OFA - Whats that all about then

Cary Millsap of OFA, Optimising Oracle and OakTable fame has written the first part of one of those series (he'll finish before me) on how OFA got started. You can find it here. I don't have much to say on OFA itself - except that for my Apps readers I'm not talking about Oracle Financial Analyser - but this quote did jump out at me.

I don't know about you, but when I practice some task over and over again, I do tend to get better at it. For a while. Then I start to get bored, and when I get bored, I get sloppy. It's why I became a programmer in the first place: so I can do something a few times, get pretty good at it, explain to a machine how to do it, and then perform the task perfectly, over and over again for the rest of my life. It's a good formula.

I can so relate to this. In fact my work laptop now has over 3000 scripts going back to the late 90's.  All because I didn't want to do it manually again. And because i'd learned that when a customer says

Can you just update this data for me - it'll help immensely just this once

You'll run it at least 3 times.

One of those small private stories that may or may not have a place on Oracle blogs. In my last place of employment we had two Senior level DBAs (I was one and a colleague was, obviously, the other) I wrote scripts for everything , he maintained a whole slew of manual processes - think loading data from spreadsheets. Neither approach was obviously worse than the other in terms of results (well his probably wouldn't work for manual standby, mine would be a disaster for loading spreadhseet data when the colour of the text has significance) but it did betray a cultural and philosphical difference between us. For the vast majority of the time we worked together neither of us managed each other, now I've gone we both manage pretty successful teams. The lesson I'd draw - commonality of approach is as important to team success as the purity or otherwise of the approach.

--disclaimer if you need one - I'm a member of the OakTable