I have been putting together a list of things my department has achieved in 2019.  It has cheered me up no end.  I've asked my colleagues to review the list...

To anyone who says "Why write tests?" I'd say the tests should capture desired system behaviour and those desired behaviours are a technical expression the business requirements of what was...

Hi David - you say:

'As an Aspie I communicate more fluently in writing than I would ever manage do face to face. '

Had to look that up, so that...

The best PM I ever worked with used to nudge meetings along, then thanked people for agreeing to own specific actions. If they challenged he'd replay the conversations in the...

I think this is a very important point and very easy to overlook.

If...

A lot of the stuff we take for granted these days just didn't exist or was in a fledgling state.

I wish I'd known about "clean code".  To be fair,...

I've got an advantage in an open plan office in that I'm deaf. Remove my hearing aids and unnecessary distractions vanish.

I print out my calendar for the day and quit...

I'm unconvinced whether AOG and other replication or scale out technology increase or decrease database availability. Designing the applications (and monitoring) to be more fault tolerant can increase system...

I don't think that you can get a 1 minute diagnosis on a newish system.

Continuous improvement and engineering excellence is the way to get there.  The cycle I would expect...

If you outsource you get a fixed scope and budget.

• The advantage is that you get exactly what you ask/pay for.
• The disadvantage is that you only get what you...

The page on the MongoDB site gives a 404.

MongoDB's strengths are also its weaknesses.

It doesn't care about the design of its collections. It'll punish poor design with poor performance but...

Most of the effort should go into thinking about what you want to test and why.

Does a test of an insert statement keep on working?  If NO then it could...

There are an increasing number of articles demonstrating that obfuscated data isn't as obfuscated as it might first appear.  The Netflix example being just one.

Tools like Redgate SqlGenerator can be...

I use virtual box and VMWare as some vendors (such as Teradata) supply virtual machines preconfigured.  Hortonworks and Cloudera both supplied their entire stacks as a VM.

I've had a few...

Those are incredibly important points.  Let us suppose that I have a product catalogue in a database and an external actor gains read access to that database.  The data they...