Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 8, 2010
I am moderating and liveblogging the Professional IT Community Conference panel called Tech Women Rule! Creative Solutions for being a (or working with a) female technologist.
One point to keep in mind: The goal is not equality for equality’s sake. The goal is to have a diverse range of experience to make your company/project/whatever the best it could be.
That being said, these issues are not just around women; they are about anyone who is “different”, whether it’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, cultural.
So what are some of the solutions?
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Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 7, 2010
Why Python?
- Low WTF per minute factor
- Passes the 6-month test (if you write python code, going back in 6 months, you pretty much know what you were trying to do)
- Small Shift/no-Shift ratio (ie, you use the “Shift” key a lot in Perl because you use $ % ( ) { } etc, so you can tell what something is by context, not by $ or %)
- It’s hard to make a mess
- Objects if you need them, ignore them if you don’t.
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Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 7, 2010
[author's note: personally, I use awk a bunch in MySQL DBA work, for tasks like scrubbing data from a production export for use in qa/dev, but usually have to resort to Perl for really complex stuff, but now I know how to do .]
Basics:
By default, fields are separated by any number of spaces. The -F option to awk changes the separator on commandline.
Print the first field, fields are separated by a colon.
awk -F: '{print $1}' /etc/passwd
Print the first and fifth field:
awk -F: '{$print $1,$5}' /etc/passwd
Can pattern match and use files, so you can replace:
grep foo /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $1,$5}'
with:
awk -F: '/foo/ {print $1,$5}' /etc/passwd
NF = built in variable (no $) used to mean “field number”
This will print the first and last fields of lines where the first field matches “foo”
awk -F: '$1 ~/foo/ {print $1,$NF}' /etc/passwd
NF = number of fields, ie, “7″
$NF = value of last field, ie “/bin/bash”
(similarly, NR is record number)
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Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 7, 2010
I am attending the Professional IT Community Conference – it is put on by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), and is a 2-day community conference. There are technical and “soft” topics — the audience is system administrators. While technical topics such as Essential IPv6 for Linux Administrators are not essential for my job, many of the “soft” topics are directly applicable and relevant to DBAs too. (I am speaking on How to Stop Hating MySQL tomorrow.)
So I am in Seeking Senior and Beyond: The Tech Skills That Get You Promoted. The first part talks about the definition of what it means to be senior, and it completely relates to DBA work:
works and plays well with other
understands “ability”
leads by example
lives to share knowledge
understands “Service”
thoughtful of the consequences of their actions
understands projects
cool under pressure
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