encouragement if I use Java (instead, God drowns a puppy).
I’m certainly glad I stopped being a Java developer, if only for the sake of my repetitive stress pains in my right hand (it’s a really wordy language). Scripting languages like PHP and perl have been far kinder on me, as has DBA work.
Way back when I decided to go into computer science there were two aspects of it that interested me:
- solving problems, and
- actually creating something (i.e., software).
It dawns on me now that what I like best in database work is when there’s something to fix. At least when it’s not something I broke myself, though that happens often enough. If I can speed up data retrieval, or improve a query, that’s golden. Everything else is pretty lame, though, if I think about it. Documentation, installing new database servers, arguing with developers, I could leave it.
I don’t ever feel I’m creating much, though, at least not these days. And I think I’m aching for that, badly. That half-day of perl coding was the most work-fun I’d had in months. I was able to (mostly) block out the banter going on around me and focus on the code, and that’s so wonderful. I find it harder to get into The Zone with my database work, though that’s probably more because of all the multitasking involved, and having to deal with people.
Maybe it’s time I signed up for an open source project or something.