Managing your skills and learning
I wrote yesterday asking about how you stay current with your skills. How do you pick a direction, then keep on top of the changes in that direction. I talked too about the cloud, and how it is so interwoven into the technology pool you no-doubt do or will work with, that it’s clearly something you want to pay attention to.
But I think too that there is actually a method to the madness that can be cultivated. I believe in managing the deltas. The deltas are the changes between things. This can be changes between versions, changes between types of applications in a specific genre of application, etc. This can take some of the crazy out of keeping up with growth and advancements.
Here’s an example. If you know databases, if you understand SQL Server and how it manages information at a management level. Concepts and implementations of indexes, performance investigation and tuning. Not all at an "expert" level, but at a solid, well-founded level. You can apply this Oracle, to DB2, even to non-relational. Now, sure, languages change, features change. But those are the deltas! Those are the things you have to know. You’ll find yourself thinking things like…
"OH! That’s the same as SQL Server except they use this option." or "ah, the same performance implications as SQL Server, but they don’t need indexes." These rather instantly increase your applicable knowledge set and let you leverage what you know even against unknown products. You can apply this to make sense of the cloud too – SQL Server in the cloud on a VM is the same as on-premise. You just need to learn how to connect to it to manage it. SQL Server database on-premise is very nearly the same as Azure database – you just need to see and use a slightly different tool approach (or a web-based management-studio style tool even) and you’re all set. Same tables, same approach to managing your information. You can just learn the differences, the deltas.
You can apply this across the board and bring incredible leverage to the things you already know. It kills me when someone tells me they know SQL Server (on-premise) in a traditional way, but they know nothing about Amazon AWS SQL Server on a VM. Or an Azure VM. Or whatever other cloud provider you’re using. They don’t even realize just how close they are to "getting it."
This applies to bigger jumps too. If you know one type of tool for performance management, you get pretty quickly get the concepts of tools for modeling, for maangement, for setting up your databases or whatever. You’ll have many similar things that you can lean on and don’t have to learn. What’s more, you can draw inferences between them and probably even leverage and experience, all instantly.
Use what you know, leverage it, learn the deltas – have you tried this technique?