In the startup world, the general advice is for founders to pay themselves $50k-$100k/year until they get outside funding. Your net worth ends up higher – but only if you hustle and grow the value of your company, since your net work mostly consists of your ownership stake. When you…
In the last couple of posts in my dream car garage series, I’ve kept a low budget. Screw that – let’s spend some money. Let’s pretend we’ve hit the big time, maybe sold the company for a few million bucks, and it’s time to build a really classic garage to…
Careful observers may have noticed a few little icons at the top of Books Online pages recently: The little round contributors icons take you to their Github profiles, like Rick Byham’s. The all link – well, that doesn’t actually work, because it goes here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/sql-docs-pr/blob/live/docs/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2017.md Which isn’t visible to the…
As I was prepping for SQLSaturday Houston, I realized it’s been two years since I updated my About-Me slide at the start of my presentations. Here’s what it was for quite a while: This time around, I decided to start from scratch and ask: Who am I writing this for? Like…
If you’re thinking about going freelance, here’s a handy Freelance Calculator by Chelsea Shaw (@chelshaw). See the Pen Freelance Calculator by Chelsea (@chelshaw) on CodePen. (Big props to Chelsea – I originally just sketched out the UI, and she knocked out all the code! You readers are amazing.) Hours per…
Last weekend, I had the privilege of speaking at SQLSaturday Houston. Allen Kinsel, Devon Leann, Joe Hellsten, and so many more volunteers did a fantastic job of putting on a totally free event for hundreds of attendees. I’ve never organized one of these events myself – I’m just not that…
For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Grant Fritchey’s topic is Databases and DevOps. Summary: you should skim this free online book to see inspiring ideas of how administration works at scale, although don’t expect to put the practices into place without management buy-in. Let’s get one thing out of the way…
A couple years ago, I mentioned that I failed high school psychology because I didn’t show up to class often enough. In high school, they actually track your attendance. In college, not so much – and that came with disastrous consequences for me. I had kind of an odd curse:…
Last week, I designed my dream 4-car, $100k garage. This week, I’m cutting the budget in half. Now, I know what you’re thinking: if you only have $50k to spend on collector cars, why wouldn’t you just buy one awesome car, and be done with it? Well, because if you only…
I’ve always loved cars, but as a telecommuter living in urban Chicago, I have near-zero need for one. I bought an Audi RS6, and absolutely adored it, but pretty quickly realized I had no need for yet another car – especially not one that I anguished over every time it got…