The MacGyver meme is making the rounds and I was kindly tagged by my
buddy, Thomas LaRock ( blog | twitter) -
that most famous SQLRockstar, who wisely chose to
tag me early in the process, lest he receive another round of disciplining like the last time.
I've also seen several other good MacGyver Moments from Aaron Bertrand (blog), David Stein also known as Made2Mentor ( blog | twitter ),
and Denny Cherry also known as MrDenny (blog). I'm looking forward to reading the bloggers
that they tagged to see what others in our community have cooked up. In
case you haven't heard, your MacGyver Moments are those times when you
improvised an excellent solution to a problem using non-traditional
materials, techniques, or tools - like the time I repaired my flux
capacitor using bailing wire, chewing gum, the tears of Glenn Beck, and
the sweat of a master ninja.
I'm a bit more like MacGruber than MacGyver
Necessity
is the Mutha of Invention
Believe it or not, I've got a long history of doing things MacGyver
style. To begin with, I grew up without two nickels to rub together.
That means you have to improvise - a lot. Once I hit teenage
years, I was constantly tinkering with all things mechanical and
electrical trying to stretch their useful lifespan beyond any conception
of "reasonable use", much like my teenage dating experiences. For
example, I once cobbled together garage workshop fan from the leftover
parts of an electric pencil sharpener, a frame made of bailing wire
(yes, bailing wire), solder, and handmade cardboard fan blades.
Shamefully, it did not include any duct tape. But it worked great! I
had to do that stuff all the time out of necessity, such as with my
series of malfunctioning cars and dodgy electronics. Hey, my MacGyver
experiences also taught me that admitting to owning a "Plymouth Horizon"
is, when trying to impress the ladies, about the same as sporting a 4"
gravy stain on your "Howling Wolf" t-shirt.
Aaaah, the Plymouth - a vehicle truly designed somewhere between the
third and fifth ring of Hades. I can't even count the number of
jury-rigged fixes I put into that thing. One that stands out clearly,
because my friends used this to prank me on several occasions, was the
repair to the broken door handle on the driver's side. Since I couldn't
afford replacement parts, I used bailing wire (I could always count on
you, my old friend) fixed to the inner locking mechanism and a key ring
as a handle dangling invisibly from the bottom door sill. About a year
after that (around 1986 or so), I discovered junk yards and was able to
rip a barely used mechanism from a Dodge of the same body style for $3.
I became pretty well known at those junk yards - I blame Chrysler.
Quality was not job 1 in those days.
Creativity and Innovation can be like that. No
buck teeth in my case.
Geek
Creativity
Like my friend Brent Ozar, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons
(D&D) growing up. I was always the "DM", that is, the guy who
administrated the game, while all my friends played characters on the
adventure. But D&D, like many good products, was designed to suck
the dollars right out of your product by producing an endless stream of new adventures to play and
supplements to purchase. I, on the other hand, wasn't gonna spend a
dime of my money on that. So I created my own adventures (called
modules). As I got better, I constructed campaigns (i.e a related sets
of modules) and from that, a related set of campaigns into an entire
Tolkien-like world (this is called a mileau) which I called Aquilonia.
My buddies loved it and, realizing that bragging about geekness creates
an inverse coolness effect, can brag that I won some contests at
regional conventions for game design.
Code
Creativity
Back in the day, I remember wondering if I should stop doing
things differently than my buddies and peers. For example, we were
assigned to write a program that would find the day of the week based on
passing in any pre-Y2K date in one of my COBOL college courses. (No
mocking please - COBOL was big back then). Everyone in the class, and I
mean everyone, wrote very large programs that delivered the day of the
week through very large (and, imo, cumbersome) IF-THEN-ELSE structures.
My program had two elegant WHILE loops and thirty-eight lines of code
based on the premise that our calendar repeats every 14 years and that
all months contain at least 28 days and at most 31 days. I got an A+.
SQL
Server Improvisation
Back when my IT shop had bragging privileges as one of the largest
enterprise installations of Microsoft SQL Server (in the v6.0 and v6.5
days), we were faced with implementing some sort of way to do
bi-directional replication. The product did a good job of standard
transactional replication, but bi-directional replication was only
possible through a major rewrite of the application. Instead, we cooked
up a way to make it work - SQL Server would allow us do outward
transactional replication as the transactions occurred. We were able to
bring the data back by also enabling sync replication (which is
non-transactional) every evening. Thus, we got bi-directional data
flows without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party
tools. (I must also give kudos to the team I worked with and who made
this solution work, particularly Dwayne Seiber, who is still lead DBA
there.)
Summary
Creativity, innovation, and improvisation are what you make of them.
You must make the choice to pursue them. Yes, necessity often forces
to seek out MacGyver moments. So does laziness in some cases. How many
master developers do you know who'll work very hard to fully
conceptualize their program before starting to write it, saving time in
the long run. Now that's creative laziness! But MacGyver moments also
stretch our abilities and call us to higher achievements.