“The DBA”
Maybe I’m unlucky, but through most of my career, I was “The DBA”. Not part of a team of DBA’s, but the only guy to take care of the MySQL stuff and to take care of the MySQL servers and do the MySQL things. No biggie. I didn’t have a problem with it. But truthfully, it probably had less to do with my title than it did with my legal name.
Uncertified to Certifiable!
This blog is subtitled: The musings of an uncertified database enthusiast. Within my development social circle, at the beginning of my technology career, we were all uncertified PHP rock stars in Dallas – taking web development, PHP backend application development and MySQL from its foundations to wherever it needed to go. The guys who got a list of certifications where Oracle, Java, and Microsoft developers and DBA’s – and we weren’t like those people. We had to do our own research, perform our own tests, make decisions that affected how we saw the future – and we didn’t know what the future was like because we were making it. Open Source was young still, and no one knew where it would all go.
Self-taught, self-motivated.
Well, times change and although I don’t think Certifications matter, to some people they do. And I got bored. Wouldn’t it be neat if I passed the test? Certifiably insane is probably what you’re thinking!
Which leads to the question: What’s the about me?
I began working with a database in the summer of 1991, with a program called dBase IV. As a summer work hire for the South Carolina Department of Social Services Training department, they needed a way to catalog and checkout training books to social workers, and wanted to do it electronically. I built the tables, the checkout forms, and even a printed receipt for them. Then I joined the Army for the next six years.
While in the Army, as the NBC NCO for Bravo Battery, 82nd Field Artillery Division, one of my main duties was M40 Mask Inventory and Assignment (Gas masks) as well as other chemical operations tools and protective gear. For this task, I used what was available through Microsoft Office 95 (Access and the Jet database engine). I was living in Austin at the time while traveling to Fort Hood when someone told me a LOT of people were making money fixing the Y2K bug.
I didn’t make any money fixing the Y2K bug. I totally missed out because I was using up my entire GI Bill on different colleges. Seriously, I only needed about 2 years after the Army for college and ended up doing 7.
While at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (later renamed to Texas State University at San Marcos), I did an internship stint with Locomotion Studios, and wrote a motion capture moves library. Some of the moves in the library included me. They donned me in a motion capture suit with all the little white balls on it, and I did a bunch of movements. This was also the first time I used PHP and MySQL and it’s ISAM database engine.
The rest is on my resume.
What’s not on my resume:
- The most money I ever lost as a programmer was about $1.25 million dollars. I thought I would have to pay back that $1.25 million dollars. I was sure happy to find out I didn’t.
- The most money I ever lost was maybe $25 million in lost revenue. While attending community college part time during the day, I worked nights at a big name semiconductor manufacturer in Austin, TX. In the late 90’s a single silicon wafer was worth about $1 million in product (or so I was told). I dropped a boat of 25 at the bump stage (the final stage), with all of the silicon disks breaking on impact with the floor. I don’t know if they were able to save any. They wanted me to be a maintenance tech after that. I opted to go to college full time and be a computer programmer.
- As a DBA working for Clear Channel, I was able to see Stevie Wonder play for KIIS FM’s Christmas in Studio Special. He was like 10 feet away! I was also stuck in an elevator with Cee Lo Green and his entourage, met Natasha Bedingfield and her brother Daniel, talked to the guys in BuckCherry, gave Eva Longoria directions to the studio.
- Cee Lo Green was not the first celebrity I’ve met in an elevator. That celebrity was Johnny Cash – and I was 7 at the time.
- My career dream was to travel the US and do contract remote development in an RV. That never happened, although I did travel in an RV through the southern US from California to Florida.
- My hobbies include: cosplay, motorcycle track riding (just a novice), martial arts (I have a black belt in Shotokan, and dabbled in Muay Thai, BJJ/MMA and Krav Maga) and music – mainly the ukulele.