My last full-time job was manager of a university's database department. Ironically, I know very, very little about databases themselves. I'm no longer in charge of college databases, but I still do have a handful of MySQL servers that run my various Web applications. Apart from apt-get install, I have no idea how to make databases work. Thankfully, help is available.

I recently was talking to someone over IRC who was helping me with a PHP app that was giving me trouble. The extremely helpful individual asked me to let him know the value of a certain field in a record on my MySQL server. I embarrassingly admitted that I'd have to install something like PHPMyAdmin or Adminer in order to find that information.

Like most things these days, modern atmospheric science is all about big data.

I recently moved my personal website from GoDaddy to my home server. I have a business connection at my house, and my site gets little enough traffic that hosting at home on my static IP makes sense. Moving the files wasn't really difficult, I FTP'd them down from the old server, and SFTP'd them up to the new server. Moving the database was a bit more challenging, however.