Archive for the ‘weaknesses’ Category
Unbelievable Blunder
I can’t believe what I did on Friday, probably the worst thing that I ever did in my working experience.
I was testing my local development environment, in particular I was testing the SQL scripts that I have for re-creating tables. On my SQL Manager, I have two tabs open, one for development database and the other one is for production database (as I was doing another task on production database). Now, I wanted to drop all the tables on my local database, so I opened up a new query tab on SQL Manager and run my query there.
Seconds later after hitting F5 to run the query, I realized that the query tab opened was connected to the production database not on my local database. I was frozen, didn’t know what to do, was hoping that this is just a bad dream. A minute later, some people saying that they saw hard errors on our website, by this time I know it’s very real and I have to do something about it. I quickly told DBA, Team leader and Production Manager, they all were very shocked needless to say.
To cut the story short, for the next 2-3 hours or so the whole development and customer relationship team worked together to get the site up and running again (some of the data had to be re-entered because they didn’t exist on the backup). as well as keeping the affected clients informed with the restoration progress.
The people were understanding, of which I was very grateful. I was also quite amazed how the Product Manager calmly handled the situation, he lead the development team so well through the crisis. I guess the similar thing also happened on the customer team. I was impressed as well how everyone able to work together to pull the company from the messy situation that I single handedly have created.
I think I shouldn’t be trusted with administration privilege on production servers every again.. I always consider myself to be very cautious person, but I was proven wrong that day, a timely reminder for me.
Sporadic Learning
Yep, that’s my method of learning, basically I just learn whatever it is that comes to my fancy. A while ago it was Model-Glue, a week ago it was Flex, lo and behold, I am now captivated by ColdBox!
I guess this also can be considered as my weaknesses, being unable to be interested in one thing for long if I am not forced too. With learning these frameworks and Flex, there’s no one really asking me to do it, so there’s no pressure and I am completely free to choose whether I want to continue learning the technology or not. I need to prioritize better, I need to think through which of “the oh so many wonderful things to learn”, that can be reasonably beneficial to my career and to whoever that hires me (or will employ me).
I guess my sporadic learning at the moment is bounded by Adobe related things and web development in general, I haven’t stepped in to Ruby on Rails yet, although each day I am getting more and more compelled to at least give it a try.
Weaknesses
I created a category called “weaknesses” for this blog. The purpose for this is, for me to be able to sit down, reflect and think through the areas in my working life that I am not good at and hopefully be able to improve on them.
To start off, I know that I am not the greatest communicator. I have less than perfect English, but that’s only the part of the problem, I think my inability to explain complex concept (orally) in a clear way is one area that I can improve. That’s why I tend to write long e-mails at work to explain things that I know I cannot explain clearly by speaking them. This weakness will be detrimental if I am moved into more of a consulting position when I have to speak to clients often, luckily I don’t find myself speaking to clients often so far.
