What lockdown left time to read
A data warehouse, an economist and a psychologist. The year the time given back by the absence of commuting went into books.
The year ends indoors. Engagements run remotely, training rooms are shut, and the time no longer spent commuting goes somewhere. It is a piece of luck worth naming as such: not everybody got a studious 2020. The year ahead looks like a return to the collective, and I do not yet know whether that concentration survives it.
The only book that explains the billing model alongside the engine, and the two are decided together. What it really teaches is why a query is expensive, which no documentation says as plainly.
The counterweight of the year. It reminds you that the rational agent our dashboards rest on is a working assumption, not a description of the world: useful to anyone spending their days optimising costs.
The description of what makes a task absorbing: hard but reachable, a clear goal, immediate feedback. Three things an organisation supplies or destroys, and which any programmer recognises at once.