Disclaimer It’s always the case that my words are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my company. This post is intended as an honest description of a complicated and difficult project and a celebration of its eventual success. Also, this post is in no way related to my previous post. In fact, I was planning to publish this…
Observations
DevOps vs continuous delivery
Two terms I love. Two terms that are often used interchangeably. Two terms that are in danger of becoming buzzwords… like agile. I don’t want that to happen. In order to avoid these terms going the way of agile, we need to understand exactly what they mean. We also need to understand what makes them different and unique from each…
“DevOps teams”
Redgate has a DevOps team. They do a good job. For the record, Redgate is not the company that inspired this blog post. The company that did shall remain nameless. I don’t have a problem with “DevOps teams” or “DevOps engineers”… as long as they are evangelists – and not button pushers, build masters or release engineers with added buzzwords.…
The DBA is dead – long live the NotCalledDBA! (Apparently.)
Sorry I’ve not posted for a while. Much travel for work. Behind on study. Being sued by a scam website. You know – the usual. But I read a thing – and I laughed – and I got fired up – and now I want to write a thing. Thank you to the Scary DBA (b|t) and the DevOps DBA…
Alex Wilson at /dev/winter 2015: What can DevOps learn from XP?
Yesterday I travelled all the way to the dev/winter/ conference in Cambridge (UK) to speak about database CD and learn what I could from the other (more talented) speakers. Great sessions, friendly vibe, great food (and beer)… free. Highly recommended if you are in the area. 🙂 One of my favourite sessions was by Alex Wilson of Unruly (b|t). He…
The technical debt singularity
As always, Wikipedia does a pretty good job of defining well established ideas and the hypothesis of the technological singularity is no different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity While the term ‘technological singularity’ is credited to Von Neumann in 1958, my favourite definition of the singularity (for the purposes of this blog post and despite the fact he never actually used the word) was…
The story behind SQL Lighthouse: An account of an agile project
Edit: Please note that since writing SQL Lighthouse has been renamed DLM Dashboard. *** Last week, at SQL in the City London, Red Gate announced the release of a new tool, SQL Lighthouse. SQL Lighthouse is product for monitoring the database environments in your pipeline for changes or ‘drift’. In this post I’m not going to focus on the product’s…
Tech coffee: A successful protocol for data transfer between human brains
This week Sean Newham (@SeanNewham) and I are visiting a company called Farm Credit Services of America. Last night a bunch of them, including John Morehouse (@SqlrUs), their production DBA, took us out to dinner and we were discussing how DBAs and developers should be better at working together. They play different but important roles and both are necessary in…
Reflecting on Agile on the Beach (part one): Defining “Agile”
In this post I am going to mention several talks from Agile on the Beach. You can get a summary of the talks by reading my notes here. You can also watch the full videos here. * A couple of weeks ago I went to Agile on the Beach and I did my best to live-blog my notes from the…
Liveblogging from Agile on the Beach
Please excuse typo’s, grammatical errors, poor style/structure and general rough-ness. I’m continuously deploying my updates to live whilst attending sessions at Agile on the Beach… I’ve tried to record the sessions accurately, without personal embellishment. Be warned: This post is very long. You should use the links below to click ahead to my notes on the sessions that sound interesting…