Category: Work Tips (page 1 of 2)

October 20, 2026 / 0 Comments

What Technical People Should Expect from a Non-Technical Conference

“Are any of these sessions going to have less… fluff?” was something that my younger, new coworker asked me somewhere halfway through the first day of a two-day conference focused on developing women leaders. Those may not have been the exact words she used, but that was 100% the intent behind what she asked. She is an application programmer, newer to the workforce than I am; this was her first non-technical conference, and she clearly expected something different of it than what we were experiencing. I can’t blame her; I felt the exact same way a few years ago when I first attended the Women and Leadership conference at Boise State University myself.

If you are someone who works in IT and are attending a general, non-technical professional conference for the first time, you may feel caught off-guard when you’re expecting to learn hard skills or technical skills, and instead you’re only presented with ways to improve soft skills or even more ambiguous topics.

Read on to learn what you can expect to experience when you attend a professional, but non-technical, conference for the first time, so hopefully you are not as caught off-guard as my coworker was this year.

If there are other things you think I could have added, please let me know in the comments! I always love to hear other people’s experiences.

What’s in this post

You will likely not learn hard, technical skills

I am going to get this out of the way immediately. If you are reading this blog, you are probably coming from a technical or IT background, which means you will likely be disappointed to learn that a general professional conference will not provide you with any hard skills you can directly apply to your daily work. That isn’t the purpose of these types of conferences; if it was, they probably wouldn’t even do a good job since the target audience has such a wide variety of professions that couldn’t all be covered.

I think this is the biggest shock to learn for people new to general professional conferences. It caught me off-guard the first time I went to one. I also saw it this year with a younger coworker attending this type of conference for the first time. These conferences aren’t like college, technical conferences, or online courses. They aren’t meant to teach people specific hard skills, because they would need to have too many different sessions for all the professions the attendees work in.

If you’re about to attend a conference like this for the first time and you work in IT or another technical profession, go in with an open mind, expecting to learn something completely unexpected, because I guarantee that you will. It won’t be what you might expect, but it will still be great.

You will learn something you weren’t expecting

Since the topics at a professional conference aren’t targeted at any specific profession, that means the topics chosen for sessions are going to be chosen to be suitable for a broad range of professionals. That can range from how to network, how to make a personal brand, all the way to things like how to meditate and do deep breathing to calm your nervous system during tough times at work. Each year that I’ve gone to a generalized conference, the topics have had such a wide variety. For example, one of the “skill builder” sessions offered at the Women and Leadership conference this year was about estate planning. I bet you wouldn’t have considered that topic to be relevant to you, but several of my coworkers went to that and said it was really insightful.

You will learn useful soft skills

Soft skills are the underrepresented benefit of a well-rounded employee that so many people, especially in technical realms like IT, overlook. While each worker should definitely have technical skills required to complete the job they were hired for, they will be much better to work with if they have soft skills as well.

What are soft skills? These are behaviors that you exhibit that shape how you communicate and work with others. They are often called “people skills”, but I think soft skills can also apply to things outside of direct interaction with others. Some examples of soft skills are: being able to gracefully handle conflict with coworkers; being able to read and write clearly to communicate ideas to others; being able to recognize and manage emotions in others; flexibility; time management; organization. The last few items are soft skills that can relate to other people at work, but are also just a part of how you decide to manage your own work.

One of the best things about general professional conferences is that there are usually several sessions available that focus on soft skills. These types of skills are necessary for all professionals, no matter their field, which is why they are frequent topics of presentations at this type of conference.

The soft skill that stuck with me most this year was changing my mindset to change my habits. One speaker pointed out that we try to change our behaviors without asking what thoughts and beliefs are driving them. I wanted to be less distracted at work, but after past failed attempts, I’d come to believe I was just a distractible person. She showed me how to tweak that thought into something that still feels authentic but points toward who I want to be: “I only get distracted when I’m tired.” Shifting that belief has actually helped improve my focus. I would never have learned this at a database conference, and I’m glad I got to apply it to both my work and personal life.

You will get to meet new people from your own company

If your company is anything like mine, they probably like to send more than one person to each conference. That means hanging out at the conference with the other people from your work who were sent there as well. This is a great opportunity to meet new people and make connections at work. There are so many reasons why it’s good to network with different people outside your normal sphere at work, and I’ve found that being together at a conference has proven to be an excellent way to chat with people I otherwise would never meet or talk to.

Why is it good to talk to other people from your own company?

  • Gives you insights into other things that are happening at your company that could impact your own work in the future
  • Make new work friends, which can improve your experience of work
  • It can open doors to new opportunities within the company outside your team; not just new jobs, but also new projects or presentations within your current role
  • They likely have some of the same frustrations and problems with their own job and the company as you do, so you can vent and get some of your frustrations out. It can be nice to know you’re at least not alone in whatever you’re going through.
  • Meeting new people can be fun. You never know what type of lives your coworkers live outside of work, and it’s fun to learn what hobbies or lives outside of work coworkers have.

You will get opportunities to meet people outside of your profession that you wouldn’t get otherwise

I’ve met and talked to some of the most interesting people at the non-technical conferences I’ve gone to. When you go to a technical conference, you can expect that the people attending likely perform roles similar to your own. At something like the Women and Leadership conference, however, you can’t expect anything like that. This year, I met and chatted with a woman who is a mechanical engineer, a woman who is a sales manager, and then a woman who is a project manager. In previous years, I chatted with a group of women who worked for the Bureau of Reclamation. I didn’t even really know what that entity was or did until I talked to them!

When I chatted with the mechanical engineer this year, we were able to relate to each other on how some of the sessions hadn’t given us the “meat” we were hoping for, which was interesting. She obviously had a more “technical” background, although not directly with technology/computers like me. I found similarities with someone that I normally wouldn’t run into in my job.

And when I talked with the Bureau of Reclamation women, I learned so many new things, like how there are three different government agencies managing just one reservoir in Boise. I had absolutely nothing in common with them career-wise, but still really enjoyed talking to them.

When you talk to people outside your own organization, you learn about careers and industries you might not even know about. Talking to new people broadens your own horizons, and these professional conferences with wide audiences are the perfect place to do that.

As an IT person myself, I know how nerve-wracking it can be to interact with others that I don’t already know, but I really encourage you to take a risk and talk to someone new at a conference. Each time I’ve branched out to talk to a new person, I have enjoyed the conversation and not regretted it at all.

You probably won’t love every session you attend

I always promise honesty in my posts, so I am sticking to that with this one: you probably won’t love or have a great takeaway from every single session you attend at a general professional conference. Every year I’ve gone to one, there has been at least one session that missed the mark for me. Whether it was because the session ended up being much different than I thought based on the title, or the presenter wasn’t great, or because I just wasn’t as interested in the topic as I thought I was going to be.

I will argue that almost every session can help you learn something, even if that something is that you don’t like when presenters do x or y. That something can be beneficial to learn, because then you can make sure not to include that behavior or method in your own presentations in the future.

