Practice Hurts

With my previous post on gaining expertise I still feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I need to learn with this new job. I just switched over an application to use a new database instance/schema. Of course in editing the settings I forgot to make sure it was owned by the right entity so we had a bit of an outage, fortunately only on test.

But that isn’t what I mean by the title. It was more of communications with people, with the office and its 20+ designers, developers, and administrators it is very easy for miscommunication to happen. Yesterday during a weekly standup I mentioned that I would move to the new database, but I ended up working on some alignment issues.

Then this morning I get an email about the test server being down and a short thing about when we should push changes to servers. I haven’t pushed changes since last month, lots of improvements, but still a few issues. So I was a bit surprised, and a bit disgruntled to be told about times to update things…

But this another area where I need to practice. First I checked to make sure I hadn’t accidentally pushed something, looked at the service, and tried to gather more data. Then I sent an email asking about where they got the information since I couldn’t seem to find anything that would point at an update yesterday.

It was still too early. I then found that it was because an account on the database had been disabled late yesterday. I got that back temporarily, but resolved to switch all the servers to the new one. And done.

I know that I have a habit of tearing into people’s assumptions if I have the slightest evidence that they are wrong. This is not the way I should approach it and today was a good example. I managed to reign in my immediate response and gather more data on the situation. I still didn’t allow enough time for me to find the root of the problem and actually write a thorough response, but at least it was not alienating.

Oh, practice hurts especially when it is teaching my ego to take it easy.