12 June 2019
12 June 2019

Building a Great Technical Team

The process of putting together a team of technical people once was largely centered around getting a group of similarly minded people. How people worked was valued more than how well they could accomplish their job. Finding people who could work together smoothly was a big focus when picking new team members, and was a … Read more
28 May 2019
28 May 2019

Innovation: A Double-edged Sword

We humans have been the most successful animals on earth. We’ve accomplished this by changing the environment to suit our needs instead of always adapting ourselves to fit the environment. We use tools, we invent, and we solve problems. Of course, many other species use crude tools, but none have done anything like inventing computers, … Read more
17 April 2019
17 April 2019

The Future of Medicine

If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen the future of medicine, or at least how the writers imagine it will be. Painless, needleless injections are given by hypospray devices, right through clothing with no chance of cross-contamination. The medical tricorder provides an accurate diagnosis in seconds. Broken bones, illnesses, and injuries are quickly … Read more
12 March 2019
12 March 2019

Why You Shouldn’t Hardcode the Current Database Name in Your Views, Functions, and Stored Procedures

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” Phil Karlton I’m terrible at naming things. I recently wrote some quick code to reproduce a design problem and demonstrate several options for solutions, and later realized that I’d named my objects dbo.Foo, dbo.FooFoo, and dbo.Wat. But I feel strongly about … Read more