But if you are stuck in a session from hell that’s so far from interesting or useful to you that you just zone out or play on your phone, know that there are options and you aren’t stuck there. It is always okay to quietly leave the session and either find another that sounds more interesting or take a break. I personally think it’s more respectful to the presenter to fully remove yourself rather than be on your phone or computer, obviously not listening but still in the room. As long as you’re not making a racket while trying to leave or making it hard for others to stay tuned in, it’s not a big deal to head out.

You will be encouraged and empowered

Professional conferences, especially women-focused ones like the BSU Women and Leadership conference, are a great place to go to feel encouraged and empowered. There is something special about leaving your normal work behind for two or three days to dedicate your time to expanding your horizons, learning from new people, and thinking about new topics. Each time I’ve gone to a non-technical conference, I have heard from inspirational speakers who make me want to do more with my life. My current life is great, but it feels so freeing to know that I could change my career and life path at any time, should I choose to do so.

Each speaker brings an interesting perspective on handling challenges in life, and that’s what I love most about this type of conference. This year, I heard from a multinational inspirational speaker and charitable powerhouse of a woman who taught me about owning my privileges and using them for good. I listened to a woman who is normally a weight-loss coach, but she shared ideas about changing behaviors and habits that have stuck with me since her session. In previous years, I joined sessions that inspired me to do new things, like starting this blog.

There is something special about listening to people who bring positivity, joy, and encouragement to others. It allows you to gain a new perspective on your life. I always leave these conferences energized because of those new ideas and encouraging words.

Summary

General professional conferences can be very useful to people of all ages and professions if they are given a fair chance. If you are about to attend a general conference like this, go in with an open mind, expecting to learn something unexpected. Enjoy the experience while you can, and think of how you can apply what is taught in sessions, even if they don’t seem immediately applicable. If you’re in IT, the conference may feel like more “fluff” than you wanted, but I hope you are able to take away useful insights in the future by using my ideas above.

Picture showing a blue knit toiletries pouch, cell phone, mini fan, notebook, and snacks sitting together on a table
October 1, 2026 / 0 Comments

What to Bring to a Professional Conference

After graduating from college and starting an office job, you will likely find yourself invited by your company, or allowed by them to attend, professional conferences. These could be giant, multi-thousand-person technical conferences, or smaller local conferences focused on general personal and professional development. Each conference will require you to bring a slightly different set of items with you to be prepared. Today, I want to cover what you should bring to a general professional conference, one that is more like the second type I described above: focused on general professional development (like communication or courage) and personal development. This is going to be a very practicle, tangible list of things to bring, not a fluffy “you should bring a good atttitude!” type of post.

My inspiration for writing this is attending the Boise Andrus Center Women & Leadership conference at Boise State University for the third year in a row. For this type of conference, I pack far fewer things than I would for a highly technical conference like FabCon/SQLCon. But if you’re new to the professional world and about to attend this type of conference for the first time, how are you supposed to know what to bring? Should you show up with just your purse (or wallet/phone) and nothing else? Is it valuable to bring other things with you? Keep reading to find out.

What’s in this post

Notebook and Pen

This one should be fairly obvious, but at this year’s conference, I’ve seen quite a few people caught without writing implements when we were requested to write things down for a session activity. I know so many people have gone totally digital and like to take notes electronically, either on a phone or laptop, but you should stick to the classics for conferences, in my opinion.

If you’re trying to take notes on a device, it’s likely harder and less convenient to do for quick activities, and it also leaves you prone to distraction. One of my rules for conferences of any kind is that I will not bring my work laptop with me, because if I do, I will definitely be pulled back into work and ignore the conference since Teams and Outlook will always be pinging. Do yourself a favor, give yourself the distraction-free option of taking notes with paper and pen. Bring yourself a notebook and pen.

Phone and Charger

The one device I do bring with me to use during the conference is my phone (well, I bring two since I have separate work and personal phones). Having your phone with you will allow you to access any digital information provided by the conference, such as parking instructions, directions for where to go, what to bring, as well as giving you the ability to scan QR codes from presenters throughout the conference. In almost every session of every conference I’ve attended, the presenter has had a QR code in their presentation for feedback sites or free items from them. They may also provide resources to use for worksheets or tasks during the presentation. You don’t want to miss out on those opportunities if you think you might like to take them.

Of course, you can’t forget something to charge your phone in case you use it a lot, so bring a charger with you. For bigger conferences, I recommend bringing a power bank instead of relying on being able to find out outlet, since they can be a hot commodity. For smaller conferences like the Women & Leadership conference at BSU, you can bring your normal charger and expect to find an available outlet when needed.

Water Bottle

Many conferences are moving to be more environmentally friendly (yay!) so they do not provide to go cups or single-use water bottles for attendees, which makes bringing your own refillable water bottle a great idea. This holds especially true at the Women & Leadership Conference at BSU, because the Andrus Center that runs the conference focuses on environmental stewardship. That means that all drink-ware is glass and fairly small, so I’ve seen people having to walk back and forth to the main room constantly to get water and coffee that’s provided, and all are trying very hard not to spill from the small glasses while walking.

I totally support the move to not having disposable drinkware, but it does make me glad that I bring my own water bottle, so am not beholden to the water dispensers and small glasses in the main room.

On the note of coffee, the same thing applies as with water. You may want to bring your own travel mug for getting the free conference coffee if you don’t want to be stuck with a very small glass that’s not easily transportable to other areas.

Snacks and Gum

Conference days can be long and rigid, and they may not align with your natural cues for hunger or your regular meal times, so I recommend bringing a small snack (or several) with you to any conference so you know you won’t go hungry and get hangry if lunch or snacks aren’t served when you need them. I always bring a granola/nut bar of some kind with me, and then maybe some fruit leather or whatever else I have in my pantry.

I’m the type of person that needs to eat a little bit of food every couple hours, so I won’t (mentally) survive if I had to go the five hours between breakfast before the conference and lunch at the conference with nothing to hold me over. Plus, there’s never a guarantee that you will like what is served at the conference (they’re always so hit or miss with the food), so carrying your own backup snack is a good idea in that instance, too.

Some conferences serve treats or snacks in the afternoons, but not all do. Which is just another reason to prepare yourself, so you don’t spend the whole afternoon with your stomach growling.

A final note on this topic is that you may also want to consider bringing gum or mints for yourself, since you’re more likely to talk to others at a conference than in other places, because part of every conference is networking. And with all the free coffee served, and the snacks to hold you over between meals, you might want to have a method to freshen your breath before talking to a bunch of people.

Jacket/Cardigan

This one goes out to all the ladies, who, like me, are plagued by too-strong air conditioning everywhere we go. Conference centers are usually set up to keep the rooms cool with hundreds of bodies heating the place up, which means that the cool air is likely flowing strongly, even in the cooler months of the year. I personally have found that conferences are always too hot or too cold, so I bring a jacket or cardigan with me every day of a conference. It’s a little annoying to pack around sometimes, but when I get stuck in a room where the air conditioning is blowing directly on me for an hour or more, I appreciate being able to cover up and prevent (figurative) frostbite.

