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...

In the past year, I've reconnected with some ex-colleagues from decades ago whom I thought I'd never see again.

It has been both a surprise and a pleasure.

I asked Claude to investigate a hunch about a code base and catalogue the results.  I could have done this manually, but it would have taken days, if not weeks,...

I'm watching a serverless cloud data warehouse issue at the moment, where the data is growing naturally, and the costs are slowly creeping up because the time to process is...

When I was in my 20s, I worked with a bloke who had retired twice, got bored twice and gone back to work each time.  He was full of wisdom. ...

For me, AI isn't the problem; it's the straw that breaks the donkey's back. The amount and size of change that has happened in the past few years is phenomenal,...

I've found that as long as things cost what they are expected to cost, within a given tolerance, the powers that be don't care.

The cost savings have to be substantial...

I've got a situation at present where a BI product has an API and a UI that uses the API.

The API has "features", as in looks like a bug, behaves...

In the 1st successful case Claude was told that I had compiled Terraform from source code for the specific version in question. When running terraform apply I got {specific error}.

Claude...

I had to do some work on an old Terraform code base.  The particular version of Terraform has to be built from source code.  I followed the instructions to set...

The mechanics for this are relatively easy.  The hard bit was the thinking to make it relatively easy.

We have a small CI/CD database that holds some data that we expect...

There have been supply chain attacks on PyPi that have resulted in popular Python packages being compromised.  Getting the timing right for patching is vital

• Too quick = Risk exposure...