It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven years since I had an idea, booked a cruise, and emailed a few friends: I really didn’t expect anybody else to join in with me – there was a ton of risk, and there hadn’t been anything like that in the SQL…
For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Kendra Little asked us to share our interview patterns, anti-patterns, highs, and lows. Several years ago, I was talking to a prospective employer via phone, and things were sounding really interesting. I made it past the first couple rounds of remote interviews, and they wanted…
The nice folks over at the SQL Data Partners Podcast, Carlos & Steve, talked to me and Chrissy LeMaire (of DBAtools.io fame) recently about what it’s like to build an open source project with the community. Here’s the episode: Building Community Tools – and you can listen to it while…
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…