If you know you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and are always running hot, this advice may not apply to you. But it never hurts to come prepared. If you run hot, this cute little phone-powered fan may be a good idea to bring instead. These were given out as goodies on the first day of the Women & Leadership conference at BSU this year, and I think it’s pretty nifty. It blows a lot stronger than I would have guessed, and some of my older coworkers told me it was great for dealing with hot flashes throughout the conference. I don’t know how quickly it would drain your battery, but it does seem a lot handier than bringing a separate battery powered fan.

Picture showing a smart phone with mini fan plugged into the charging port

Laptop

While I did say above that you should try not to use your laptop for notes since you may get distracted by normal work and miss the conference even though you’re at the conference, I think there are some reasons that bringing your laptop may be a good idea. Personally, I bring my own, non-work laptop with me to conferences in case I want to research anything in breaks or to be able to work on my blog or other personal projects. If you have a job that just won’t let you be “off” for a whole day, you might bring your work laptop with you to check in at lunch or during breaks.

I am currently writing this post on my laptop while waiting for the second day of my conference to start. Laptops aren’t bad by default, but can become an impediment to your learning and growth if you let it.

If you are going to bring your laptop, make sure it’s charged before you leave for the conference to reduce the chances of needing to charge throughout the day. But also remember to bring your charger to use when needed, just don’t expect to find an easy and convenient place to plug it in and be able to use it. Technical conferences are usually pretty good at putting power strips everywhere in session rooms since computers are expected in those conferences, but non-technical conferences are a lot less likely to give you good places to charge and work at the same time.

Earbuds/Headphones

This recommendation is for people who are easily overwhelmed by crowds and large events, or people who just want to be in their own bubble for a bit throughout the day. I always bring earbuds to conferences with me, in case I want to watch a video over lunch, or if I need a moment of solitude and relative quiet in a loud event. Plus, having the earbuds available and ready means I can quickly turn on a grounding meditation during a break if needed. I also use mine during breaks if I need to do a bit of work, since having my own quiet music on lets me concentrate better than if I was hearing all the people talking around me.

Emergency Toiletries

This recommendation is mostly directed at the ladies again, but truly can apply to anyone. I normally carry around a small pouch with my regularly needed toiletries, and going to a conference is no different. In my pouch, I have:

  • Ibuprofen, Tylenol, and Benedryl (headaches and allergy flare ups)
  • Floss (for post-lunch freshening)
  • Earplugs (mostly for when I am traveling, to make sure I can block out traffic noises in hotels, but also handy for other things that come up)
  • Nail file
  • Nail clippers (I really hate having hang nails and chipped nails)
  • Pocket mirror (good for checking face/teeth after eating)
  • Lip balm
  • Hand sanitizer
  • Glasses lens cleaning wipes

Customize the list to be whatever you would most likely need in a mini personal “emergency” situation (fashion issue, minor medical issue).

Summary

Preparing for a professional conference should be quick and easy, especially if you follow my list of items above. Don’t bring too many things, because then it becomes hard to move between sessions and to shake the hands of new people you meet. Try to fit everything into a single backpack or bag you can easily handle yourself, something you can tuck to the side or under your chair during a session.

If you would like to know what to expect and how to mentally prepare for a professional but non-technical conference, I will have a post coming out next week that covers that topic. I have a younger colleague who joined me for the Women & Leadership conference this week, and I don’t think she knew what to expect for how this conference would go, and I believe it impacted what she thinks of the conference. Attending a generalized, non-technical conference can feel a little weird for highly technical people like programmers and engineers, so next week’s post aims to level set expectations for these types of conferences so hopefully people aren’t surprised in a bad way.

Created using icon from nawicon at FlatIcon.com
November 18, 2025 / 0 Comments

You should Make Your Writing Easier to Understand

As technical professionals, those of us in the IT field tend to lean towards writing with technical language when we are communicating with others, whether that is with other members of our own teams or with business users or customers. While we may find our technical writing easy to understand, that may not be the case for others that we are working with.

Recently I was writing an email to a business customer in another part of my company who we made a custom chat bot for, trying to explain to her how the bot was able to give great answers even if the information it was providing was not explicitly written within the documentation we had given the bot for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model. Writing that email turned into a 20 minute learning experience of how I could simplify my explanation to a level that a normal business user would understand. I’m not sure why this idea popped into my head today, but I remembered that there are online services that will check the reading level of your writing, so I put my email draft into one of those and was surprised by the outcome and knew I needed to rewrite the email to be easier to understand for non-technical people.

What’s in this post

Average U.S. Adult Reading Level

Based on different studies and models, it is estimated that the average reading level for an adult in the United States is around the 7th-8th grade level[1]. There are other estimates that say that 54% of adults in the U.S. have a 6th grade reading level or below[2], which is a startling statistic.

I bring those statistics into this post because they point out why we as technical professionals may need to change our writing behaviors, especially when communicating with non-technical business users or customers. We need to make sure others understand what we are trying to say. If we are writing at a college level but the average person can only comprehend up to a 7th or 8th grade level, there are going to be misunderstandings.

Check Reading Level Online

In the email I was writing about how our chat bot worked, when I realized that it was overly complicated from a business user’s perspective, I started researching concrete changes I could make to how I wrote the message to make it more understandable to a normal, non-technical person. I love being in the weeds of the technicalities, but I know most of our business customers don’t; they only want to know how to use the tool to help themselves.

The best resources I found were the “Hemingway Editor Readability Checker” and then an older PDF document from Montclair State University which walks through getting analysis of writing in Microsoft Word. Jump to the section below to learn more about the Microsoft Word method.

The “Hemingway Editor” is a simple website where you can paste in your text you’d like to check, or provide a full text document, and it will do a quick analysis and highlight sentences that are hard to read, very hard to read, or not hard to read at all. It also gives a numeric “Grade” value indicating at what grade someone would be able to read the text.

When I pasted in my original email draft, it rated it at Grade 14, and marked all sentences in the text as either hard to read or really hard to read.

Screenshot of the Hemingway App readability checker showing a block of text marked with red and yellow highlights for very hard and hard-to-read sentences. The right panel displays a readability grade of 14 and notes that most of the six sentences are difficult to read

That review confirmed that I needed to rewrite the email to be less technical and easier to understand for average people. The website recommends aiming for Grade 9, which is what I tried to do. After a lot of editing, I got the score down to 10, which was as close as I could get to 9 without completely changing what I was trying to communicate.

Screenshot of the Hemingway App readability checker showing a block of text highlighted mostly in yellow, indicating hard-to-read sentences. The right panel reports a readability grade of 10 and notes that 5 of 6 sentences are hard to read, with none marked as very hard.

Check Reading Level with Microsoft Word

If you don’t want to use the online editor to check your writing level, there is also the option to do that through Microsoft Word. Before you can check the reading level, you first must enable an option to do that.

In Word, go to File > “Options”, then “Proofing”. Under that page, check the box for “Show readability statistics”. Click OK to save the change.

Screenshot of Microsoft Word "options" window on the "Proofing" page, demonstrating how to turn on the readability statistics function through a checkbox option.

