Chalkboard at the Office

2011-09-29 11:29:56

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 […]

Celebrating Mistakes-Part 2

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s easy to say we want to take risks, much harder to set the boundaries so that you demand diligence. Taking risks shouldn’t be on the level of buying lotto tickets or a roll of the dice. It’s got to be a shared risk, one that you may […]

Celebrating Mistakes-Part 1

Most of us learn more from mistakes than successes. We talk about taking risks, but what is the average response when you fail – not good, is it? We’re not trying to fail, to make mistakes, to disappoint the boss. Does intent matter? Sometimes. There are mistakes and then, there are, mistakes. You can’t have […]

Fitting In-The Editorial

This editorial I wrote ran on SQLServerCentral a couple weeks back and generated a lot of comments, and more than a little pushback. I was looking at it again today, thinking what would I do different to do a better job of getting the point across without getting pulled into visions of joining the Borg […]

Thinking on Culture

Over the past few years I’ve grown to believe that few things have a greater impact on the success of a business than it’s culture. I’ve seen good cultures and bad, cultures that were hyper-reactive and some that were deliberate, some that were people friendly and some that were not, and all kinds of variations […]

JTDS & Grails

Recently I had the chance to do some tuning on a system that was built using Grails (formerly Groovy on Rails) and the short and hopefully accurate enough scoop for our purposes is that includes an ORM layer – a data abstraction layer. ORM’s excel at rapid development/time to market scenarios, and they can also […]

Upcoming PASS Performance Virtual Chapter Presentation

I’ll be doing an introductory level presentation on statistics for the Performance VC on September 7th, details and the LiveMeeting URL at http://performance.sqlpass.org/). For those of you who have been tuning for a while you’re not likely to learn a lot of new stuff, really focused on those new to the concepts and showing them […]

Web Site Tuning

I just spent a couple days doing some minor tuning on SQLShare and here are some notes from that effort. I already had a Google site map published, but it turns out there that is a separate format for videos I had totally missed. I think they already index the stuff pretty well, but it […]