Author: Emily Lahren (page 4 of 4)

December 19, 2023 / 0 Comments

How to Clean Up Old Local Branches With Git

If you use Git Bash or another form of Git on your local development machine for version control in your organization, have you ever looked at how many branches you have from old work? Sometimes I forget that Git is keeping every single branch I’ve ever made off of master in the past unless I manually go in and delete it. This means I end up with an insane number of local branches hanging out on my computer, some of them months old. It’s not necessarily bad that these local branches are still around, but I know that I will never need them again after the related ticket or software change has been deployed to Live. Any pertinent information that might be needed for reference for that branch is stored in our remote repo which means I don’t need it hanging around on my machine.

When I finally remember to check how many local branches I have on a repo (using the command “git branch”), I am shocked to see dozens upon dozens of branches like in the above screenshot (which is only about half of the old branches I have on that repo). Then I want to get rid of them but also don’t want to use “git branch -D <branch>” for every single individual branch to clean them up one by one since that would take me quite a while to complete.

The faster way to get rid of all local branches, taught me by a coworker, is the following: “git branch | grep -v “master” | xargs git branch -D”. Note: use this with caution because it will delete everything and you don’t want to delete something that you still need. Also, there are some caveats with which this command won’t work, and you can read more about that on StackOverflow.

TL;DR: the above command will fetch the list of all branches available on the current directory/repo, will get all branches except the one you specify with “grep -v” (so that you can keep the local master branch), and will then delete all of those branches with a force delete.

Let’s break down each part of that command:

“Git branch”
- This is the command that will list all local branches on the current repository
- Using a pipe character (the vertical bar “|”) will tell the command to feed in the results of what’s on the left of the pipe into the command on the right of the pipe, which in this case means we are feeding the list of local branches into the command “grep -v “master””
“grep -v “master””
- The grep command will print output matching a specified pattern
- The option “-v” signifies that the inverse of the list matching a pattern should be output
- In this scenario, the two above points mean that this full command is going to take the list of all local branches and print out all of them that aren’t the specified branch, which in this case is “master”. If your main branch isn’t called master, you can change that value to whatever branch you don’t want to delete with this command.
“xargs git branch -D”
- I haven’t been able to definitively figure out what the xargs command is doing (if anyone has documentation on this, please send it my way!), but essentially it seems to be taking the list of branches created with the two previous commands and running that list through the normal “git branch -D” command which will perform a hard delete on those branches.
- “git branch -D” is the command used to force a delete of a branch (the -D is short for using the two options “–delete –force”)

This isn’t the most necessary Git command you’ll ever use in your work, but it does come in handy to keep your work organized and decluttered if you’re someone like me who values that.

December 12, 2023 / 0 Comments

How to Stay Organized While Busy at Work, Part 2

Welcome back to part two of my discussion on ways to help manage stress and chaos at work. These posts are specifically aimed at database and application developers and IT personnel as a whole, although I think most of the topics would also apply to other office workers. Today’s post will cover the final three topics in the list below. If you would like to catch up on last week’s part one post, you can find it here.

Once again, I hope you find something valuable in this post, and I would love to hear your thoughts about how you’ve implemented these and had them work (or not!) in your own life. Thanks for reading!

Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage
Only work on one thing at a time
Every work request should be a ticket (mostly)
Set times to catch up on email and messages throughout the day
Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning
Track what you spend your time on

Set times for yourself to catch up on emails and messages throughout the day

Going back to the advice to only work on one thing at a time, that should also include emails and messages. If you’ve never heard of the concept of context switching, I think you should read into it because it can be a huge time-sink if you don’t control it as much as possible. (Read about context switching from Atlassian here.)

While I am working, I find that if I am constantly being bombarded with messages and emails from other people, I get incrementally more stressed as the day goes on because it all starts to be overwhelming, especially when the group chats are going at 100 miles per hour some days. Plus, the context switching of always losing focus to read what new chats are coming in as they come in is tiring and prevents me from getting important things done. This is why I’ve set a rule for myself that I will use Focus Time like I said in part one, and will give myself dedicated time throughout the day to focus on working, but will also mentally set times throughout the day to stay connected with coworkers.

I try to work with a loose version of the Pomodoro Method of intensely focusing on a task for 25-50 minutes and then taking a 5-10 minute break from that task. I used an actual timer app in the past, but now I don’t use it and mentally keep track of how long I’ve been focused on one thing. Then when the break time comes, I will quickly catch up on and respond to any messages I’ve received while focusing. Emails I only check about 3 times a day, after my morning standup, before going to lunch, and before leaving for the day, since usually email is not as urgent as Teams messages. This method gives you the best of both worlds of still being able to help your teammates with their work while still being able to get your work done without too much context switching.

Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning

This concept is what many in the self-help world refer to as “eat the frog”, which I think is a pretty weird name, but the concept is a good one. I am a natural procrastinator. You would have thought I would have learned my lesson with many late nights in college trying to finish work the night or two before a deadline, but I guess not. My procrastination comes from a fear that I won’t know what to do when I get into the task I need to complete, and then it will be scary because I won’t know how to proceed. However, not once in my professional career so far have I ever been assigned a task that I knew 0% about what needed to be done, even if all I know about the task is that someone wrote a vague document about it 5 years ago or that it needs to use recursion to get the data.

With all of this in mind, in about the last 6 months or so, I’ve focused on starting my day out by working on the most challenging and important tasks first thing in the morning. I usually start work around 7 AM and have my first meeting each day a 9:15 AM, so I know I usually have about 2 hours to buckle down and focus on that one difficult task, so I have no excuse to not focus on the task. I still don’t like doing the challenging thing, but doing it first thing in the morning makes sure I have the mental energy to do it because I’m freshly awake and am sipping on my morning coffee. Starting early also means that when I inevitably make good progress on it before lunch, I can have a sense of accomplishment and a lighter load after lunch (when the onslaught of meetings normally begins). For the scenarios where I don’t make significant progress in the morning because the task is that challenging, at least I know I put my best effort of the day into it to make some amount of progress instead of procrastinating on it and becoming even more afraid of the task at hand.

Track what you spend your time on

This relates to my earlier advice about making every work request a ticket, but this advice to track what you spend your time on isn’t exclusive to ticket work. I also recommend that you track the time spent on other activities as well so you know what truly is taking a lot of time in your work day. If you are constantly helping others (which can be good) instead of doing your work, you may look back on the day or week and wonder where your time went and why you weren’t able to finish your tasks. I have been in that exact position, which is why I started keeping track of all the work I complete throughout the day, including small calls with teammates to help them with their work, meetings, and even presentation work time. I do this, including keeping a general summary of what I did or learned with each of my tickets, with a daily OneNote page, but you can track it in any way you would like.

In the past, I tried using Trello and other software to do this timekeeping for me, but it always ended up being too complicated so I would inevitably stop using the software and stop tracking what I was working on. This year, I decided to make a OneNote page for each day of work and made a default template to use for all new pages that would give me the list of things I want to track each day. Then at the end of the week, I compile and summarize the daily work into a page that I call “Weekly Summary”, and add any notable work into my list of accomplishments for the year. This method speeds up and eases the process of identifying accomplishments so that when the annual review time comes around, I will have plenty of items to pull from my list instead of trying to remember it all myself (which I don’t because I have a terrible memory for these things).

My daily summary page contains the following items:

Tickets worked on (I will write about the challenges I’ve faced with the ticket today as well as the progress made on it)
Tickets closed
Resources found/used (this is where I keep track of the random StackOverflow pages or blogs I’ve used to help myself with my work throughout the day)
Other work completed (this is where I list any calls, meetings, etc.)
Other notes

Once I made the OneNote page template with these items, it became much easier for me to stick with completing the daily summary since I never had to think or retype the main bullet points. This process has helped me define how much time I spend on various activities throughout the day and week which gives me perspective on how much I do (a lot).

Your work time is important, guard it ferociously

My goal for these posts was to give others ideas for how to tame their workload to make it feel more manageable and less overwhelming. I hope that some of these ideas spark something for you to implement in your work life. Overall, I would like to get the point across that your work time is important, and your mental health relating to work is important, so guard both of these things ferociously. Managing your time and not letting others make your life hectic can help prevent burnout, or at least slow it down. These strategies have helped immensely in my chaotic work life, so I hope they can also help with yours.

December 6, 2023 / 0 Comments

How to Stay Organized While Busy at Work, Part 1

Recently, I was suddenly given responsibility for all database development work for the application I support, plus many other work items not directly related to the application, when previously I had been splitting that work with another developer. I wasn’t expecting this change, and neither was anyone else, so I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of work, questions, and requests for review that were coming my way. The first week of this new responsibility was chaos, and it made me realize I needed to tighten up my work organization strategies. I’ve always been someone who keeps my work organized and tried to keep myself to a set pattern of efficient behavior, but it wasn’t as regulated as I needed to keep on top of the flood of work that suddenly came my way. I quickly developed a set of organization and work strategies to make sure I stay on top of everything I’m responsible for while also not being extremely stressed by the workload. Plus, I love helping other people and didn’t want to stop helping other developers because of the new workload, so I made sure my new strategy allowed time to continue with that.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disorganized with your work and would like some ideas for getting organized to reduce those problems, keep reading. I ended up having a lot more to say on this topic than I originally thought, so I’ve split this topic into two posts. This post will cover the first three ideas on the list below, and the final three will be covered in next week’s post.

Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage
Only work on one thing at a time
Every work request should be a ticket
Set times for yourself to catch up on email and messages throughout the day
Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning
Track what you spend your time on

That may seem like a lot of items to add to your already stressful work life but trust me, getting and keeping things organized takes a huge load of stress off of your shoulders. You can’t control what craziness gets thrown at you by others, but you can control how you react to the craziness and how you structure your day to handle that craziness. Plus, if you pick just one or two to start with, ones that would benefit you the most with the least amount of effort, it won’t feel like a burden to use these strategies.

Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage

Seriously, if you’re not using your work calendar already to manage meetings and schedule yourself time to work on what you need to get done, you should start doing it immediately. Whether your calendar is shared with others or not, blocking times for yourself to work on specific tasks can allow you to prepare for that work time mentally and then fully concentrate on that work when the time comes. Plus, it keeps you accountable for getting work done. Here are my 3 quick tips on how you can utilize your calendar to its fullest:

If you use Outlook and your organization has the feature enabled, use the Microsoft Viva plugin to schedule Focus Time for yourself every day. Focus Time is a feature that will automatically schedule blocks of time on your calendar, two weeks at a time, for you to focus on what you need to. While in Focus Time, your status on Teams will be changed to Do Not Disturb so that you won’t get all the pesky notifications of chats, posts, updates, etc. to reduce distractions. I have loved this feature since it got added because it gives me a dedicated and justifiable time for not responding to the constant chats I get throughout the day. Most people in my organization understand that Focus time is sacred and that I won’t be responding to their chats until after the allotted time has ended.
Schedule work time for the most important items you need to complete. Put it on your calendar and have it set your status as Busy for that time. The most important effect of doing this is it will let others know not to schedule meetings over this time (unless they don’t respect calendars in general, which is a separate problem). I usually schedule myself non-Focus Time work times when there is an important meeting coming up and I need to prepare for it. I will set aside 30 minutes to an hour before the meeting when I know I will work on that one task. And when the time arrives for you to work on whatever it was that was scheduled, don’t respond to emails or chats. Setting this time aside for yourself will help keep you on top of what needs to get done when it needs to get done so you’re never unprepared for a meeting or other task again.
On the same note as #2 above, at the beginning of each week, block out time on your calendar every day for lunch and breaks, if you take them. I have found that I am the most productive and feel the best personally when I take a midmorning break, an hour lunch break (to go the gym), and a midafternoon break. I have started blocking out those times on my calendar which prevents people from scheduling over my breaks and also gives me reminders when it is time to take a break. If I didn’t have the reminder pop up, half the time I would forget I need to take one and would then feel burned out at the end of the day.

Only work on one thing at a time

This piece of advice is easier said than done, especially if you work in an organization that often suffers from poor planning or conflicting priorities, but I would like to say it is possible for everyone. It’s at least physically the only way to work (unless you’ve developed a way to code on two different programs at once). Since you can only physically work on one project at a time, and have your focus directed to a single thing at once, that is the best starting point to fight for yourself to get buy-off from management or project managers for only working on one thing at a time.

For me, when things got crazy at work, I realized that I could no longer handle the stress of trying to accomplish all of the business goals within the same time frame they were originally scheduled for. I have worked extremely stressful jobs in the past and had vowed I would never put up with that again, so I had to set boundaries for myself in my current work to reduce the stress. I began pushing back on the analysts and program managers who decided on work priority to give them the burden of making the difficult prioritization decisions that I felt I was facing, given there was now only one DB dev doing the project work.

As an example, during the craziest week of my life at my current job, I was already assigned two tickets, one of them high-priority. Then I went on vacation and came back and was assigned another high-priority ticket that had a deadline in less than two weeks and it was something I had never done before. As soon as I saw that mess, I went to our SA and asked him which of those 3 “high priority” tickets was the most important, stating that I could only work on one task at a time and there were only so many hours in the day, so they needed to tell me the order in which I should work them, according to the business needs. Within a few hours, I had an ordered list provided to me as to what I should be focusing on that day.

