Voice of the DBA

I had never heard of data debt until I saw this article on the topic. In reading it, I couldn't help thinking that most everyone has data debt, it creates inefficiencies, and it's unlikely we'll get …

If your job as a developer or DBA has been like mine, it's a constant stream of requests to change something, often without enough information and short deadlines that create a bit of stress. There's…

The short answer is of course, most of us can learn and improve our skills to become better developers, engineers, DBAs, etc. While we might not be able to become the 10x engineer that many aspire to…

There are many, many choices for cloud database services these days. I would hope everyone is aware of the various IaaS options in public clouds with EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine, and others. T…

Starbucks has too many order combinations. This article about the challenges for their new CEO notes there are over 170,000 combinations of things customers can order. As someone who has visited a st…

I caught this post about a career presentation from Kendra Little and it resonated a bit with me. The summary of the post (it's a bit long) is that there is valuable work that supports and benefits a…

For the last few years, we've seen no shortage of cloud migration stories and felt pressure from management who wanted to migrate our systems to the cloud. It seems that almost everyone I speak to ha…

Read the rest of The Learning Plan for 2025

I was chatting with a friend recently about routines and some of the helpful or silly things we do. I mentioned that when I played adult baseball, we often had Sunday morning games and a routine of m…

I went to San Francisco for Small Data SF, a conference sponsored by Mother Duck. The premise of the event was that smaller sets of data are both very useful and prevalent. The manifesto speaks to me…

When I was younger, I had a variety of jobs, but in most of the positions I had to work hard for stretches. Really hard, as in more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. Often as I was starting a ne…

I was asked this question recently: is it more likely that AI will replace humans or assist them in their work?

It's a good question. If you think about the way AI is being hyped in 2024, many people…

It seems there's quite a dichotomy in the technology workforce. On one hand I hear about the Great Resignation where many employees are leaving their jobs because of RTO (return to office) mandates o…

I was listening to someone at Microsoft talk about their product recently. I can't disclose which one it was, but lots of people use this product and are impacted by changes. The particular thing tha…