I was introduced to the example of the "Upthing explainer" in https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thing-Explainer-Complicated-Stuff-Simple/dp/1473620910

I loved the explanation of the Saturn V rocket (“U.S. Space Team’s Up Goer Five”): “Lots of fire comes...

A good friend told me years ago to think of a subscription to a quality training service, such as Pluralsight, as an investment in myself rather than a cost.  There...

I've been banging on about librarianship for years.

When I write pages on Confluence I have a number of standard templates, all of which have a header table with a minimum...

Rod, it may take me a while but I will put together some stuff for you and pass it on.

I think that is a good point.  Review what the developer has actually submitted, not other stuff.  Obviously there are some "It depends" scenarios.  Restricting the blast radius is a...

Where I work we have GitHub workflows.  These contain a number of things

• Linters/formatters
• Test suites with minimum code coverage requirements
• Docker container builders
• Docker vulnerability scanners

We are investigating

If you are a manager then the thing that lets you be autonomous is being able to trust your staff to be autonomous.

The danger I find with autonomy is that...

I came across a DB with thousands of tables.

A process was run where a master stored procedure was run that triggered another 10 stored procs.

Each stored proc generated a dynamically...

There's the old copy/paste from Stack Overflow joke.  Make sure you copy the solution, not the problem.

Taking Lawrence Philips metaphone as an example.  Metaphone 3 is commercial and sold...

People want to be data driven while the data confirms the opinions they hold already or provides the basis for an opinion they have not yet formed.

Treasure the highly paid/ranking...

I like being able to do things, even if it is at a basic level.  It helps me appreciate people who do it at an advanced level; to recognise their...

Eric, my experience has been that spinning rust and 256GB of RAM remains plenty for most applications and customers.

There's need, and then there's want.  No-one needs a Porsche, a lot...

One of my connections on LinkedIn is fond of pointing out that most data warehouses are below 1TB in size.

1 TB RAM used to be science fiction, now it can...

What goes around comes around.  The person you help today may remember you when they get their next position.  There is a pleasure to be had when you hear that...

I've recently had a complete failure of internet connectivity to my home.  As it was fibre broadband it also meant no landline telephone connectivity.  Most of my mobile phone usage...