Once you have enabled the feature, you can then go to the “Review” tab and click the button for “Spelling and Grammar”.

Screenshot of the "Review" ribbon tab at the top of the Microsoft Word screen highlighting the location of the feature "Spelling and Grammar".

When you click that, you will first get a panel that will point out any grammar issues that the program has found. If you don’t care about that, you can click the “X” at the top left of the window (next to “1 remaining”) to close those suggestions.

Screenshot of the first page of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor panel in Microsoft Word

After closing the grammar window, you will then get scores for your writing and recommendations for fixing the writing. There is also an option to check the similarity of the text to what can be found online, which might be useful for teachers and professors that are reviewing the writing of others and who may be concerned about plagiarism.

Screenshot of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor in Microsoft Word, showing the Editor Score of 89% for the document and other corrections, refinements, and features available for checking the document.

If you keep scrolling almost to the bottom of that recommendations panel, you can click on the “Document stats” button under the “Insights” heading, which will bring up a separate window with the reading level information and other details about your writing.

Screenshot showing the bottom of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor screen in Microsoft Word, where you can find the button called "Document Stats" to get insights into your document

While there are other statistics about my writing that could be helpful in other scenarios, what I am most interested for this example is the “Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level”. In this case, Microsoft Word recognizes the same reading level as what the online checker has for my simplified email. Which is cool.

Screenshot of the "Readability Statistics" window in Microsoft Word, which shows the word counts, averages, and readability scores of the document. The reading level of my sample email is 10.0 in this window.

Reading Level for this Post

I got curious while writing this post, wondering what its reading level would be. The answer? 12.2 according to Microsoft Word and 13 according to the online Hemingway Editor.

Screenshot of the "Readability Statistics" window in Microsoft Word, which shows the word counts, averages, and readability scores of the document. The reading level of my blog post is 12.2 in this window.

Screenshot of the Hemingway Editor Readability Checker showing a scoare of Grade 13 for my blog post draft, with 13 of 34 sentences having been marked as very hard to read, and 10 of 34 being marked as hard to read.

I thought it would be higher, so I’m glad to see that it hopefully isn’t unreadable for your average IT professional.

Summary

Technical people are often bad communicators, especially when it comes to interacting with non-technical people. I can’t say that we’re all terrible at it, but many technical degrees require technical communication classes for a reason. I am as guilty of too-elaborate writing as others are. But I am now going to intentionally work on better summarizing myself when emailing and talking with my business users. I would never want to make someone feel dumb because I was talking at too high a level.

Sources

Related Posts

Created with Icon from Freepik on FlatIcon.com
October 28, 2025 / 0 Comments

Troubleshoot ALL Layers of Your Data Flows

This is going to be a short post, which I am writing as a reminder for my future self as well as any of you reading out there.

If you are troubleshooting an error with your pipeline, especially if you work in a database system that has layered views, make sure you fully dig down through all layers of your data setup before you make a ticket with Microsoft. I learned this the annoying way over a work week while working through a ticket with Microsoft for a very strange issue I was seeing in a pipeline that uses a Synapse Serverless SQL Pool. We had checked so many things that week with no luck in changing the outcome of how the pipeline runs, and then the pipeline just went back to working when I ran it outside of its schedule.

What’s in this post

The Error

The error I was seeing made it look like the Serverless SQL Pool views, which use an OPENROWSET call to a parquet file, were referencing the wrong source file even though I confirmed multiple times that the view definitions were correct. For example, the view was written to use parquet files under TestDatabase/MyTable/** as the source files, but the error was making it seem like they were instead pulling data from TestDatabase/OtherRandomTable/** which was confusing to say the least. I thought that the Serverless node was broken or had a bug that was making the views look at “OtherRandomTable” files instead of the correct files.

The Cause

The error happened because multiple views used a CROSS APPLY to another view tied to a parquet file in a data lake, and that parquet file was being deleted and recreated by a parallel pipeline. When the failing pipeline tried to reference its views, it couldn’t find that base view because the source file had not yet been recreated by the parallel pipeline. Makes sense and is so obvious in hindsight, but it took Microsoft support directly asking me to make me realize that I had a view referencing another view, which I needed to check the definition of.

The change I needed to make was to update the pipeline triggers so that the process deleting and recreating the base view would be done making the parquet files when the second pipeline ran and tried to use those files.

If I had done my due diligence and dug through every layer of the data environment, which I am normally good at with other scenarios, I would have quickly and easily discovered the issue myself. But sometimes we need to learn the hard way because our brains aren’t running at full capacity. (It also helps that I finally had dedicated time to set aside to this problem and so wasn’t trying to multitask multiple work items at once.)

Summary

If you are troubleshooting ETL failures of any kind, make sure you dig down through all layers of the process to ensure you have checked everything possible related to your failure before reaching out to support. They’ll happily help you find what you missed, but it will save everyone time if you can figure it out yourself first.

Related Posts

Picture of someone filling out a bubble sheet for an exam
Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash
April 30, 2024 / 0 Comments

How I Prepared for my AWS Certification Exams

So far in my career, I have achieved three different certifications from AWS for different aspects of their cloud development platform. I passed all three of the exams, one beginner, one intermediate, and one advanced, all on the first try. While I’m usually pretty good at learning new things and taking tests, two of the tests left me questioning whether or not I had actually passed or not when I left the testing center, but I did end up passing each of them. Many of my colleagues have asked me how I prepared for the exams, as they are also beginning to work on similar certifications, so I thought I would also share my process here to help others outside of my organization.

What’s in this post:

AWS exams I have taken

  • Certified Cloud Practitioner
    • This is the easiest of the certifications I have achieved
    • The content of this exam is general knowledge of most of the services available in the AWS cloud
    • You will not need to have any great depth of knowledge of any particular service to pass this exam
  • Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
    • This was the middle ground in terms of difficulty of the exams I’ve taken
    • Very focused on the cost and design of systems across a broad range of services in AWS
    • Focus on the “Well Architected Framework”
    • More of an architecture-level exam (not development level)
  • Certified Database Specialty
    • This was the most difficult of the exams I’ve taken, simply due to the deep level of knowledge I needed to have for each of the database services available in AWS
    • Focused somewhat on the design of databases in different services of AWS, but mostly focused on the best way to implement different use cases for the various database services
    • More of a development-level exam rather than architecture-level

My level of knowledge before starting courses for each exam

  • Certified Cloud Practitioner: absolutely no knowledge of anything with AWS before starting a course to learn and prepare for this exam.
  • Certified Solutions Architect: I had more general AWS knowledge before starting to learn and study for this exam due to what I had already learned for the previous exam, but I still hadn’t done any actual development work myself in the AWS platform.
  • Certified Database Specialty: In addition to the knowledge I had gained from studying for the two previous exams, I had finally started to play around in the AWS console personally, so I had a tiny bit of AWS database development before starting a course for the exam.

While it’s best to actually develop in the AWS cloud before trying to take an exam, it isn’t required in any sense. Preparing for the exams is actually a great way to learn more in depth about all the AWS services so you can start working with them yourself.

