Where does the work come from and what the heck are you doing?

Most of my work comes in my email.  period.  a few phone calls, a few messages from the help desk.  But most of them, email.

When I sit down each day to work, I am monitoring different servers, services - technical things, and am waiting for someone to raise a flag.  Lots and lots of people in different systems carry around flags.  They are trying to do their job and sometimes bump into me.  When I am asked for something, its usually in the form of either

"whats wrong with this? ...."

or

"can we do this?"

Some of my customers are internal, lots of them.  Some are external, other school districts, parents, high school students taking on-line courses.

I am serving both people and servers during a typical day.

I could be working in a DB or on a web server.  I keep the DBs and the web servers healthy.  They are good at keeping themselves healthy, but still need maintenance and problem solving application.

I support teachers who teach high school courses on a moodle install.  I actually support 10 moodle instances. This service consumes 50 % of my overall work.  It used to be a little higher.  My colleague retired recently, now I am covering a lot of the things she did in support of other systems.

I also have to update the software on the servers - this is sometimes tricky, especially with complex software like moodle.  

I try to keep my minds eye in the sky.  This encourages a more global, complete picture kind of view.  I am better able to keep all the details in my head at once. When I can, keep the birds eye view!  Can see more from their.  When necessary, descend to the ground level to see much more detail, solve a problem and then ascend back to the birds eye view.

I remote into my web servers on a regular basis - weekly, at min.  Check their drive space, DB backups, services running etc.  I also check error logs and their overall size.  On a semi annual basis, I will rename the error logs to start with a fresh one.  I keep the error logs for a couple years. I spend a fair amount of time looking at site logs.  People will occasionally need clarification about little suzzie or a block of time when something may have happened.

I also keep analytic information for most of my servers.  I added tracker code a few years back, so I can get an accurate measure of server traffic over a period of time.  I will typically use this information when communicating with my customers or my boss - management likes this kind of stuff.

I spend a lot of time looking at data in the DBs.  Using mySQL or MSSQL.  Over time, I have created a bunch of snippets - little SQL code blocks - so I do not have to re-write that each time I want to use it.  I also do things like trim records from tables, add triggers to tables, create BU routines, compress and save and remove backup files after a certain amount of time.  I reset passwords, update data in multiple tables via scripts that I wrote and occasionally restore entire DBs.  I use phpMyAdmin as one of the primary tools.  I also use MySQL Workbench.

I also support a very old MS Access DB. I has a request recently to add more data to it.  I found myself thinking critically about the design of the data - its relationships to each other (new data) and to the existing data. In this DB, I spend a lot of time clarifying things with my customer.  Asking lots of questions about her intent with the data.  Eventually, I will actually add the tables - forms, reports, queries etc , to the Access DB.  You must design that well, or your DB application will fail or at least struggle and look bad.

A common task of late is updating pdfs on sites.  Different sites, CMSs, LMSs.  Same issue.  If the update requires HTML editing, people punt.  Mindful in each site to upload the file to a shared location, and copying/updating references to it.

I have a portal or marketing space where I still do development, using PHP. Development of web application content that gets its content from a DBs.  I used to do more development, using ColdFusion, javascript, SQL, CSS, HTML, PHP.

I probably spend just as much time in the DBs now as then, but not in the code.  I am now an equal administrator of the web and DB servers as support analyst for systems.

Support analyst for systems?  AKA, problem solver.  I solve problems.  Which takes me back to first point in this post - where and what are you doing.  I keep my job each year because I solve problems.  I do not create them, I solve them.

I am not a noise maker, but a noise reducer.

Keeping data and servers healthy, supporting people who feed and use those systems that you support.  helping them solve and work through problems as they use the system.