But after you push back and get a truly prioritized list of work items, you then need to keep your boundaries in place, no matter what else tries to happen. If others are coming up to you and asking you for a lot of help with whatever they’re working on, tell them that you are currently unable to help but would love to help later after you’ve finished your current task (within reason, if you work in a collaborative environment like I do, you can’t blow your coworkers off all the time). Or if someone else is trying to assign you more tickets that need to be done “right now”, push back on them and your manager and make everyone else work together to figure out how the new task fits in your current list, and switch if needed.

Every work request should be a ticket

This piece of advice is one I’ve used on myself for both of my development jobs so far in my career, and I think it’s one of the easiest to enforce. If you are being asked to do work that will take 30 minutes or more, no matter what it is, create a ticket for it or have the requester make the ticket. I do this to cover myself because I never want to be the person who’s eternally busy but with no metrics to show where their time goes. Even if others don’t admit it, they may be wondering what you’re doing all day if you have no hours logged on tickets. If you set a standard that everything gets a ticket, you won’t ever have to worry about that. Also, having everything as a ticket can help with the prioritization of all work on your plate and helps keep all your current and future work documented and organized. Plus, I like to keep everything in tickets for the satisfaction at the end of the year of seeing how many work items I completed, along with the number of hours total I spent on everything I did (I love data, even on myself).

Conclusion

The three ideas above are only half of the story of what I have been using recently to keep my chaotic work life more organized. I won’t promise that it will make everything sunshine and rainbows, but it at least keeps the chaos reigned in a bit and brings it down to a manageable level. If you’re interested in reading more about the final three methods I’m using for organization, that post will be going up next week. I hope these suggestions are as helpful to you as they have been for me!

November 28, 2023 / 0 Comments

Highlights of PASS Data Community Summit 2023

This year I was able to attend the PASS Data Community Summit for the first time, and it was also the first time I had ever attended a professional conference in my career. Not only did I learn more than I expected about new and existing databases and tools, but I was also able to meet many interesting new people that I never would have been able to connect with otherwise. Each of the people I chatted with at various points throughout the conference had a unique story to share and was more than happy to introduce themselves, share their experience, and offer me help going forward if I need it. Going in as someone who’s never been to such an event before, I was relieved to find that I was fully welcomed and not made to feel like an outsider.

While I really enjoyed meeting so many new people from all around the world (I can’t believe how far some people traveled!), the best part of the conference was learning about many new and useful topics. These are the most interesting highlight items I learned across the three days of the conference:

Red-Gate Test Data Manager

I think this was the most exciting thing I learned while at the conference because it would be the most beneficial for my job and company. Currently, my organization has a homegrown tool that pulls down a subset of test data (from our QA environment) to each developer’s local database. While this tool is useful and has been mostly sufficient for us since it was created, it’s becoming harder to maintain and less useful to developers over time. The main issue we have with our custom tool is that it’s set to only pull down 500,000 records for any given table, with no regard (for the most part) for getting useful data for testing. Often, when trying to test a complicated or totally new process, the data subset either isn’t enough records or the records aren’t what is needed for testing.

That is why the Test Data Manager (TDM) from Red-Gate is so interesting to me. It solves all of the problems we currently have with our custom tool plus more we hadn’t considered yet. It allows you to create a clone in less than a minute from production data (my organization’s tool currently takes a long time to pull down all of the data and it pulls from our QA environment which isn’t as good of a testing set). TDM also allows you to mask any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping that data relevant, related, and useful after it has been masked (our custom tool isn’t that smart). Additionally, you can select a premade subset of data for any given table (small or large) or you can specify your own custom type of subset (e.g. only pull customer data for 2022 customers), and the software will ensure the data stays related and meaningful as it creates the subset of data.

Unit testing for databases is possible

You might think this is obvious, but the fact that unit testing can be added to database code now is crazy and exciting to me. I figured that it would be possible to write unit tests for stored procedures since that’s just code, but there’s a whole world of possibilities for other ways to unit test databases using tools already created and perfected by others. The two main tools that were discussed in regards to database unit testing were tSQLt, an open-source testing framework, and Red-Gate’s SQL Test which utilizes that framework while also giving additional capabilities for your team. While I haven’t had a chance to try to use either of these tools yet, I look forward to exploring the world of unit testing. I would love to be able to have a way to automatically test database code changes, since currently, all testing of database-related code changes, whether it’s SQL or SSIS, must be done manually by someone else on my team (and testing resources have been scarce lately).