How long I learned and studied before taking the certification exams

  • Certified Cloud Practitioner: 2-3 months
  • Certified Solutions Architect: 4 months
    • At the time I was learning and preparing for this exam, I had quite a bit of free time during my average work day so I spent many hours each week preparing for this exam
    • If you only have a couple hours available each week to prepare for this exam, you will likely need more than 4 months to learn and prepare for the exam
  • Certified Database Specialty: 4-6 months
    • I did not have as much dedicated time during my work weeks to focus on this exam, so it took me longer to prepare (although I can’t remember now exactly how many months I prepared for it)
    • If you only have a couple hours available each week to prepare for this exam, you will likely need closer to 6 months or more to learn and prepare for the exam

How I use the ACloudGuru learning platform

ACloudGuru is a learning platform specifically aimed at helping developers learn how to use various cloud technologies, including AWS. They seem to have a course designed for every possible AWS certification you would want to achieve.

In all honesty, I’m not sure I would personally seek out using this platform again for any future certifications if I had to pay for it myself. My work pays for every developer to have a license to the platform, and it’s a great jumping off point for learning enough about AWS to pass the certification exams, but it certainly has flaws. But if you have the opportunity to work with these courses, they do a good enough job to get you 90% of the way to what you need to prepare for the AWS certification exams, so they’re certainly not a bad option.

Pros of ACloudGuru

  • It offers a unified, full course experience to cover most topics you will need to know to pass an AWS certification exam
  • You can watch the videos at your own pace and come back to any video whenever you need to
  • Each video and section of a course will offer some links to read for further information, which can be helpful to find the AWS documentation you need to read
  • Each section of the course has a review quiz to test your knowledge as you go, which can help you remember things better
  • There is at least one practice exam provided to cover all of the course’s content at the end of the course. You can take this exam as many times as you would like, and the questions are not always the same or in the same order (so you can’t just pass by memorizing which answer to select–A, B, C, or D).

Cons of ACloudGuru

  • I found that the videos often focused on things that weren’t that important for the exam and would somehow cram the most important details into one or two sentences that I would then have to fully unpack myself.
  • Need to supplement the course teachings with additional reading of relevant AWS white papers or other documentation online
  • The course content isn’t updated as frequently as the exams seem to be updated, so I ended up covering a lot of content in the course that was never covered in my exam, and also didn’t cover some exam topics nearly enough with the courses.
  • The editing of the videos wasn’t the best in the Database Specialty course, which I find disappointing for a platform that I’m sure costs a lot of money. There were many videos where it seemed like things were kept in that should have been edited out (like actual bloopers, not just irrelevant content).
  • Practice exam questions aren’t written in the same manner as the actual exams which might lead people to believe that the actual exams will be easier than they are.
  • The course definitely doesn’t spoon feed you everything for the exam, you have to be willing to do your own additional research and experimentation to be fully prepared

How I used the AWS white papers to learn more

As I mentioned in the section above, in addition to going through the ACloudGuru courses online, I also read a lot of documentation and white papers from AWS to feel like I truly had a sense of how each service operates.

My approach for learning was to watch each video in the courses from ACloudGuru, making sure to take thorough notes of what was covered in each video. Then after I had completed each video, I would review any documentation linked for that topic (there was usually at least one document per video, but not all videos have links to AWS documentation for further reading). If there were topics covered in the video that I felt weren’t covered well enough or that I was still confused about, and those topics didn’t have documentation linked to them in the course, I would seek out AWS and other documentation to learn more about the topic. And would also then take notes on those documents.

Although reading documentation is never the most interesting thing you could be doing with your day, doing it really does pay off when it comes to taking the exam, so you should try to read the AWS white papers and documentation for each service when possible during your studying journey. And make sure to take good notes. For the two tougher exams, I filled 1/2 – 3/4 of a composition notebook with notes for each. There was a lot of content to cover for each exam and I made sure to take thorough notes.

Additional tools I used to help myself study

After I made my way through the entire ACloudGuru course for each certification exam and had read enough AWS documentation to fill my head for a long time, I would then try my best to synthesize and recapture my notes in a useful way in order to do my final studying. For all three of the exams I have taken, I used note review and study skills that I used in college.

Custom practice tests to help review notes

I feel like this is one of the nerdiest things I can admit to, but I swear it works so I’ve done it for all 3 of the exams I’ve taken. After my notes were completed, I went through them again, by chapter of the ACloudGuru course, and wrote my own practice exams to test myself with as a first pass. Doing this does take a lot of time and paper, but I personally think it’s worth it.

To make these personal tests based on my notes, I would essentially turn the most important bullet points into questions that I could then answer. So, for example, say that I have a note that says “Redshift is used for data warehousing and data analytics, not OLTP”, I would then turn that into the question “Which AWS service can be used for data warehousing and analytics but isn’t suited for OLTP data?”. I would develop these custom tests using a Word document and would then print it out and go through all the questions I made for myself, trying to use my memory and not my notes whenever possible for the best recall and memorization.

Flash cards for quick and repetitive review of high-level ideas

A high school and college classic study tip, creating and using my own flash cards really helped me burn the necessary knowledge into my brain before each exam. And I created literally hundreds of flash cards for each exam. Sorry, trees, but the numerous flash cards really helped me so it was worth the use of so much paper.

While the thought of creating and reviewing hundreds of flash cards may seem daunting, I hardly ever tried to work through all of them at once. Instead, I made, grouped, and reviewed flash cards by topic or section of the ACloudGuru course and only ever really reviewed on section of cards at a time.

My best tip for getting the most out of flash cards is to remove from your review stack anything that you can answer immediately upon seeing the card, and keeping the cards that took you a while to remember the answer to or that you couldn’t answer at all to review again later. Keep reviewing the problematic topics over and over until they are no longer problems.

What practice exams I used to prepare

While each ACloudGuru course does include a practice exam to help you test yourself on the course’s contents, I personally do not think that those practice exams are useful in preparing for the exam, outside of general recall of the topics that could be on the exam.

What was the most useful part of my study routine for each of the AWS certification exams was to take practice exams through Udemy/Tutorials Dojo. I don’t know how those folks have done it, but their practice exams are extremely similar to the actual AWS exams. The wording of their questions and answers are basically the same as the real exam, which I found to be the most helpful thing to use for studying, since it prepares you for the verbose formatting of the AWS exam questions. In comparison, the practice exams from ACloudGuru have very different formatting and wording, which, in my opinion, isn’t useful for preparing for the real exams.

You can get the Tutorials Dojo exams through their website directly or through Udemy, but you will have to pay. However, the price is reasonable and well worth it (make sure you wait for a sale on Udemy to get the “course” for ~$16 instead of the list price of $80+). The price is especially reasonable if you’re in a situation like I am where I would have to repay my company the multi-hundred-dollar cost of the exam if I failed. Pay the little bit of money and retake the practice exams until you get 70% or higher on them repeatedly. Also make sure to review the correct answers and explanations for those answers on questions you get wrong, because those explanations to be super helpful.

