Sometimes, trying to get stuff done is hard It wasn’t a short week. I had a lot of time to focus on some important projects, but my focus this week was a little lacklustre. I have been heading into the office a few days a week, but the rest of my team is working from home, so it feels a little lonely when the others groups have multiple people from their teams....

I had my birthday to celebrate on the weekend and so it was only a four-day week. Not too much exciting going on at work: Nightly ETL errors to fix Some code to disable nightly jobs built by other people if they fail too often without being fixed Trying to put the rest of our databases under git change automation Check our remaining databases to see who I missed for removing db_owner privileges Going through and remove all instances of individual users being create This seems to happen when someone who connects to the database through a group (an Active Directory group), that group has no default schema, and then the user creates an object without specifying a schema....

Goodbye part-time hours, it was nice knowing you Well, I enjoyed my two weeks of working half-days and going for long walks, but it’s back to regular hours. Interestingly, I was probably more than 50% productive with only 50% of the hours. It’s easier to focus for a shorter day, I think. I’m sure there is some optimal point in that curve. So, this week’s work was mostly a continuation of all the things I had started on during the previous fortnight....

Second week of part-time work Even though I was not on task-allocation duty this week, my second week of working 4 hour days seemed to have just as much admin work as last week. Still, I made progress on a few a important things. We’ve worked to reduce our nightly error list again, and I loaded some more tickets for bad data in the source system causing import errors. I was finally able to alter the necessary tables to change one of our column types to BIGINT in production, and then copy the Change Automation data from the test server so that our Octopus deploy wouldn’t lock the tables for hours again - the migration scripts were already flagged as done....

First week of part-time work So, I’ve now spent a week only working 4 hours a day instead of 8. It’s been pretty nice to not wake up to an alarm, start late, and finish my work on 2 PM. It’s given me more time for exercising, baking, and Warhammer painting, to name a few. I don’t know if I’m actually sleeping better, or my stomach feels any better, but it’s a much nicer state, mentally....