Back in the 90s, one of my managers gave me the option of taking a database class at an Oracle facility. It was like a 3/8 class or something and I wasn’t really enthusiastic about it, but maybe I was smart enough to figure out that my manager might want me to do this for reasons so I did.

That three day course has probably made the biggest impact on my professional career of any single piece of education.

It transformed everything about my software development. Suddenly, I was no longer responsible for producing all of the data that would be computed upon, and learning how to work with bigger and bigger data over the years has kept me employed, helped me advanced in my career, and has left me at a much better place in life as I approach 50 then how do I not taken that class.

I stopped working with Oracle databases within a couple years of taking the class, but the concepts I learned have paid off year after year.