A Side Trip to Wonderhell

I should be jubilant. But I'm not. 

I'm habitually non-jubilant. I don't know why.

This weekend, I returned from the kind of a trip that I don't take very often: an all-by-msyself vacation. This year, I attended the IPMS/USA National Convention 2023 in sunny San Marcos, Texas. IPMS is the International Plastic Modelers' Society. The convention is three things: a contest, a meetup, and a vendor showcase. This is the first time I've ever attended. 

The contest is a big deal. Some people spend years preparing for it. And I won two gold medals for a model (a "replica") that took me seven years to make. It was awarded 1st place in its category and then it was named the best of its class: one of only eight such awards among a field of over 3,000 entries.

I should be jubilant. But I'm not.

There are modelers out there who have worked hard over the past who-knows-how-long, suffering now that their work didn't result in the level of appreciation they had hoped for. They probably have a right to be offended that I'm not jubilant.

One of the reasons I'm not jubilant is because I promised myself before the show that I wouldn't get too emotionally wrapped up in how my entry was judged. There are just too many things that could conspire that could deny—rightfully or not—my little model from winning a prize. So, before the show, I preloaded my mind with the following sentence: 

When you put your ego in other people's hands, you're asking for trouble. 

My wife and I have similar conversations with our kids. As she says, sometimes we need to ride the monorail, not the roller coaster. For example, when you believe you're awesome because a local sportswriter says that you are, then it's also tempting to believe that you're trash when that same writer doesn't include you in his all-area team. If you get too high or too low because of how someone else defines you, you're almost guaranteed to crash eventually. 

That sentence of mine sustained me for the first three days of the show. The 3,000+ models on display in the contest room were absolutely overwhelming. There's no way I could walk in that room and feel like a legitimate competitor, no matter how hard I knew I had worked on my model. It would have been ludicrous to think I was going to win something. Even when I did, it felt like it couldn't be real.

Now that I'm home, I'm in this weird predicament of having summited an audacious, multi-year goal, certainly a good feeling, but simultaneously there's this looming feeling of "now what?" Sure, I won this huge award three days ago, but what have I done lately?! 

It makes me feel like there's something wrong with me. But I know I'm not the only one. What I'm feeling happens so often, it even has a name: Laura Gassner Otting calls it Wonderhell.

At the end of all this, the feeling I'm trying to savor and cultivate is gratitude. Thankful for the awards, of course, but also thankful for what I really was hoping for when I signed up for the show. What really drove me while I was building my model was the hope that people might look at my model, enjoy it, and want to talk about how I built it. 

That conversation happens every month in my club (my model couldn't have been what it was without my club). And it happened enough times in San Marcos to make it fully worth submitting myself to the harrowing competition part of the convention.

Maybe I'll do it again someday, I'm not sure. But for now, my monthly club meetings will be enough. Right now, I need to focus on improving my business so much that someday soon I can blog about being oddly not jubilant about that.

A Better Way to Think about %

A lot of people get confused by the "%" symbol. I can understand why. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage seems way more confusing than it should be.

Well, maybe I can help. 

Here's a simplifying little idea that I learned by reading ISO 80000-1: 

The percent symbol (%) is just a constant, just like π or e. Its value is 0.01 (or 1/100, if you prefer).

Let me show it to you in a table. Maybe that'll clear it up:

Symbol	Value
π	≈ 3.14159
e	≈ 2.71828
%	= 0.01

What this means is that anywhere you see the "%" symbol, you're free to substitute the value 0.01 if you want:

50% = 50(0.01) = 0.5

So, how does that help? Well, it gives you a simple rule you can apply instead of having to intuit how to convert something to or from a percentage. 

For example, I used to find myself wondering, "If I want to convert this percentage to a real number, do I multiply by 100? Or divide?" I hate memorizing crap like that.

But knowing that % = 0.01 makes it easy. For example, converting 42% to a number without the % sign, I simply substitute, like this:

42% = 42(0.01) = 0.42

When you know that % = 0.01, it's easy to see that 100% is just another way of expressing the number 1:

100% = 100(0.01) = 1

Converting a number to a percentage is easy, too. 

I can of course multiply anything I want by 100% and still have the same quantity I started with. Here's how to convert 0.0005 to a percentage:

0.0005 = 0.0005 × 1

= 0.0005 × 100%

= (0.0005 × 100)%

= 0.05% 

Yep, ISO 80000-1... I don't do everything it says, but this percentage thing was a nice revelation.

Version 1 Is Never the Answer

I create for a living. I make presentations and software and books... Even my hobbies are creation hobbies. I make tools and furnishings and, these days, “museum quality aviation replicas.”

Many of the things I’ve made have worked out really well, but one result I can count on: my version 1 of pretty much anything is rarely going to be a keeper. My good work is almost always a v2, or v3, or beyond. When I succeed, it’s usually more a persistence thing than a genius thing. 

