Bloggin' For Mentors

Good morning to half the world. It's afternoon where I am but that's only a quarter of the world and I'm going for the most mass appeal.

This blog exists as a shameless attempt to get some free asynchronous mentoring from Paul Randal. So not only am I writing a blog post as part of his "contest," I'm making an entire blog. But as the title indicates, I don't know I have anything new to add to the blogosphere, but if I do! It will show up here.

I've scratched my way to becoming a Senior DBA at a company that operates in the loyalty program space near Toronto. I have over 20 years of temporal experience, but maybe only about 10-15 years of REAL experience. Because up until mid-2013, I still spent 90% of my time working with SQL 2000. No excuses, no complaints. At least now I live mostly in the SQL 2014 world. I'm catching up fast!

I serve as a sort-of mentor to my DBA twin at work, an awesome 27-year-old who up and moved to Canada less than a year ago. I really feel like I've taken ownership of this sort-of mentor role, and I'm even encouraging her to be the Lead Cloud DBA, since she has a lot more runway ahead of her than I do. But it's inspired me to really start pushing the envelope and embracing a lot more new technologies. I'm ga-ga over dbatools, I just passed the AZ-900 exam this morning as a stepping stone to DP-300 and the Azure DBA Associate certification, and am forcing myself to use more PowerShell 7 and VS Code.

We have enough autonomy at my company that we can really influence a lot of SQL things, and I finally feel like my career has passed the tipping point from drudgery to exhiliration. But I've never really had a mentor per se, I've just picked up various tidbits from managers and colleagues (and #sqlfamily of course) over the years. I'm happy with the path that's gotten me here, and yet I am confident that the next 20 years are gonna be a hell of a lot more exciting and interesting than the last 20 were. And I'm hoping Paul can help me realize that the future is even better than that. Cheers and thank you to Paul for this initiative, and hopefully my own initiative makes the cut.

That speck in Lake Erie is my 8-year-old son, which is one of my other full-time jobs. I made a conscious choice a few years ago to try to simplify my life, and if something doesn't make me a better husband, father, or DBA, then I try to avoid it. I guess now I'll add mentor to my twin as my fourth job. Hopefully I can get a contract gig as a mentee! See? Shameless.