PASS Summit on Tour in New York City

Posted on July 2, 2025 by way0utwest

The PASS Summit goes on tour this year, with an August stop in New York City. This is the first event in the series, and I’m excited to go back to New York City for the event. You can register here and come see some amazing speakers on Aug 18-19, 2025.

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The lineup is small and short, but it’s a one pre-con day with two half-day sessions and then a one full day of hour long sessions. The pre-cons include security, analysis, performance tuning and more. All from industry experts. The regular sessions are across four tracks with a variety of things you can learn during the 5 time slots throughout the day.

There is also a Redgate Summit in New York on Wednesday. That’s got Redgate specific content, but if you’re interested (or a customer), stay an extra day for that as well.

If you’re near New York City, or can convince your boss to send you, register today and join us on tour. The larger main event is still in Seattle, and if you prefer that, come for a full week in November.

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Quick Wins with GenAI

Posted on June 30, 2025 by way0utwest

The more I look to GenAI to save me minutes, short periods of time, the better it works. Here’s an example of something I do regularly where AI helps.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

Reformatting code

I often see code like this submitted in articles.

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The code conversion box often adds extra lines between code. It’s a strange error, and since things get pasted in with lots of formatting, it’s not so simple to fix. I often look at the code side of things and remove lines. This is the raw code:

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It’s ugly, and it’s easy to fix, but it takes time and it can be an annoying task. I often might put on a video or multi-task while I handle this simple reformat.

Using Claude

Claude is often my go-to GenAI for now. I tried this prompt, with a CTRL+V of the code. As you can see, Claude starts to reason things out.

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On the right side, I can see it rewriting code, which is always fascinating. Reminds me of terminal work over a 300baud modem in university. I’ve grabbed a short snippet of how this works.

Once this is done, I see my code on the right code. I can click “Copy” at the top and then paste back into the editor. It looks much better.

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This allows me to move on and tackle some other task before I come back to this, knowing Claude will have helped me.

Small wins, very helpful, but a lever to make me more productive.

I don’t know if this is worth the cost in computing, but it is very helpful. Minutes saved are likely worth a small subscription to the tool every month if I can find a few more tasks like this.

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A Well Deserved Break

Posted on June 27, 2025 by way0utwest

This is my last day of work. Not forever, just for six weeks. I’m off on my sabbatical after today and won’t be back until August 11. However, everything should run smoothly with Grant and Kellyn holding things down until I return. Have a little patience with them as this site can be a bit of a hectic whirlwind at times, and they still have other jobs to do.

It’s been a wild first half of the year. After very little travel in Jan/Feb, the rest of the year has been a bunch of travel, including most of May and June being on the road. With coaching responsibilities for two teams from Jan-Apr, I am ready for a break. No big plans, but I am looking forward to being at home, playing some guitar, working on a few projects while trying to be very unwired for six weeks.

I know most of us tech professionals likely deserve a break from work at some point. I am very lucky to get a sabbatical, on top of vacation allowances. It took my a number of years to understand and learn to relax while on breaks. Too many years of being on call, owning a business, and driving my career forward had me delaying or skipping vacations some years. I carried over a lot of days from year to year at many positions.

That’s a bad idea.

We need breaks. We need to recharge, and while I wasn’t thrilled when Redgate’s policy changed, I have come to appreciate it. We can only carry over a week, and I try not to do that in any year. They want employees to take breaks, and I try to do so. My wife certainly appreciates me getting away from work and not checking email, Slack, etc. I was nervous the first few times I left SQL Server Central for a week, often trying to get an hour of work to check on things every morning while on vacation. I come to trust that everyone at Redgate will keep an eye on things and ensure the site keeps running.

I may still blog about the sabbatical, but I don’t know it will be any sort of priority. I’ve been quite busy up until today and haven’t had time to plan much of anything. That won’t make for any interesting blogs, but it will be a well-deserved break.

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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The Book of Redgate: Motivation

Posted on June 27, 2025 by way0utwest

Another of our values is this:

Motivation isn’t about carrots and sticks.

Constant oversight and the threat of punishment are incompatible with great, fulfilling work. We believe in creating appropriate constraints and then giving people the freedom to excel.

We do have some rules, bumpers, guidelines, and limits on what people can do. We’ve added a few since 2010 as the company has grown and lots of people might not have the culture ingrained.

However, we try hard to let people get work done, expect them to do so, and have a few reminders, but without the thread of punishment.

At the same time our bonus or recognition strategies are mostly around group goals or company goals. We don’t push people to compete with each other to get a bigger bonus than someone else.

That was strange to me, coming from US companies, but I have found it more refreshing. There are some commission aspects for individuals, but for most of us outside of sales, we’re all in this together.

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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