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…
Most older companies and people default to closed. They build things in private and discuss what they’re doing behind closed doors. “Collaboration” usually means by invite only. Most newer companies and folks default to open. They build things out in public in their Github accounts while conducting discussions in public…
For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, James Anderson’s chosen theme is shipping database changes. Hoo, boy, have I got some scars to talk about. I’ve been a developer who had to deploy changes, a DBA who had to deploy other peoples’ changes, an open source maintainer, and even been a software vendor…
Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I…
Last month, I wrote about the pricing tests we ran in advance of our subscription training class launch. I explained why the winner was this one: Going into the launch, I had a lot of questions. Here’s how they turned out. Which option was the most popular? DBAs – 29% of buyers…
First, a few disclaimers. If I started today with a mission to build a $1mm/year e-commerce business, I probably wouldn’t start with WordPress – I’d probably go with a purpose-built e-commerce tool like Shopify. There are even folks out there who will tell you not to start a blog on it either,…