Today happens to be the last day of the month and the last day of the quarter. And according to my calendar, it’s the 4th Blursberyday of the month of Holiecouw.

I decided to take a look back at my first post of the year: 2020 in Preview. Wow, a lot has changed in a scant three months. I mentioned I was reading Station Eleven. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world after a world-wide flu pandemic. Little did I know at the time I’d be living that reality a scant 3 months later. Ok, this is not nearly as bad as in the book, but it does give on pause to think. We are living in a time of upheaval and it will be interesting to see how this current pandemic changes social structures for coming years.

I wanted to speak at SQL Saturdays. Well, almost every one I’ve put in for or was planning on putting in for has been cancelled or delayed. So much for that goal. On the other hand, members of the #SQLFamily have been holding Friday afternoon (and other times) Zoom hangouts as sort of a morale boost. So I’ve actually gotten to know a number of my fellow DBAs and fellow speakers, so that’s better.

Fortunately, I’m still working. As a consultant, you realize every meal may be your last meal, so you keep working at it and hoping more meals are coming your way. So far my biggest client shows no sign of slowing down, nor does my second largest client. I’ve been fortunate, I know a number of folks across many industries who have been hit with a temporary or even permanent job loss. This is going to be hard for many.

But, I’ve also been taking the time to do more webinars. Last week I sat in on a Redgate webinar on the state of DevOps that was quite informative. The next day, Kendra Little (also of Redgate) gave the WIT webinar and also talked about DevOps. Both were quite informative and I learned a lot. I look forward to the upcoming Redgate Streamed event.

I’ve been using git more and more. I started using it integrated with Visual Studio about two years ago I think. But, after seeing my son working on a project where he was using it at the command line, I decided it was time to start to do that and now for one client that’s my de facto way of checking in and out changes I’ve been making to the PowerShell scripts I write for them. Next up, more version control for the SQL Scripts. I’ve already written a small deploy script I use to deploy scripts and changes and more importantly to log them. So while that client hasn’t really adopted DevOps, I’m doing my part for my small corner of work.

My next goal is probably starting to learn how to use Docker more. Cathrine Wilhemson’s blog post on that has convinced me it’s time.

And I finally finished binge-watching Haven.

So, the last few weeks haven’t been exactly what I planned for, and the upcoming months won’t be what I planned on either, but it hasn’t been a terrible time. What about you?

P.S. While out biking the other day, a thought dawned on me. Many post-apocalyptic books (such as Station Eleven) have characters using cars, but more like carts, either pulling them themselves or with horses because once the gas runs out, you can’t make more. But I got wondering how having a large number of electric vehicles would play out in such a world. Yes, much of the infrastructure would be gone, but even if you had to carry panels with you (much like Mark Watney in The Martian) you could probably be far more mobile. Hmm…