Conclusion

Overall, it does take quite a bit of time and effort to fully prepare yourself to take one of the AWS certification exams, but it is all totally doable and the exams are not impossible to pass. Just make sure you do your due diligence in studying before signing up to take the exams. If I can pass them, you can pass them.

Image showing white coffee mug and open notebook sitting on white table
April 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Two Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for SSMS

Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.

This morning I was doing my normal work when I had a realization that I should share something I find super useful and use frequently use in SSMS that a lot of developers seem to not know about. They are small actions but they make your life easier when doing a lot of query editing in SSMS.

How to Minimize the Results Window

I have told many developers about this keyboard shortcut and they all appreciated it. I’m sure most people that frequently work in SSMS would like to be able to minimize and maximize the results window as needed in order to give themselves more screen real estate to work with while coding but still be able to see their query results as needed. But there is no minimize button for the results window of SSMS.

The only way that I know of to minimize and then maximize the results window in SSMS is to do CTRL + R. I use this keyboard shortcut every day at work while writing queries or updating existing queries.

How to Refresh the Intellisense

I have also had to tell many developers about updating the intellisense suggestions of SSMS since it will often trip them up if they don’t know how it works. First, you should understand that the intellisense offered by SSMS is only accurate as of the time you opened your query window or changed the connection for the query window (usually). If you’ve been working in the same query window for a while and have made DDL changes to any tables, functions, stored procedures, etc., intellisense is likely out of date and could tell you that a table or column you’re trying to reference doesn’t exist when you know it does.

If you ever run into this situation where it’s telling you something doesn’t exist but you know it does, use CTRL + SHIFT + R and the intellisense suggestions/corrections will be updated.

Bonus shortcut for Red-Gate SQL Prompt

Similar to the intellisense built in to SSMS, if you are using the SQL Prompt tool from Red-Gate, you can run into the same issue with the tool not recognizing that objects or columns exist when you know that they do. If you run into that issue and would like to update the suggestions list for SQL Prompt, use CTRL + SHIFT + D.

Image showing white coffee mug and open notebook sitting on white table
April 9, 2024 / 3 Comments

How to Set Notepad++ as Your Default Git Editor

Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.

When you start working with Git Bash for the first time (or you have your computer completely reimaged and have to reinstall everything again like I did recently), you will likely encounter a command line text editor called Vim to edit your commits or to do any other text editing needed for Git. And if you’re like me, you probably won’t like trying to use a keyboard-only interface for updating your commit messages. If that’s the case, then I have a quick tutorial for how to make Git use a normal text editor to more easily update your commit messages.

What is Vim?

Vim is an open-source text editor that can be used in a GUI interface or a command line interface. My only familiarity with it is with the command line interface, as the default text editor that Git comes installed with. If you don’t update your Git configuration to specify a different text editor, you will see a screen like the following whenever you need to create or update a commit message in a text editor (like when you complete a revert and Git generates a generic commit message for you then gives you the opportunity to update it, or when you want to amend an existing commit). This is what the command line editor version of Vim looks like (at least on my computer).

I personally don’t like this text editor because to use it, you need to know specific keyboard commands to navigate all operations and I don’t want to learn and remember those when I can use a GUI-based text editor instead to make changes more quickly and intuitively.

How to Change Text Editor to Notepad++

The command for changing your default text editor is super simple. I found it from this blog post: How to set Notepad++ as the Git editor instead of Vim.

git config --global core.editor "'C:/Program Files/Notepad++/notepad++.exe' -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin"

After you execute that command in Git Bash, you can run this command to test it, which should open up Notepad++ to try to update the last commit you made: git commit --amend.

That blog post then says that you should be able to double-check your Git configuration file to see that the editor has been changed, but my file doesn’t reflect what the other post says despite Notepad++ be opened for commit messages after I ran the change statement. This is what my gitconfig file currently looks like after setting the editor to Notepad++:

So your mileage may vary on that aspect. As long as the change works for me, I’m not too concerned about what the config file looks like.

How to Revert Text Editor to Vim

If you ever want to change back to the default text editor, you can run the following command to switch back to Vim, and once again confirm it worked using the git commit --amend statement: 

git config --global core.editor "vim"

Conclusion

Changing your default text editor for Git Bash is extremely simple as long as you know where the exe file of your preferred editor is stored on your computer. It’s also simple to change back to the default Vim editor in the future if you want or need to.

Photo of pencil sitting on open notebook
Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
April 2, 2024 / 0 Comments

My New Note Taking Tool

Note: I am NOT sponsored in any way for this post. Everything contained in this post is my honest opinion and review of the software.

For about a month now, I have been working with a new software for taking notes for my blog as well as personal learning projects, and I have really been loving the tool so thought I would share it and how I get the best use out of it. The tool I am now using is called Obsidian, and it has turned out to be a very simple but useful software for taking notes of any kind for any subject.

What’s in this post:

What I was using before and why I switched

Before I made the switch to Obsidian, I was using good old OneNote, the built-in Microsoft note taking software. That worked well enough for me for several months, but I eventually decided to make the switch from it because I was really disliking the organization and look of OneNote and was finding it hard to customize the formatting of my text in the way that I wanted. OneNote has predefined styles for headings, plain text, and code snippets, and I wasn’t liking those options anymore. In previous versions of OneNote, I swear I was able to customize the styles to my liking, but the version I had been working with before switching to Obsidian did not allow that. Plus, I was really just finding the whole app a bit ugly and outdated looking, so I started the search for a new tool.

In my search of note taking options, there were a lot of different apps that gave the customization I wanted, but they usually required a subscription to use them for more than a few simple notes, and I am adamant right now that I don’t want to add another paid subscription to my life. The one really great looking option was Obsidian.

I sat on my research for about a month until I got really tired of the flaws of OneNote, especially the code formatting options since most of the notes I have been taking recently have been with Python. Then I finally downloaded Obsidian and have been using and loving it since.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is a markdown-based, text-editor-like note taking tool that is more bare-bones than OneNote but allows you to do a lot more formatting and linking of notes than OneNote is ever going to be capable of. Obsidian even includes a graph features that allows you to look at how all your notes are linked together, which it says can help you visually see how your thoughts are connected.

On the back end, your Obsidian Vault (how they refer to what I would call a notebook) is simply a folder structure full of individual markdown (.md) files that each contain one of your pages of notes. Since it is so simple on the back end, it is easy to keep organized and backed up with any software you normally use to backup your local files.

Below are screenshots showing what my Obsidian notebook looks like on my computer in File Explorer, and one screenshot showing what those same notes look like within the Obsidian app.

Screenshot showing the folder structure within my Obsidian Vault using File Explorer

Screenshot showing the individual note markdown files within the Python folder of my Obsidian vault
Screenshot of the Vault explorer pane in Obsidian

As you can see from the screenshots, it really is just simple files stored on my computer, but those files look much sleeker and more organized within the actual Obsidian app.

