For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Kay Sauter encourages us to say thank you to those who helped us this year. My list is not short. I owe mounds of gratitude to many people in my personal life; they know who they are, and they're not out looking for accolades. But I'm going to keep this about tech anyway.
Andy Mallon
First and foremost, this guy literally keeps me sane. Since moving to North Carolina in 2018, I don't get to see him in person as often as I used to, never mind as often as I'd like. I did get a chance to visit him in Maine this year, and we chit-chat about things across the tech spectrum just about every day. Andy saved my bacon just the other day, when I was complaining about retry logic in our data dump upload, and he reminded me that the error handling was, um, imperfect. It saved me from waiting 12 hours for a file to get uploaded a second time for no reason.
Nick Harshbarger
Like Andy, Nick keeps me sane. We have had a several-years-long ritual now of sending each other a Marco Polo message every weekday. Mostly just a greeting, a dad joke, the weather, etc. but also we do a lot of venting and peer troubleshooting across a wide gamut of work and tech topics – broadband solutions, home automation, better sprinklers, and annoying meetings.
Fellow Stackers
Terry Long and Raymond Borjas, who are always willing to pitch in and cover my ass when I am overloaded or away from my desk.
Michael Frank and Juan Rodriguez, who will happily listen to me bitch about almost anything.
And Adam Lear, who can instantly recall the most obscure little detail about some feature or piece of code that he hasn't looked at in years.
Not people at all
And yet not all shout-outs need to go to actual people.
A few short months ago I was cursing AI up and down for multiple reasons, and I owe it an apology. I've been having a hell of a fun time using DALL-E to distract me from real life and backfill all of my old blog posts with new featured images. I wrote about this a bit last month but, if you snoop around the site, you'll see a whole lot more than the few I highlighted. The thing about this that I appreciate the most is that coming up with just the right prompt to get the image I'm after can be a challenging exercise, and I feel like it keeps my brain sharp for interacting with, you know, humans.
All the rest
If I didn't mention you here, it doesn't mean I'm not grateful for you. Like I said, my list is long, and nobody wants to read a Wikipedia article. Trust that, if you're in my life, I do appreciate you.