The Mythical Bus Accident

Posted on July 17, 2026 by way0utwest

What if I got hit by a bus?

I’m sure many of you have heard some variation of this, or used it, or maybe your boss told you to be ready in case you (or someone more important) gets hit by that vehicle. This is the “bus factor,” and it’s often used in reference to preparation for unforeseen events. Not literally someone getting hit by a bus, but perhaps a sudden accident that takes someone away from work (hopefully not fatal). Perhaps it’s someone leaving for a new job. Maybe it’s retirement, which is something my boss and I at Redgate chat about periodically.

Don’t worry, I’m not planning on retiring anytime soon. I expect to work until at least 2033 and possibly longer. Likely longer, I’m a weird work-a-holic in some ways, and I love my job.

Recently, Rob Sewell wrote about a DR plan for his life, and specifically about his setup in case his wife needs to understand what’s running. I certainly don’t have the automation or complex computer setup he does. In fact, none of my computers really need to be running for anything on the ranch to function.

However, there is a lot of important data.

If you think about how embedded your life is with digital assets, you’ll realize quickly that if you were to get hit by the mythical bus, a lot of stuff might disappear. Most won’t matter, but your partner/spouse/children/parents might care about some. They might really care about a few items.

There will be passwords to banks, the locations of photos, videos, and other memories. There will be documents you’ve kept on maintenance, or manuals on how something works, or maybe it’s just the various email (and social) accounts you have. You might not care, but the person behind you might feel the need, and want to, notify your friends and coworkers that you’re gone. Maybe your family wants to know how to keep your site alive (I still miss Tom and re-read his work occasionally).

This isn’t to be morbid or worry you, but the planning you might undertake for your life is a lot like the planning that you should be doing at work for your job. Others should be able to take over for you (especially on vacations), and a guide to how you’ve solved problems, patched over issues, and built scripts that run rarely but reliably for some forgotten reason. Those items should be available to others. Certainly, your IT staff can give someone else access, but will those others know what to do with that access?

I’ve documented a bunch of processes for SQL Server Central. Mostly so I can go on sabbatical and not worry, but also so that others can share the load. I’ve given away some of my work to others, I’ve been lucky to have others volunteer (volun-told) to help, and I realize as I write this, I likely need to update some docs. Not a fun task, but my buddy Claude can likely help me. And he will.

Planning for the future is prudent, it’s respectful to others, and it’s a common courtesy. I used to think the future was a long way off, but as I age, I realize it’s closer than I think. Planning for the future is a good idea, and it’s something I need to ensure I update every so often, to help the others in my life.

Steve Jones

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

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

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Moving on from Tesla

Posted on July 17, 2026 by way0utwest

We decided to sell our Tesla Model Y. It’s been almost 5 years, and it’s (still) an amazing car. My wife, however, wants something more luxurious. As cool of a car as it is, and how well it performs, it’s not luxurious inside. The ride can be stiff, the seats are good, not great, and we’re ready for something else.

We’ve been testing a few different SUVs, as we don’t want anything smaller than the Model Y. We ended up choosing a Lucid Gravity, which feels like an advanced version of a Tesla in many ways. It doesn’t self-drive, but it’s a very, very nice car inside and drives like a computer.

A luxury computer that is very comfortable.

What’s amazing is I listed the Tesla and had 6 people ping me that day for the car. I showed it to one and he liked it, so we’re in the process of getting paperwork done. I haven’t sold a car in a long time that had a loan, and I’m surprised at the weird challenges that this entails.

It’s been 4.8 years with the Model Y and it’s still an amazing car. No real problems with it, it’s performed well, and the battery health is still at 88%. What’s even more amazing is that moving to 18” wheels netted me better performance than I ever had, with my last, around town 200 miles showing 205Wh/mi. Kind of amazing.

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The Book of Redgate: Products

Posted on July 17, 2026 by way0utwest

We are product focused at Redgate Software. Here is another of our values that focused on this:

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The text on the next page is:

Shipping something amazing is better than creating something average and to budget and on time. We cannot market, sell, manage or account our way to success.

We have tried to do that. I’ve used many of our products before coming to work for Redgate. My former partners at SQL Server Central used them extensively as well. Since I have been an employee, I’ve worked with a lot of customers who constantly find value in our products.

I think we’ve succeeded, and I think that us trying to build useful software is what has helped. My fellow advocates and I constantly try to bring the voice of the customer to Redgate so that our engineers better understand your challenges. This helps them build things that are useful.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

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A Security and AI Fail

Posted on July 15, 2026 by way0utwest

The AI boom is still growing like crazy. Many organizations are trying to learn how they can use AI to improve operations and become more efficient at a reasonable cost. Plenty of companies are spending crazy amounts of AI tokens, sometimes blowing their yearly budgets in months and not necessarily receiving substantial value back. Some companies are trying to train AIs to understand their operations and perhaps reduce their other costs, primarily labor. Still others are tiptoeing in the waters of AI LLM use and conducting smaller experiments, with limited access to AI technology.

Meta has been a company at the forefront of trying to train AI based on the work employees already perform. There has been plenty of concern that their efforts are designed to lower headcount and replace humans with AI agents. That might or might not work, though I don’t expect a lot of organizations to do this. It’s likely harder than any of the hype suggests, and most organizations have much more complex types of operations than Meta.

However, in collecting this data, Meta has had other issues. Notably, they have had security problems with all the data they are trying to collect. Some of this data was exposed and they have paused the data collection for now. They were trying to move fast, likely cutting corners or not thinking things completely through. They created these issues. Hackers are constantly looking for holes and the quicker anyone moves to change their software and processes, the more likely that security holes slip by.

Plus, data governance and protection is hard. Most developers really don’t think through data protection and security well. They’re focused on software and assume the data store (RDBMS, NoSQL, data lake, etc.) is handled by someone else.

Data is hard. Especially at scale.

While I’m sure most companies aren’t looking to track employees’ every move (which is a big uplift), they will be trying to move data around and use it for AI purposes. With RAG, with model training, with who knows how, but they are just as likely to cause a security incident if they are not careful.

Think data governance and data security early. Develop patterns with DBAs and InfoSec alongside software engineers to ensure that as you stand up new agents, systems, and data stores, you aren’t asking for trouble. Re-using existing data is fine, but if you assume that your development team automatically knows about data security, you’re going to have issues. They likely don’t, and if you (or they) think they do, make them prove it.

AI is amazing, but it’s also easy to mess up the data part of this. Everyone I deal with at Redgate Software is concerned about data governance, and more so all the time. For good reason. Meta made the headlines, but a lot of us aren’t better at securing our systems. We just aren’t as much of a media target.

Steve Jones

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

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

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