The best manager I ever had was clear that she wasn't technical.  She was a person who had a calming influence and was a brilliant communicator at all levels, and...

For AI, the small stuff is the big stuff.

Team GB cycling under Sir David Brailsford had a philosophy called marginal gains.  Lots of 1% improvements accumulate into significant success.  Those...

I work in a consultancy that is a DataBricks partner and is focused on delivering data warehousing and AI solutions.  This is another platform for me and an opportunity to...

My next-door neighbour and his wife are both in their late 80s and have very little financially. They are always doing something or have something planned.  They have an ancient...

The 1st conferences I went to were SQLBits.  This gave me a very high and unrealistic expectation of what conferences could deliver.

People like Denny Cherry, Thomas Kesjer (to name but...

I can remember being amazed when PyCharm allowed me to rename a method on a class and it automatically updated my entire codebase with that alteration and did it correctly.

I...

I find AI provides me with 80% of what I need.  As a data engineer, this is fantastic.  I can't think of a programming aid that can boast the same...

I agree with David Poole except on his last point about the system being deprecated - I've heard that too many times and then seen the system still up...

For me, the factors that stop me from refactoring are

• I am not 100% sure of the blast radius of my change
• It requires commitment from others, too
• It detracts...

I read an article this morning about a consultancy that did a test with 5 teams of senior consultants.

• 4 were told that reports had been written by a team...

One of my bosses had an Outlook rule to delete any email where he was CC'd.

If he came back after vacation, he would go to his "unread" list.  CTRL+A, DEL. ...

General de Gaulle is reputed to have had two trays on his desk.  Instead of labelling then IN and OUT they were labelled

• Problems that will be solved by time

...

Yeah, once I came across the restriction in Oracle licensing that, if you virtualize your Oracle database on any hypervisor other than Oracles' own hypervisor, you had to license...

I now know why it is called a software tax.

Apparently, the UK tax code runs to 10s of thousands of pages.  There are tax accountants and specialist companies to help...

Wow.  This one falls in the category of those things that are obvious, but only after someone says it.

I do wonder if some of the momentum behind NOSQL and polyglot...