It took me a few days to get used to using Obsidian, but I got the hang of it quickly and decided it was going to be my one source of truth for notes going forward. It’s bee nice enough to use that I have even stopped using my physical notebooks for now, which I didn’t think would ever happen (where will I put all of my fun stickers now if not a physical notebook??).

How I organize my notes

As you can see from the screenshots above, I currently have my notebook organized into multiple folders. The most notable are Attachments, Blog, and Topical Notes. The best part of Obsidian is that you are able to customize it to meet your exact needs, so I am only showing how I have mine organized to maybe give others ideas for how they might organize their notes. This organization is very specific to my current needs.

Attachments

I created this folder based on advice I read from others online who use Obsidian as well, and it’s a great way to keep any images you have pasted into your notes organized, due to how Obsidian handles attachments in notes. When you insert an image or screenshot into a note, not only does the image get pasted where you want it to in your note, but that image also gets saved as a separate file into your Vault, at the very top level of the file structure. While that may be fine for others, I was really disliking it due to the number of screenshots I was copying into notes, so the main view of what’s in my notebook was getting very cluttered with all the image files visible at the top level.

(Technically, the image that you see pasted into your notes is just a link to the physical image file, but done in such a way that it appears as if the image is just stored within the text. But since every note page in Obsidian is a markdown file, it cannot store in itself an actual image, so that’s why the links are used.)

So to clean up my vault/notebook a bit, I created the Attachments folder and I copy all image files and other attachments into the folder after pasting them into my notes. It can be a bit annoying at times because I have to move every single image that I paste into the specified folder, but it’s really not that bad and makes the notebook look nicer so I’m happy to do it.

Blog

As you might guess, the Blog folder contains all my notes related to my blog, including drafts of posts that I am working on as well as other pages including lists of tasks I want to accomplish and future goals for the blog. Nothing too crazy in this folder.

Topical Notes

This section is where I put various notes about technology or anything else I am working on learning, when the topic isn’t big enough for its own folder/section but needs to be organized somewhere. Currently, this folder only contains some notes for OLAP data storage & processing as well as Snowflake.

How I save my notes

Unless you want to pay for a subscription, you will not have a built-in function for saving your Obsidian Vault to the cloud or have any easy way to sync your files across multiple devices. But thankfully, since everything with the tool is file-based, it is very easy to use an existing cloud storage service you may already have to save and sync your files across devices. One option would be to use OneDrive, another is to use Git and that is the option I am currently using.

To make my notes available to me easily no matter where I may be working, I decided that the best solution for saving my notes off my computer would be to use GitHub, since I already have an account with them. I created a private repository on GitHub and pulled that down to my local and set up Obsidian in that repo. Since creating that, it has been super easy and intuitive for me to save my notes every day by pushing to the remote GitHub repo.

Other Features

One main feature that Obsidian uses as a selling point that I haven’t found useful for my own purposes yet is the Graph View of my notes. The graph view shows you a physical graph (like the data structure) of how your notes are linked to each other. I haven’t found this useful because, while I do link some of my notes occasionally, I am not doing a lot of linking and don’t feel the need to view my notes in essentially a “mind map” format. But others who are more visual thinkers could find it useful. That feature is certainly unique to this software.

Screenshot showing the Graph View of my Obsidian notebook, very few links between files at this point

As you can see from that screenshot above, I have hardly done any linking with my notes yet, so the graph view doesn’t show anything useful for me. (FYI the blanked out boxes are for upcoming posts that I didn’t want to leak.)

Obsidian also has a feature called Canvas, which I haven’t played around with much, but it seems like a tool that might be nice to help you plan out large projects or any type of work with notes or ideas that connect to each other. The Canvas reminded me a bit of LucidChart, but it seems more focused on helping you organize your thoughts rather than to make flow charts.

Screenshot showing a sample Canvas I created using one of my Obsidian note pages and a “card”

Pros of Obsidian

  • Works well with code snippets, since it has simple markdown functionality for that style
    • If you are a programmer or are just learning code, being able to format the code nicely in your notes is wonderful
    • You don’t need to use the mouse to change to code formatting while typing, just use the markdown symbols
  • Notes are stored on your own system which makes them as secure as your computer– no need to worry that the company is going to get hacked and compromise your data
  • Simple yet robust note-taking features, with just enough styling options to make it personal yet not hard to read
  • Modern design and function
  • Can use most keyboard styling shortcuts available in other text editing tools (e.g. CTRL+I to make text italic, CTRL + B to make text bold, etc.)

Cons of Obsidian

  • Uses markdown styling for all text formatting options, so you need to learn that to be able to style text how you want
    • I have been going back to this cheat sheet multiple times to remind me how to do markdown formatting
    • Once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy to do all sorts of custom formatting
  • Must buy a license if you want to use it for work, even if you’re not the owner of the company
    • I would love to be able to use this tool for all my work notes since it’s so customizable yet simple
    • The current subscription price for one person is $50 USD per year, which is reasonable, I just don’t want to pay for yet another subscription service right now
  • Must manage your own cloud saving and syncing across devices if you don’t want to pay for Obsidian Sync
  • Difficult to add color or other text customizations beyond bold & italic to your notes, must use inline HTML to add colors
  • Can’t specify your own ordering of notes, will always be placed in alphabetic order
    • I think this is the biggest annoyance to me for the most part, sometimes it would be nice to keep your notes in a specific, non-alphabetic ordering
    • The easiest way to keep things in the order you want is to use numbers or symbols at the beginning of note names (I put the date at the beginning of each note to keep it organized better, and then put symbols like ! at the beginning of the title for notes I always want at the top of the list)

Conclusion

Obsidian is a great free tool to use for taking organized and useful notes right on your own computer. While there are a few features of the tool that are annoying to use at times, it has more positives than negatives. I would recommend that anyone in a technical field take a chance with Obsidian for their notes solution if they’re looking to try something new and modern.

Picture of many employees sitting in open office working
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
March 12, 2024 / 0 Comments

Getting Better at Keeping Work at Work

Despite already writing a similar post about this topic myself, I have still been struggling recently to keep my work at work, struggling with not thinking about it in my free time in the evenings and on weekends. Looking for some professional guidance from an outside perspective online, I found this great article from Harvard Business Review that I want to share with others.

Using Technology to Log Out for the Day

Steps 1 and 3 from the article come easily to me. While I don’t have specific hours I am required to be at work, I am great at keeping a regular work schedule for myself that I don’t normally deviate from. Once I log out at 5 PM each day, I don’t check Teams messages, and I don’t even have my work email on my phone so I can’t check that even if I wanted to. I manage this system using the Focus Time feature on my iPhone.

I have two different scheduled Focus Time settings for my phone: 1) Work and 2) Personal Time. I’ve set up the Work Focus Time to be active during my normal work hours and it only allows notifications from Teams, my two-factor authentication apps, and a couple of important family members. Then I’ve set up the Personal Time custom Focus Time to be the opposite: it runs from the time I get off work to the time I start work in the morning and blocks any notifications from Teams or other work-related applications.

This system has been working really well for me and I would recommend others try it out if they haven’t already, because then you never need to think about which notifications to turn off after work each day, or worse, just keep getting those notifications all evening and weekend long that take your mind back to work when it shouldn’t be there.