PostgreSQL (PGSQL) is similar but also really different from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

Over the course of the Summit, I went to many different sessions related to PostgreSQL, some of them more helpful than others. What I learned is that there are multiple different tools in the AWS platform that could be useful to others to help in their transition from MSSQL to PGSQL, but those tools might not be as useful to my company. We are considering a full transition to PGSQL in the coming years for cost savings, which means that we will want to completely move our current application systems from one engine to the other.

One of the AWS services I learned about that didn’t seem like it would be as helpful to us is BabelFish, which is a service that allows you to create an instance of PGSQL in AWS and still use your existing TSQL queries to interact with the database. This service seems like it would be very helpful for anyone who is looking to migrate a single database instance, or maybe up to a few, to PGSQL without having to rewrite their entire codebase, since it lets you keep working with your same application code. BabelFish probably won’t be helpful to my team in our migration efforts since we do want to do the full switch, so there would be no need to spin up BabelFish instances that we would later have to migrate fully anyway (especially since we’re looking at moving dozens of databases).

The other AWS services that were discussed for migration from MSSQL to PGSQL, Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) and Database Migration Service (DMS), seem like they would be closer to what my organization needs for our transition to Postgres. These tools allow you to convert most of your existing TSQL codebase to Postgres without any work on your part. However, AWS doesn’t claim that the converted code is going to be aligned with PGSQL best practices or will be performant, so that could be a challenge we’ll have to deal with later. The first half of the migration process with these tools is SCT which does the conversion of tables, schemas, functions, procedures, etc. from TSQL to PL/PGSQL Then the second half of the toolset, the DMS, would help with moving the data from one server to another. If I was going to guess how my organization is going to manage the transition from one engine to another, I would say that we’ll likely use these two tools to get us started, recognizing that they won’t get us 100% converted and we’ll have to do some manual conversions ourselves as well.

The last thing I learned about how Postgres differs from Microsoft SQL Server is that the indexing system is much more customizable and specific in PGSQL than in MSSQL, and that means I will need to learn a lot about indexes in the former. MSSQL only has a few different index types you can use, clustered, nonclustered, and columnstore, while PGSQL has at least 5 or 6 different kinds that are built for very specific use cases. While it may be a bit confusing to me, a career-long Microsoft database developer, to figure out the different types of Postgres indexes available when we start the transition, I’m going to focus on what an interesting learning opportunity it is. This will be the first large database engine change I will have in my career, and learning a new system will make me a better developer and a more lucrative job candidate in the future.

AI is being added to tools many of us use daily, to help us work more efficiently so we can do the more important and interesting work

This is one of my final takeaways from the conference, but I don’t think it will be quite as useful or relevant for my current role as the other things I listed above. A large part of the sessions at the Summit this year were focused on how AI is going to start changing how we work, and that we are going to need to adapt and learn how to use it to benefit ourselves instead of being left in the technological dust by refusing to use it. AI certainly isn’t going to be stealing our jobs in the next couple of years, but it will change how we work so we should prepare for that.

For myself, I plan on using AI tools currently available (mainly ChatGPT) to try to help me be more efficient in my role, probably with non-coding tasks such as writing emails and documentation. AI can help you work much more efficiently so you can spend most of your time on what is most important to you and your company instead of the mundane daily tasks that hog your time. That is the most exciting takeaway from the AI discussions I attended at PASS.

In the future, when other new AI tools, such as Red-Gate’s SQL Prompt+ (which was announced at the conference) are released, I also intend to play around with those to see how they might increase my work efficiency. The demo that the Red-Gate team gave for how SQL Prompt+ can be used is to highlight a query in a stored procedure and ask the tool for recommendations on how to improve the performance of the query. While I guarantee the tool is going to make a lot of bad suggestions that a human can easily tell won’t improve anything, I also think that it may provide a good starting point for investigating underperforming queries that you may not have thought of yourself. That is why I go back to my point of AI not taking our coding jobs in the near future but it becoming a great resource for making your job easier.

The concept of AI in general is a bit frightening (as a lover of sci-fi and horror books and movies), but it’s not likely to take over the world anytime soon. However, it may trickle into your workplace in the next few years so it’s better to confront change head-on and figure out how you can use these new tools to your advantage.

Summary

I hope that in the future, I’ll be able to attend more of the PASS Summit events since this year’s conference proved to be such a fun and relatively easy way to learn a lot of new information relevant to my career. Whether you’re newer in your career like me or an old hat in the trade, I really would recommend attending the next PASS Data Community Summit if you’re able to. You never know what you’ll learn that could improve your work life and make you a better developer.