My SMART objectives for 2018

Two years ago I wrote about why new year’s resolutions suck and why set myself some SMART objectives for 2016 instead. SMART objectives have the following five attributes: S pecifc M easurable A ttainable R ealistic T ime-related I’ve used SMART objectives in business because they are good for motivation and accountability. Most new year’s resolutions are broken because they fail to possess some of these attributes.…

DevOps, Culture and Trust

The slide above is from my DevOps 101 session. Sometimes people need reminding. DevOps is about five things: C – ulture a – utomation l – ean m – etrics s – haring First, and with a capital letter, comes Culture. Let’s talk about why. Dysfunctional teams As a consultant, the engagements I find frustrating are where a customer asks…

Doing the right thing

I enjoyed solving problems and helping people achieve great things. I got a lot of scope to achieve this in my role because our software was pretty awesome – but at the end of the day the measure of my success was how many licences I could help to sell. I wanted the measure of my success to be how…

Three People Who Made a Difference

This blog post is part of T-SQL Tuesday #96 – Three People Who Made a Difference, hosted by Ewald Cress. T-SQL Tuesday is an online blog party started by Adam Mechanic and you are invited to join in. A record of every previous T-SQL Tuesday is maintained by Steve Jones. Chris O’Dell (book|t) My very first speaking experience was a bit of…

Rolling back database changes

@_AlexYates_ Hi, Could you give insight how rollback work with Database CI/CD? — Gourav Sharma (@sharmagourav) October 30, 2017 A thorny topic. Rolling back code is easy. Normally you can just redeploy the old binaries and you’re done. Databases are more difficult – because data. The existence of persistent data has two significant consequences: You can’t just redeploy the entire…

T-SQL Tuesday #90 – You are doing “Continuous Integration” wrong!

It’s still Tuesday alright… In the USA anyway. (And by the USA I mean Hawaii.) This blog post is part of T-SQL Tuesday #90 – Shipping Database Changes, hosted by James Anderson. T-SQL Tuesday is an online blog party started by Adam Mechanic and you are invited to join in. A record of every previous T-SQL Tuesday is maintained by Steve Jones.…