Struggling with “Mental Clarity” Around Work

Steps 2 and 4 from the HBR article are more challenging for me lately than I would like them to be. Step 2 is to get “mental clarity”, which essentially means that you should know each day what tasks you need to accomplish at work, by keeping a running to-do list or somewhere else to manage all your thoughts about work. I used to be great at this before the last couple months, when my job became less clear and began changing. I stopped keeping a physical notebook because I needed a new system to keep related notes related and physically close since I now have larger projects to manage rather than small tickets to work on daily or weekly. Once I stopped heavily utilizing my physical notebook, I stopped creating daily to-do lists for myself to accomplish.

Not having a go-to place to list out all the current and future things I will need to complete has led to the problem of me randomly remembering important things I need to do for work at inconvenient times, like when I’m trying to fall asleep. I’m sure many can relate to that. This mental clarity step reminds me of the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen that I read a couple years ago. One of the main points of that book is you need to be constantly dumping thoughts out of your head onto paper (or anywhere you want as long as it’s consistent) so your brain can trust it doesn’t need to constantly remind you of important things at inappropriate times. If you know that you always write important tasks in the same location, you know that anything important is in that location and not just in your head. The Harvard Business Review article made me realize I need to get back to that organization method and start actually using the digital note page I made awhile ago that is supposed to act as my catch-all list of items on my plate now and in the future.

One final note on the mental clarity step of keeping work at work– I actually do still manage to complete an end-of-day wrap up each work day where I write out everything I accomplished throughout the day along with notes for what I need to do the next day and a review of the next day’s calendar. I occasionally skip days of this, so I would like to schedule time for this each day going forward so I’m more diligent about doing it.

The Need to Feel Accomplished

The final step to keeping work at work recommended in the article that I’ve been struggling with the most recently is step 4, which says that you need to get work done at work. It may seem crazy for someone to not get work done during their work day if they’re showing up on time and leaving usually later than they should, but it is entirely possible if you allow your entire schedule to be consumed by meetings with no or minimal time between them. My job has morphed into a collaboration-focused position where I suddenly need to have meetings upon meetings about everything related to the projects I am working on. This means that on an average day, I have multiple hours of meetings with colleagues, and somehow they all seem to leave 30-minute gaps between to tease me with the possibility of getting work done, but then I never actually get time to focus in those gaps.

This cycle of continual meetings and no long stretches of work time has made it really difficult for me to have any decent amount of time to focus on the deliverables I need to complete. While sure, you could theoretically get good work done in the 30 minutes between meetings, reality is much different when you need to work on a confusing or difficult task. Those types of work items are better suited for longer stretches of dedicated focus time, at least one hour but hopefully two or more. That is a rare occurrence in my current work life and I want to change that, and will do so by following the recommendations of this HBR article, and actually some of my own advice from a previous blog post. I need to schedule blocks of one or more hours each day to focus on work. My plan is to do that on Friday afternoons the week before or Monday mornings the week of, so I can block out work time for an entire week to get ahead of meetings that will inevitably be scheduled.

Summary

While the advice of the Harvard Business Review article isn’t entirely new to me, it did act as a great trigger to remind me of the valuable work skills I have neglected recently so I can revive them. Going forward, I am going to revitalize my use of my own calendar and digit notebook to see if that helps me feel more in control and less caught up in the whirlwind at work.

Give the HBR article a read and see if any of it speaks to you like it spoke to me. Is there something in your work-life balance situation that could be improved to reduce your overall stress?

screenshot of errors
Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash
February 13, 2024 / 0 Comments

Using the WordPress Local Development Tool to Avoid JSON Errors

When I started my blog a couple months ago, I determined a posting schedule for myself of once a week on Tuesdays. If you are someone who notices details and patterns, you may have noticed that I went a few weeks without posting at the end of December and into January, but it wasn’t for lack of me trying. In this post I’m going to talk about the issues I faced that prevented me from posting and how I finally got a workaround for the problem that has finally allowed me to start posting again.

Background

While trying to create and edit my tutorial post about working with Liquibase, I kept running into the same vague JSON error when trying to save drafts, always at the same point. The error was: “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON response”.

The point at which it always failed was about midway through the post, either when I copied in text that contained double-quote characters or when I added the first image. I spent several weeks going back and forth with Flywheel (the web host I use) support, trying to figure out what was causing this JSON error when I tried to save a draft.

We tried many different things, including the normal troubleshooting steps of disabling plugins, reverting to the default WordPress theme, disabling all of my browser extensions, trying to work in an incognito window, and several other things. I read so many of the articles online discussing how to resolve this error, and none of those solutions worked. On the Flywheel side, they told me they were trying several different server changes, including extending timeout values and other firewall type changes. I even completely restored my website to default, but not even that worked. And then I had to rebuild everything on my website (except for posts and pages which I exported before restoring).

As of the time of writing this, I still don’t officially have a resolution from Flywheel for this error that keeps popping up and generating 403 errors on the backend (I figured that out myself by inspecting what happened when I clicked the “save draft” button). However, thanks to some kind folks on a WordPress forum, I finally figured out a viable workaround that I am actually enjoying using more than the online WordPress admin portal.

The Successful Workaround

The workaround that I am now using, even as I write this, is to use the development tool for WordPress called Local. This tool gives you a local development environment for WordPress that can seamlessly connect with Flywheel and other hosting providers. The setup for the tool was super easy, took me less than 5 minutes. After going through the setup, all I had to do was pull a copy of my site to local and then I have been able to locally edit my website through the tool.

Once you’re done making all your changes, you only need to select to “Push” to your production site, then select which changes you want to be pushed, then it’s quickly sent to your actual production website. It takes a few minutes for Flywheel to update with the changes, but then you can see your locally developed changes on your real site. All without the hassle of the ever-present JSON error when trying to save a draft.

I will be continuing to work with Flywheel to try to resolve the error on my production site, but at least for now, I am able to keep working and posting, back to my normal schedule.

Summary

If you are facing endless errors when trying to create posts for WordPress and you’re hosted with Flywheel, try using the Local tool to develop on your own local machine to see if that helps you in the same way it helped me.

UPDATE

We finally seem to have resolved my issue after going back and forth so many times with the Flywheel support team and continuing to escalate it through all their support levels. I’m not sure if this is what finally resolved the issue as I wasn’t provided any further details, but the last detailed message I received seemed to indicate that something was set up incorrectly with their Web Application Firewall (WAF) that was preventing me from editing. Before getting the issue fixed, I also found that I couldn’t edit the footer of my site because I was also getting 403 errors when trying to save those changes, and that along with my post creation issue has been resolved.

The moral of this update is that if you’re having this same issue and your site is hosted on Flywheel, keep pushing them to try more things on their end, don’t let them say that it must be something with your local environment. They were super great in continuing to try as long as I kept pushing and saying it still wasn’t working. It also seemed to help when I started showing them the exact errors I was getting with the Inspect tool in Chrome so they would have something to work with.

« Older posts

Categories