Both -- there is so much to learn and forget -- practice and note taking is essential.
If a book has 30 pages in a chapter, I'll always have about 2 pages of notes at the end of it. So at the end of a book I usually have a 24 page mini-book/doc that I can refresh my memory quickly. In fact, I read these mini-books all the time when I'm stuck in traffic or waiting on anything.
Ran alter table sql that changed the column type from money to int causing the db to round the values in the column, dropping the cent values from all line-items -- had to restore values from backup.
I remember hearing a story on my internship that a previous admin (departed before I joined) did something similar, but intentionally.
The company printed labels using fully computerised process machines. Labels for things like medicine bottles etc. So obviously they need a lot of precision.
Now, the company had been an independent UK firm for many years, but had recently been acquired by a US company doing similar things.
The admin (of all trades, sysadmin, DBA, etc.) was going through the DB and noticed how the label dimensions were stored to something silly like 6 decimal places. In the UK, we were using millimeters. That kind of precision was never needed nor used, so the admin cut the column down, dropping the decimals.
Except he wasn't on the UK server. He was on the US server.
And since the US used inches, even 0.1 of an inch is quite a considerable difference for printing a small label!!
He went home for the weekend, the Americans came in and outright panicked when their process machines had useless data. My supervisor got phoned up late at night and had to remote in and restore the values from backups.
Now, imagine how angry he was when the admin did exactly the same thing the following Monday!!
Yeah the black hole problem is definitely something a lot of people bump into. I hadn't actually come across Flipboard before, seems similar to Pinterest.
This isn't something I'd use myself -- but I just wanted to say 'great job' with the onboarding, I immediately got the use-case after looking at the 'How's it work' instructions.
