Whiling away an afternoon, thinking

Posted on March 17, 2026 by way0utwest

I come to Heathrow often. Today is likely somewhere close to 60 trips to this airport in my lifetime. After over 19 years of working with Redgate (plus a trip in college), this is the airport I’ve visited most outside of Denver (my home).

This is the view outside my hotel window. You can see an A320 (or a Boeing 737) taking off. This is a good sized plane I fly all over the US. It is about 35 meters (100ft) wide and carries 150-180 people.

As it took off beside the A380 pulling into the terminal, it looked like a toy plane. Those things are massive.

20260317_151547

I’ve stayed here a few times after landing to try and get some work done, and to check in early to take a nap. I landed at 10am after flying all night, and I could use some rest. Rather than heading into London and getting stuck sitting in a restaurant waiting to check in, I booked a room here. Already had a nap and ready to work.

Thinking Time

This is good thinking time, which is sometimes rare to get. Years ago on one of our multi-times-a-week SQL Server Central calls, Andy told me that he needed time to think about his work as a DBA and manager of others. Time to just consider how things are going, why things are going well or not, and which direction to go.

Time just thinking about a topic.

It has stuck with me all these years that time to just think is important, and it helps me clarify how I view things.

It’s often how I get editorials written. Turning vague ideas into something concrete. I’ll look at a note I’ve made or re-read something and think about it. When inspiration strikes, I’ll start writing.

Today I was thinking, watching planes take off when I realized I hadn’t seen a plane in awhile. Normally they take off around every 45s at LHR. Then I saw this little vehicle doing down the runway, something I’ve never seem.

20260317_151301

I watched for a few minutes and realized there was another one coming the other way. They met in the middle and circled a few times before leaving the runway.

20260317_151335

I’m sure this is some FOD (Foreign Object Detection) process looking for pieces that might have fallen off planes (yikes) or vehicles, or somewhere. A pilot friend said that this is something that is done in the military, sometimes by grunts walking the runway looking for something that might get pulled into a jet engine.

In any case, it was something new and unusual and inspired me.

I don’t know that everyone needs thinking time, but if you manage or lead or are trying to develop strategy, I do believe you need some quiet thinking time when you’re not really getting anything done, but just thinking about work.

Glad that I took the time today and grateful to have the opportunity.

Now back to writing about AI and other things impacting the data professional.


Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Breaking Down Your Work

Posted on March 16, 2026 by way0utwest

I saw an interesting LinkedIn post on Kyler Murray and how he goes about approaching the game of American football. I don’t know if this meme is true, but certainly, his efforts to prepare have been a reported issue during Murray’s career. The post actually deals with sales and analyzing the reasons for deal success or failure, something I’ve been able to witness at Redgate the last few years. It’s interesting to me to see the sales process examined, though I don’t make sales.

Incidentally, one of the comments is one I appreciate, referencing Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality. I like the approach of working and asking questions to become better.

Most of us technical people aren’t thinking of sales, but do we break down and re-examine how we do our jobs? Do we aim to improve the skills we have and develop more depth in the areas we work? I know lots of technical people like learning new skills, but is looking at the improvement (or refinement) of existing skills on your list?

My experience has been that most people don’t look to grow deeper in many ways. They learn a thing and then often use that skill, but don’t often re-examine to see if they could actually do that thing in a new way. Technology changes, and it’s easy to think that the way you write SQL or build servers or implement security is good enough. It can pay to not only learn new things, but re-examine your existing patterns and practices to see if there are better ways to accomplish those tasks.

This is where the one year of experience repeated ten times comes about with candidates who don’t interview well. They’ve been repeating patterns without improving them.

I promote the idea of regularly improving your skills, sharpening your tools, and growing your abilities in a way that provides value for your employer and ensures you have a successful career.

This is going to be more important in the future, especially with AI impacting the way many managers view technical work.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

Posted in Editorial | Tagged | Leave a comment

Multiple Deployment Processes

Posted on March 13, 2026 by way0utwest

We had a Simple Talks podcast recently where we discussed roll forward vs roll back. You can watch the episode and listen to our thoughts, but one interesting place was when we talked about deployments. Grant mentioned that he deployed from version control/source control at a previous employer. I asked him whether he did that for every system.

His response: “Well, …”

He admitted that most, but not all, databases came from a controlled source. There were some systems that had a more ad hoc change process. I wonder how many of you have consistent processes throughout your organization. I suspect not many of you do, especially if an organization isn’t small. Often, different groups and applications are in a constant state of flux, with lots of different processes and protocols.

Some groups are more mature and have stable staff who expect to deploy changes in a certain way. This might be on a known cadence, with documents or processes in place already. Others applications might have been developed quickly; perhaps they are newer and use more automation to deploy changes. Some might even use things like packages from an ORM or a vendor that takes control of database changes away from anyone managing the database. Does anyone deal with Spring Boot and very optimistic developers?

I wonder how many of you have a consistent process for promoting database code to production across all your teams. Maybe 80% is a better metric, as this accounts for those groups severely limited by legacy technology or those that might be experimenting with new ways of working.

Even those companies that have platform engineering groups in place to ease the flow for both developers and operations often aren’t consistent throughout the organization. Often, getting everyone to adopt a standard is hard and takes time.

That might be the biggest challenge with standardizing database deployments: time. Organizations grow and change, new technologies come, and by the time we think we’ve gotten everyone to agree to change, who everyone is has changed. We have someone or something new, and we’re forever chasing standardization. Even when we might have a great DevOps process or a platform engineering team for software, we don’t do this for databases.

I believe having a consistent, standardized process is a worthwhile goal, but one where 80% success is probably good enough in most organizations. If you can get most teams to follow the same process, you’ll increase efficiencies and ensure a better software development life cycle.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

Posted in Editorial | Tagged | Leave a comment

Advice I Like: Knots

Posted on March 13, 2026 by way0utwest

Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand. For the rest of your life, you’ll use this knot more times than you would ever believe.” – from Excellent Advice for Living

I like this advice, not because I use this know a lot, but because there are things you should be able to do in the physical world, and some self-reliance and ability is handy.

For the record I do use bowlines regularly around the ranch, but we use some horseman’s slipknots (manger tie) and square knots more.

In my life, there are small skills like this that get used over and over. We still live in the physical world, and not only are physical skills useful, but there is a lot of satisfaction from being able to accomplish something yourself.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , | Leave a comment