Articles for category: Delivery

September 28, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Flattened Table Pattern

Years ago I attended my very first technical conference, SqlPass.  I was only a DBA for a few months at the time and it was a very last minute adventure.  I would spend the next 3 days at this conference becoming inundated with all things SQL Server surrounded by peers who had been doing this for much longer (I had only been a DBA for 3 months). The only session I remember from that event was this guy (sorry don’t remember the name) who got up on stage and talked about this big project he did for this restaurant review site and

September 27, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Caring Call Centre?

I had to make a call about a month ago to an ISP when a site I was working on went down in the middle of the night with no warning.  My first fear was that all of our data had been deleted and I did not know anyone who had a backup. I called up the ISP and miraculously got someone on the phone and spoke with them.  At this point in time, my heart was racing, my anxiety levels were through the roof and I felt a large hammer precariously positioned over my head. Whilst on the phone,

September 23, 2015

Greg Thomas

Service Restarts Go Boom!

Want to throw a wrench into someone’s day?  Assign them a critical production bug. Everything they had planned for that day just went out the window as they now to try to identify, isolate and solve the problem.  Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not and the time it can take to resolve can go from an hour to the entire day. Want to throw a grenade into someone’s day?  Tell them they have to restart a service or reboot the system for this production bug to be resolved AFTER a change to data has been made. There is nothing that

September 17, 2015

Greg Thomas

Code like a Comedian

Take your favourite comedian and watch them work their magic on the crowd. Notice anything? When a comedian, a good comedian, makes you laugh it’s only the start of their delivery, they have you laughing, smiling, you’re almost at the peak and then they deliver the one-line zinger that sends you over the edge, you can’t contain the laughter you were holding in, you never thought you’d be one of those people that laugh with a crowd (fear of embarrassment?), but here you are losing it with a complete stranger, tears streaming down your cheeks. You might have been fine with

September 11, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Happy Compiler

CTRL + SHIFT + B is the most satisfactory of keyboard short-cuts. At the end of a long day, a frustrating problem or a late night of coding beyond the zone, the greatest feeling can be summed up in watching your complier scroll through all the dependencies, build them one at a time and generate your masterpiece unto the build server.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes, sometimes the longer it takes, the more satisfying when it completes successfully. You’ve done it, you’ve shipped something, after all that scope creep, refactoring and last minute code reviews, you’ve taken the first step

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