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a 20-minute session I’ll present at P99Conf. Creating a presentation, for me, is a mostly private experience. I simulate in my mind what an audience might like to see. When either I think I’m finished, or I feel stuck, the next step in my process is to find an audience and go through the material. In other words, I use the material in front of other people.

Today, because I felt stuck, I showed my P99Conf material to the audience on my Tuesday Zoom call.

Here’s what I learned. The slides I had made were awful. Not nearly relevant enough to match my audience. I was already off the rails by the fourth slide. In the discussion though, the discussion helped to put me on the right track. The group was very helpful, identifying a couple of slides that were actually pretty good, and suggesting fixes for the worst parts. I went into the call, stuck. I came out inspired, ready to get back to work.

The thing that I suspect might surprise you, that did not surprise me, is how this process felt. I did not feel insulted or denigrated or “vulnerable.” The feelings I did have, because of the call, were these:

1. Gratitude – I was appreciative that the group would lend me their time
2. Motivation – I was inspired now, and interested; instead of stuck
3. Shame – I was a tiny bit embarrassed that my v1 hadn’t been better
4. Confidence – I knew my work was going to be better because of the review

I did not feel surprised, because I don’t expect any v1 to be a production release. Most of my v1’s I expect to throw away. A v1 is simply part of the process; you can’t have v2 without v1. More precisely, and this is the critical realization in the whole process: 

You can’t have v2 without feedback, and you can’t have feedback without v1.

My job, then, is not to try to create a v1 that is production worthy. It is to create a v1 that is feedback-worthy. And then go get the feedback. That feedback loop is essential. It’s not a step that I aspire to ever “optimize away.” It is a vital part of the process that I embrace.

If you’re interested in this story, then you might be interested in a paper I wrote in 2011, called “My Case for Agile.” 

Why the Oak Table Was So Great

This weekend, I watched a wonderful TEDx video by Barbara Sher, called “Isolation Is the Dream-Killer, Not Your Attitude.” Please watch this video. It’s 21 minutes, 18 seconds long.

It reminded me about what was so great about the Oak Table. That’s right: was. It’s not anymore.

Here’s what it was. People I admired, trusted, and liked would gather at a home in Denmark owned by a man named Mogens Nørgaard. Mogens is the kindest and most generous host I have ever encountered. He would give his whole home—every inch—to keep as many of us as he could, for a week, once or twice a year. Twenty, maybe thirty of us. We ate, drank, and slept, all for free, as much and for as long as we wanted. 

And the “us” in that sentence was no normal, regular, everyday “us.” It was Tom Kyte, Lex de Haan, Anjo Kolk, Jonathan Lewis, Graham Wood, Tanel Põder, Toon Koppelaars, Chris Antognini, Steve Adams, Stephan Haisley, James Morle, John Beresniewicz, Jože Senegačnik, Bryn Llewellyn, Tuomas Pystynen, Andy Zitelli, Johannes Djernæs, Michael Möller, Peter Gram, Dan Norris, Carel Jan-Engel, Pete Sharman, Tim Gorman, Kellyn Pot'Vin, Alex Gorbachev, Frits Hoogland, Karen Morton, Robyn Sands, Greg Rahn, and—my goodness—I’m leaving out even more people than I’m listing.

We spent a huge amount of our time sitting together at Mogens’s big oak table, which was big enough for about eight people. Or, in actuality, about twice that. We’d just work. And talk. If there wasn’t a meal on the table, then it would be filled with laptops and power cords covering every square inch. Oops, I mean millimeter. That table had millimeters.

And here’s what was so great about the Oak Table: you could say what you wanted—whatever it was!—and you could have it. You could just say your dream and your obstacle, and someone around the table would know how to make your dream come true.

It’s tricky even trying to remember good examples of people’s dreams, because I’m so far removed from it now. Some of them were nerdy things like, “I wonder how long an Oracle PARSE call would take if we did a 256-table join?” You’d hear, “Hmm, interesting. I think I have a test for that,” and then the next thing you know, Jonathan Lewis would be working on your problem. Or, “Hey, does anyone know how to do such-and-such in vim?” And Johannes Djernæs or Michael Möller would show you how easy it was.

I got into a career-saving conversation late one night with Robyn Sands. She had asked, “Is anybody else having trouble finding good PL/SQL developers? I can’t figure out where they are, if there even are any. Are there?” We talked for a while about why they were so scarce, and then I connected the dots that, hey, I have two superb PL/SQL developers at home on the bench, and I had been desperately trying to find them good work. The story that Robyn and I started some 3:00am over beers resulted in a superb consumer femtocell device for Robyn and a year’s worth of much-needed revenue for my tiny little team.

