Take A Vote and Accept Your Loss

Learning to make decisions and then get work done is important to Steve. Read his thoughts today on many of the decisions software teams need to make.

Fixing Poor Programming Practices

Today Steve has a few stories of how he's fixed poor programming practices and asks you to share your own.

Five database DevOps practices for boosting team productivity

Speed of delivery and protecting data can often feel incompatible, but there are industry-proven database DevOps practices that bring them together in harmony.

Across each of these five key practices, there’s a theme of removing barriers and cognitive load for teams; but crucially, they are also putting safeguards in place to reduce the risks to production environments.

When Work Isn't Done

Today Steve looks at the case when one software developer finishes their work, but another doesn't. The challenge of reordering work is something that happens more and more as teams struggle to coordinate their efforts.

The Code Review Checklist

Code reviews are a part of many software development processes, but not used that often with database work. Today Steve has a few thoughts and asks if you have any formal code review process.

You Always Have a Software Pipeline

If you build software for customers, you have a pipeline. It might not be good, but you have one. Steve recommends you work to make sure this is a repeatable, reliable pipeline.

Modern Development

In some ways, development tasks haven't changed much in decades, but in others the way we build software has changed a lot, especially with regards to data.

The Importance of Thick Clients

Steve prefers thick client tools for working with his databases.

Working around schema drift in SQL Server

At Stack Overflow, our environment has multiple implementations of a largely – but not 100% – identical schema. (By “schema,” I mostly mean the set of tables within a database.) I sometimes need to retrieve or update data across a large number of sites. Let’s say, pulling or removing information from the Users table, and related tables, across all of our databases.

Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion

Communication can be challenging when we don't work closely with others. Steve draws a comparison with a popular children's show in the US.