Strong Manager or Weak Manager?

Here’s the link to my editorial on SSC last week. I was pleasantly surprised by the discussion, and was interested to see that rather than strong the word ‘brave’ popped up. That’s interesting to consider, it’s less about technical skills and more about personality, the willingness to fight the hard fights. Of course the hard […]

Notes From The 2011 Jacksonville Code Camp

In a departure from my usual plan, this year I drove up to Jacksonville mid-morning in time to have a leisurely lunch with my family, and then had them drop me off at the University of North Florida about 1:30 pm. It’s definitely different to arrive in after lunch, all the excitement and chaos is […]

PASS Update #63 (How Do We Rate)

A short update today, following up on an email to the Board from incoming VP of Finance Douglas McDowell who suggested we go through an evaluation process similar to what is done at Charity Navigator. As far as I can tell we don’t meet their qualifications to be rated, and to be fair we’re not […]

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I ran into a friend at a recent event and during the discussion he asked what I was doing lately because he couldn’t tell from my blog. Good comment, and reminds me how easy it is to forget to discuss what seems obvious. Last year my restlessness hit a new high. Training was starting to […]

PASS Update #62

Our most recent Board meeting was Aug 11 & 12 in Ft Lauderdale (located so we could attend SQLSaturday on Saturday). The week started with our management company deciding to change plans and attend by phone instead of in person. In person meetings are where we hope collaboration gets done, having anyone on the phone […]

Defining Your Culture

Imagine that you take over a team, department, maybe even a whole company, and as you look around at how things are done and how people are treated you decide that the culture isn’t what you want it to be. That doesn’t mean the current culture is bad, just that it doesn’t – from your […]

Networking Dinner at the PASS Summit 2011

We’re repeating our event this year, a low key no sponsor dinner for those that arrive early and want to enjoy dinner with old friends and new ones. We’re having it on Monday night this year, and it will start at 6:30 pm (though one of us will be there from 6 pm on) at […]

Writing Your Resume

There’s a lot of info out there about putting together a resume, and I probably can’t add a lot, but I reviewed a resume for a friend recently and of the notes I sent back, I wanted to share a couple here: Tell them what you want to do. Are you a DBA. An ETL […]

You Are Allowed to Care About Whatever You Want

I wanted to write this because its often overlooked. I care about things that may not interest you, things that may interest you, things that you may totally despise. And vice versa. As individuals that’s fine, we live our lives and move on. In a group setting it’s harder. Imagine you have a colleague who […]

Micromanaging

Micromanaging is one of those words that evokes an instant negative image. Certainly there are times when it happens, but it’s surprisingly hard to define well. Maybe a very rough high level definition is “excessive oversight”. Most of the time on the management side it happens due to inexperience, a lack of faith in employees […]

SQLAndy

Month: August 2011