|
|
|
personnel Eureka
Monday, October 3 2016
At the recent retreat in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, one of the young women (Te) working in fundraising was helping IT take our group photos, some of which inevitably ended up on Facebook. One featured Te photobombing us in the foreground, and in the comments attached to it, Ni in IT jokingly suggested we would be taking Te for our group. This put an idea in my head. Fundraising wants to hire a database expert of their own (instead of mostly using me), but it's not easy to find people with much computer knowledge who are morally committed to the mission of The Organization, and it's even harder if an additional restriction is that the person be local to Los Angeles (a requirement the head of fundraising has been insisting on). But even if they were to find a perfect backend developer, it would take time to teach that person how the particulars of our database are organized. It might actually be easier to teach someone who already knows how it is organized SQL. That someone is Te. I work with her a lot, and I know her to be highly-competent and a fast learner. SQL, meanwhile, is a computer language with an unusually shallow learning curve. (The first time I was exposed to it, I remember thinking, "Really, that's all it is?"). If I could make a little place where she could type in free-form SQL queries and get results in a responsive way, I think she would feel very empowered by a little SQL knowledge and might just learn the rest on her own. This would require adding free-form SQL capabilities and HTML output to my reporting tool.
When I brought the idea up with my colleagues in the IT team, they didn't initially think I was serious, but then I made my case. My argument was a persuasive one, and minds were changed.
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?161003 feedback
previous | next |
