2020 has been a tough year for many, but I can’t complain considering what other people have gone through. While others lost their job due to the shutdown, I could work from home for extended periods.
But I haven’t been satisfied with the way things were going and needed a change. I wanted to focus on what I enjoy doing, and after a checkpoint, I realised what things I wanted to avoid.
There was also this uncertainty about the future, how long could I continue where I was.
So, in October, I decided to do something else and leave the company I have worked for the last seven and a half years. From February I will be on my own in my company, Enesi Consulting.
One of my good friends said I was crazy doing this, probably hinting at the uncertainty we are going through. That just confirmed the concerns that had passed in my head, but not rational enough for me to stop. It is now or never.
I have received plenty of encouragement from friends in the Oracle Community. That too reminded me how much I like to be in this environment with excellent friends, and working with the database, infrastructure on Linux, development, and most importantly, data analytics.
One of the advantages I am looking forward to is saying no to duties that I don’t do well, like silly meetings, bureaucratic processes, plans without results, etc. I am a techie guy, and I like to help people.
Optimisation and troubleshooting of systems connected to Oracle is one area of priority; traditional DBA-work may be out of demand, but developers have just found new resources to abuse. Words like observability and metrics, mostly cover what I have been doing for a while; use the instrumentation and create a resource usage profile to find the bottleneck. But there is undoubtedly more to be done out there. Few systems are so heavily instrumented as the Oracle database, but now it is more accepted to make other systems observable. Prometheus is fun to work with, and coupled with Grafana ; proactive monitoring becomes less of a burden.
I have moved away from the typical DBA role for the last years and done more database development, especially with Oracle APEX. Python is also cool, though it will take some time before I reach fluency. If somebody asks me to do integration, I will choose Apache Kafka. It is rock solid and gets the job done. Nothing is worse than delayed data to a data warehouse. It is time to stop these overloaded batch jobs that fail way too often. Please keep it simple, get a clear overview of the flow, and spend money on storage, not human labour.
My current hobby is machine learning; I am rediscovering old interests in mathematics and algorithms. The list of topics I want to look at won’t be empty for a while, which is good. The combination of people, data, and code will occupy me further on.