I got tagged by Go Daddy girl Michelle Ufford in her post Things you know now….
So here is my little post. Before I start I will say that I thought of several things that are the same like the other people that were tagged already wrote. One of them is of course participating in newsgroups/forums, another is have a blog and writing about the technologies you are using. I will not cover those two here for the reason stated above.
If you can buy it don’t write it.
What do I mean by that? Take for example having to write code that checks for any schema or data changes between staging and production servers. Sure you can spend a couple of days writing that and then another couple of days for testing/debugging or you can have your boss pay a half day of your salary(this depends on location) for SQL Compare or something similar. This enables you to work on real stuff like those quarter end reports. Your work will be done faster and the tool will probably be much better and do so much more than you could ever write.
First get to know a variety of technologies and then zoom in on one of them.
If you are someone who know a lot of different things but you are not an expert in any of them then it is time to specialize. There was a time when I worked with SQL Server, Coldfusion, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, JavaScript etc etc. I was decent in all of those (or so I thought) but I wasn’t an expert in any. When companies are looking for people there is always one thing that they are really looking for with a bunch of required/nice to have things. If you know a something about lots of thing most likely you will notpass the technical interview because your knowledge is not deep enough.
Use the internet to see if it exists before you reinvent it
6 or 7 years ago I wrote some paging code in which you could pass in what page you want, how many rows per page etc. A year or so later I discovered that Aaron Bertrand had something very similar on his aspfaq site. If I knew this beforehand it could have saved me hours of debugging and perfecting this code
Know your product well
Believe it or not I wrote once a whole bunch of code to parse a proc and to get all the params and their data type and position in the proc to document this. This took me a whole day or so…..later on I realized I could have just used INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PARAMETERS and be done in two minutes. It is important to get to know the inner workings of your product, for SQL Server this means you need to study the system tables and the dynamic management views. There is so much information that is exposed through the dynamic management views that it will help you with a ton of stuff like metadata about your system, performance problems etc
I will not tag anyone since I know you have to prepare for Valentines Day