I've seen several tools that have started as side-of-desk development to make an individual's life easier.  What started as one person's "make my life easier" project grew to become something...

Walk a mile in someone else's shoes!

A senior infrastructure colleague used to describe people's attitude to infrastructure as being paid for in wooden dollars.  To non-infrastructure people, the real cost...

I worry that there has been a transition from putting in extra hours to get ahead to putting in extra hours just to stop falling behind.

An elite athlete will tell...

The thing with a P01 query is that there isn't much there to tune.

I worked on a system where the DB was under stress from 10s of thousands of calls...

Part of the road to AI adoption is learning what you need to do to build trust in it and which bits you can trust.  There are a lot of...

I work with Snowflake, where the billing is based on compute per minute, with the increasing warehouse sizes having a higher multiplication factor.

If we double the warehouse size, the price...

I worked on a project where the company had 2 big vendor contracts.  The sort where you sign up for 10 years for a figure that would keep someone in...

I worked at a company where the data analysts were paid significantly below market rate.

This became a growing staff retention problem, but HR rules made bulk pay rises for existing...

My youngest son was an engineer for a heritage railway company.  That was a varied job with tight deadlines and often required thinking fast on his feet.

My middle son is...

I recently took a series of Tableau TDS files and extracted their metadata in a form similar to INFORMATION_SCHEMA. This revealed what the schema, table and attributes were in the...

I found the readability tools in the article editor for this site useful, so my prompt is;

Suggest edits to my document to improve the Flesch reading score with a minimum...

I was fortunate that a previous employer sent me on the SQL Server 6.5 training courses (Admin and Developer).

I've used many DB platforms since, but SQL Server remains my favourite. ...

Years ago (pre-AI), I had a conversation with a Solutions Architect who had come up through the ranks of Java development.

They had joined a company where architects had to be...

The company I used to work for had 3 offices. The office I used to work for was a 45-mile each-way drive, and I never thought twice about it.  The...

I can remember Buck Woody describing the cloud as somebody else's computer.  I sometimes think that someone else is Don Vito Corleone.

37 Signals wrote about their repatriation from the...