It was a world where you could have anything you want. Better yet, it was a world where you could dream properly. Today, in isolation, it’s hard to even dream right. After nearly two years of being locked away, I can barely conceive of a world that’s plentiful and joyous like those Oak Table years. I feel much smaller now. (Oh, and it wasn’t COVID-19 that killed that Oak Table experience. It died years before that—but, obviously, it’s a factor today.)

I want it back. I want my friends back. How are we going to do this?

The New Book Is Ready: “Faster: How to Optimize a System”

My new book called Faster: How to Optimize a System is ready! You can buy the PDF now at method-r.com. The hardcover format should be available at Amazon sometime around mid-January. The hardcover format is available now at Amazon. 

The physical book will be about 250 pages long, in a normal 6 × 9-inch business book format. There are 109 chapters, each of which conveys either a story or a lesson. Most of the lessons are only a couple pages long. A few of the stories are longer than that, but the story chapters are little adventures that read quickly.

So far, the people I’ve shown it to seem to like it. I can’t wait for you to see it.

Buy Faster:

• Faster (PDF)
• Faster (hardcover)

How I Spent My COVID Vacation

I haven’t blogged in, what, ...forever. A couple of years.

I have been writing, though. Just not here. A lot, actually. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve done during my lapse here:

• 2020-01-28 – “Solving the unsolvable performance problem” (2 pages)
• 2020-02-14 – “Method R Workbench: the pesky, intermittent performance problem” (video 4:57) 
• 2020-03-11 – “Preventing the post-production performance problem” (2 pages)
• 2020-04-23 – “Better testing, better risk reduction” (2 pages)
• 2020-05-07 – “Some things you probably didn’t know about tracing (Dallas edition)” (video 1:03:27)
• 2020-06-10 – “Death to the health check… Long live the health check” (2 pages)
• 2020-07-01 – Method R Workbench 9.0, a huge new release of my company’s flagship software system. Since 2001, this software has grown from a tkprof replacement to a system for mining and managing 10,000s of trace files at once.
• 2020-07-01 – “Method R Workbench 9: a whole new way to see Oracle performance” (video 5:36)
• 2020-08-26 – “Some things you probably didn’t know about tracing (Chicago edition)” (video 1:07:34)
• 2021-01-19 – CMG IMPACT 2021 “Three tricky performance problems solved with Oracle trace data” (ad video 6:12)
• 2021-08-09 – Method R Trace 21.2, a re-imagining of our trace file collector extension for Oracle SQL Developer.
• 2021-08-11 – “Method R Workbench video tips” (8 videos, each 2:21 or less)

But the biggest reason of all: I’ve spent every spare moment outside of my work obligations since March 2020…

 …writing a new book. 

The working title is How to Make Things Faster. It’s a book about making things (including software) go faster, for readers who aren’t necessarily technical. It will be about the size of a Dilbert book and contain pretty much everything I’ve ever learned in 30 years of work, both technical and political. The audience I’m aiming for is every IT professional, business leader, and consultant on Earth. I hope you’ll be able to find it in airport book stores next to Liz Wiseman and Dr. Phil.

The book is story-driven. You’ll get a fun story or two and then half a dozen bite-sized (~2½-page) chapters teaching lessons inspired by the stories, then a new story and more bite-sized lessons. I think that people will be able to enjoy reading the book both serially from front to back, and randomly two or three short chapters at a time.  

To ensure that the material would be accessible to non-technical readers, I hired a very special first reviewer for this project: my mom. My instructions to her were to identify anything that was either unclear or boring. Thanks to her help, other reviewers so far have characterized the book as “fun,” “lively,” “quick,” and “important.”

It’s been a lot of work, and there’s still a lot to do. I’m excited about it, and I hope you’ll be, too. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.

If you want a peek, you should join me next Thursday, October 7 at the Dallas Oracle Users Group’s “DOUG Training Day 2021,” which will convene live (!) in Grapevine, Texas, not too far from where I’m sitting right now. This will be an important event for me: it’ll be the first time I’ll have presented face-to-face with a live audience in nearly two years, and it’ll be the first time I’ll have presented material from the book. Plus, it’s a keynote for the event, so …the pressure’s on. :-)

If you’re interested in the sound of the material, please consider booking me for a workshop.

Sometimes the Simplest Things Are the Most Important

I didn’t ride in First Class a lot during my career, but I can remember one trip, I was sitting in seat 1B. Aisle seat, very front row. Right behind the lavatory bulkhead. The lady next to me in 1A was very nice, and we traded some stories.

I can remember telling her during dinner, wow, just look at us. Sitting in an aluminum tube going 500 miles per hour, 40,000 feet off the ground. It’s 50º below zero out there. Thousands of gallons of kerosene are burning in huge cans bolted to our wings, making it all go. Yet here we sit in complete comfort, enjoying a glass of wine and a steak dinner. And just three feet away from us in that lavatory right there, a grown man is sitting on a toilet.

I said, you know, out of all the inventions that have brought us to where we are here today, the very most important one is probably that wall.