A Las Vegas Break

Posted on April 3, 2026 by way0utwest

Only a little break for me. I’m actually heading to Las Vegas today for  the Red Rock Rave volleyball tournament with a team of 13 year olds. We’ve been pushing them at practice for a few weeks, so hopefully they’re ready to compete and we break into the top half tomorrow.

That’s usually our goal as the teams I coach aren’t often the top athletes in Colorado. If we finish 1st or 2nd in our pool tomorrow, then we’ll be in the top half for Sunday and Monday. We did this at Crossroads in Jan and the RMR Showdown in Feb. The second day can get rough, but we’re learning and improving each time.

The tournament finished Monday and my wife and I are staying until Tues to get a little break. During tournament days, we’re very busy and it’s real work. We don’t get a lot of down time, and we are constantly searching for ways we can coach better and help the team improve. Plus the 15 year olds from our club are going and we coached 3 of those girls at 13, so we’ll stick around and watch them after we’re done playing.

It’s great to get away from technology and do something in the real world. I always like those moments when I get away from computers, and I’m looking forward to the break.

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AI Database Central

Posted on April 1, 2026 by way0utwest

SQL Server Central has been a great success over the last 25 years. We’ve helped a lot of people improve their careers with the Microsoft Data Platform, primarily SQL Server, but we’ve published articles on other aspects of databases, including other platforms. I wrote a bit about the history of the site last month, with a few stories in various pieces. We even got Brian Knight to contribute a piece on what the site meant to him.

Over the years, we experimented with trying to get an SSIS Central or a SSRS Central off the ground. However, we struggled to find other people who would have been willing to partner with us to provide content and answer questions. Eventually, we gave up, though I wish today we’d have pushed forward with a PostgreSQL Central site a few years back.

However, we’re moving forward with AI Database Central next week. This is an experiment that will look to gather lots of articles and news on how AI technology can be used to work with databases. Our goal is to build a site that showcases some of the ways in which AI works well. To handle the load of producing articles, we’ve got a very modern take.

We’re setting up a Clawdbot system that will read existing articles and questions and then produce its own articles based on the knowledge of what AIs have about database technology. For every article here on SQL Server, we’ll get a series of articles that cover the same topic on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB to start. We’ll turn the AI agents loose on more platforms over time, but our hope is that this will provide an exhaustive body of knowledge that other data professionals and AI agents can use. We’ll even have an MCP server available.

Of course, we will take submissions, which AI agents will edit and provide feedback. We’re also looking to experiment with submissions of editorial topics and ideas, which the AI agent will then use to produce its own content for you to read.

This will likely not work that well, mostly because it’s April 1 and this is an April Fools joke. It could be possible, couldn’t it? Not likely very good, but it could be fun.

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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Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up

Posted on April 1, 2026 by way0utwest

I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a few people thinking and commenting on their own experiences. I decided to write a few posts supporting the ideas in the presentation, which my wife and I have used to both drive our careers forward while enjoying our lives.

Just this week, I had an example.

This is a series of posts on finding balance in your career.

It Starts with a Picture

My daughter told me this happened Monday afternoon. This is one of our horse feeders, and as you can see, the bottom has fallen out.

2026-03_0141

This happens periodically, but it was unexpected. In this case, I’d returned from a week and a half of travel, and I needed to try and get prepped for some additional travel the following week.

In other words, I had plenty of work to do, lots of commitments in life already in place, and now something new pops into my life.

This isn’t critical, but it is something I need to get done before I leave again, which left me limited time around work, coaching commitments a few nights a week, trying to get time to exercise to maintain my health, cooking for the family while I’m here, and, of course, getting time to relax.

I decided I’d have to find time in a couple ways. First, I got up a little early, 30 minutes, the next day and started working. When my daughter texted that she was getting the tractor out, I took a break and went outside to meet her and bring the feeder back to the house.

I then evaluated what was needed and realized I needed some wood from the hardware store. Fortunately, I had a meeting scheduled that I didn’t need to speak in, so I started to town while listening to the meeting in the car.

Multi-tasking FTW.

I had almost completed my trip to town when the meeting ended. I drove back and went back to work, handling a few tasks, editing an article, etc. Once I thought I had gotten most things done for the day, I took a break.

It took about 75 minutes to cut some wood and re-attach the pieces and parts in the feeder. I’d cut into my day a bit, but fortunately work is flexible and I can work a little longer on Wednesday to make up for the time missed.

That extra work will cut into my time to relax, but this is an unexpected issue, and I have to trade time somewhere. Making adult choices, I flexed work to get something in my life done sooner, and spread that flex across two days so that I wasn’t overloaded.

Less time to relax, but that happens some weeks. Especially with horses.

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Prompt Requests

Posted on March 30, 2026 by way0utwest

One of the challenges of AI-assisted coding agents is that they tend to produce A LOT of code. Even in refactoring or migration changes, the AIs can work quickly and generate such a volume of code that the process starts to become overwhelming. For pull requests, for CI/CD build systems, and certainly for human reviewers, they can be overwhelmed. This can become a real problem with OSS projects, where submissions can grow exponentially to the point that maintainers stop looking at pull requests. I suspect the same thing might happen in corporate repositories when lots of developers can refactor or submit huge amounts of code produced by AI agents in a fraction of the time it took a year ago.

I was listening to an interview with an experienced software developer and OSS project maintainer who said that he preferred getting a “prompt request” that contained a description of a problem and the specification for a solution that he could submit to his own LLM to get the code. Rather than use an AI to review a code in a PR written by a human or AI agent, a great prompt that can communicates the problem and solution is preferred.

That’s a fascinating idea to me. Specify what you want and let the code owners send it to an AI and get a code response whose quality and focus they can decide to implement, based on their own context provided to an LLM (standards, style, patterns, etc.)

Of course, for open source projects, perhaps the maintainer doesn’t want to spend time managing AI agents or working through quality, but this does allow them to focus on the idea being suggested rather than attempting to review code, test it, judge the quality, and perhaps request changes from the submitter. They can take your idea and implement it. If it’s a simple fix, even better, as the maintainer might get quick help from an AI, using the style of code they are used to (their own).

Software engineering is changing a lot in the age of AI, and this seems to be one of the more interesting things I’ve seen suggested. Not YOLO or vibe-coding, but rather a prompt that suggests the idea and turns contributors into a specification written for the robot coder.

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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