No Laughing Matter

After years of working in the same area we get entrenched in our ways: go to the same user groups, seek bulletin boards strictly based on our area of expertise, etc. Even jokes become interspersed with professional terms making them obscure to the non-initiated. Only a data modeler might appreciate a pun such as: “An entity with a dangling relationship walks into a bar....” There is a real danger in such entrenchment. However, it does sometimes help to extend familiar concepts to a new area.

I wrote the above lines back in 2008, then I realized, no one was laughing at data modeling jokes; they were busy learning new concepts. Enterprise architecture and relational databases were “so yesterday”, and NoSQL was the new king. The article was never published as I redirected my energy as well.  Nowadays I sign for user groups but have to switch to yet another technology before being able to attend their next meeting.