In my latest project, we made the decision to ]]> One of the tools that I have come to love is RedGate’s SQL Search. If you’re not using an ORM, or if you need to get down into SQL Server and find columns, procedures or otherwise, it becomes indispensable to quickly get a handle on a largish database.

In my latest project, we made the decision to move to MySql, due in large part to SQL Server’s ballooning cost structure. After a few months of working with MySql, I feel qualified to say that in some ways, you get what you pay for. We haven’t found the tools around MySql to be anywhere near the polish of some of the SQL Server tools (the SQL Server installer itself, not included of course).

In order to find things in our database I did some research on rolling my own Sql Search, what follows are some of the things I have found.

If you want to find a column used in a function:

SELECT Name, CAST(body AS CHAR(10000) CHARACTER SET utf8) 
   FROM mysql.proc
   WHERE body LIKE '%Search term%'
      AND db = 'DB Name';

SELECT Name, REPLACE(CAST(body AS CHAR(10000) CHARACTER SET utf8),'\r\n',' ')
   FROM mysql.proc
   WHERE body LIKE '%Search term%'
      AND db = 'DB Name';

If we’re looking for a particular column name:

SELECT * 
   FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
   WHERE table_schema = 'DB Name'
      AND column_name = 'Column Name';

There is a very annoying .NET to MySql bug in that if you have anything but NULL or a 36 character string in any field with a column type and size of CHAR(36), MySql throws an exception. If you have someone testing and they put incorrect data in these columns, no one can select until the data is corrected. Want to find all your potential problem columns then?

SELECT Table_Name, Column_Name
   FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
   WHERE DATA_TYPE = 'CHAR'
      AND CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH = 36 
      AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'DB Name';

I’m getting more comfortable with MySql now that I know where to look for things. If you’re using MySql, I hope this helps.

This is good and a thing we should all do far more often.

I started the day with nothing to do and nowhere in particular that I had to be. So my wife and ]]> I’m writing this from a vacation spot where I thought I had spent almost exactly zero time thinking about my day job.

This is good and a thing we should all do far more often.

I started the day with nothing to do and nowhere in particular that I had to be. So my wife and I took a cooking course with Sous Chef Scott and learned a few simple dishes that were just stunning in taste, presentation and simplicity. Scott is a really nice and laid back guy. We asked all kinds of questions and he answered each of them with a story of his experiences.

Then I wondered around and snapped pictures and I realized how much I enjoy taking pictures.

The reason I love photography is pretty simple. While I love creating things, creating things inevitably draws comments and critique, even when you are not asking for any. The pictures I take are for me. I don’t think I could ever be a professional photographer, aside from not having the skills to be one, but also because when you get paid, you are told which pictures to take. For me, that removes the art and love that goes into composing a compelling photograph.

I have taken photographs that really move me. At some level, I hope you enjoy them too, but that has never been the point of why I love one picture over another. I love them because of their meaning to me. You could say that I should have used flash, or that I pushed the color of a picture too far, and that’s fine.

However, at no time would your comment make me feel guilty for not getting it right. Nor would it affect how I feel about that particular shot. I’d keep it mind for the future, because really, that’s all I can do when it comes to a picture that is already taken, no?

Which brings me to software development. I guess I was thinking about it all along.

Since the last I posted, we launched a major system, in some ways a rewrite of an existing system, in other ways something totally new; which made things complex and had overlapping domain terminology and forced us to make difficult decisions. The requirement gathering was painful because things changed a million times, and we often over-engineered parts of the system because we knew features would be coming soon enough that we would need to account for. Why not build some of that plumbing now? We worked hard and at the end, we were very much red-lining as a team.

We were death marching.

Then we launched and things calmed down and changed. We re-gelled. We had a minimal number of issues crop up, all of which were solved within hours of finding them. It was a success, but, like I said, it wasn’t easy and we certainly didn’t do everything “by the book”.

I’m quite sure we will have disappointed several industry pundits by not following their one true way to getting things done. They would swing their one true sledgehammer upon us with impunity.

In software, we are creating, much like a photograph. People would like to think there is a great amount of science or engineering that goes into it, but really, at the heart of any software project is a need associated with people, and those people are the very reason that science and engineering are a small part of what goes into a real-world software startup project. When we start, we don’t know how big the bridge span is and we certainly don’t know if the bridge needs to support horses, cars or tractor trailers, let alone how many at a given time. Over the span of the project, we will figure those things out and there are certainly ways of coming to those knowledge bits earlier rather than later.

Yet the sledgehammer that my favorite soapbox hero is swinging is likely not a big part of our successes in this project. Using x technology didn’t solve people problems. Going to the cloud didn’t either. A relational database, NHibernate, or otherwise didn’t solve it. Tests, pairing, and readable code were certainly good things that we did on this project, but I noticed that the difference these items made were not obvious. We did them where they made sense. We did not do them where we agreed they were not needed.

To be perfectly clear and precise, sledgehammer topics are ones where x declares that you must do y in order to be professional, successful or likewise. You simply must do x 100 percent, 100 percent of the time!

I do actually wish some of these things were true, but the fact is that we do not live in a black and white world, foremost because at the heart of software is people, and people will always be that unknown factor. Often overlooked is the simple fact that software development rarely controls a business singlehandedly, and the business wields software like a tool, as it probably should.

For us, we wound up not having 100% unit test coverage; but we have a lot of integration tests. We didn’t pair on a lot of things, because there was just too much to get done. We’re working on going back through things after the fact and it seems fine so far. The sledgehammer might disagree. It will bite you in the future! You’ll slow down! You’ll start finding bugs too late! It won’t scale! We haven’t found any of these to be true at all. In fact, things are speeding up and the code changes have been easy refactors. We release daily and customer feedback has been good.

While we cannot control what might lie in front of us, we certainly can steer the ]]> It is the end of the year, the beginning of the year, or rather, it is that logical break where I hope we at least retrospect on where we are and where we might go in the coming times.

While we cannot control what might lie in front of us, we certainly can steer the ship towards exciting things, exciting people, and exciting opportunities.

If we are not steering the ship in these directions, may I invoke the oldest of cliches and remind us all of how very short life can be? This is not just about work by the way, this is about all things. Work is not life, nor is life, work.

In the past year, I certainly read a lot of things, listened to a lot of people and followed a lot of movements.

I do hope that all of these things work for the people who toil away at their focus in such a way that rainbows fly forth from the keyboards and unicorns stampede in the name of their cause.

But all of these things do not work for me all of the time and I’m quite done worrying about if I am following x or y or z any longer. Perhaps the more you know, the more you worry about those things and frankly:

Worrying weighs you down.

Worrying brings you down.

Worrying slows you down.

In software development, I used to think we had a healthy dialog about our tools, our methods, and our culture. Our obsessiveness was taking us to a better place and we were delivering better software, faster and more often.

Lately however, I look at Twitter and think that we sound like an old couple, bickering just to bicker, just to be right, just to forward our own agenda. We talk about craftsmanship, but I know many builders, contractors and carpenters. They just do not bicker in the way that software people do. They build, period.

I can’t see how the bickering is constructive any longer. Could it be just an albatross that keeps one from building something? That bird has tried very hard and to some extent has reigned in that youthful exuberance I once had. That crassness where I felt like I could build anything at any time.

And so, with no sadness, I must say that, Albatross, your services are no longer needed here.

When is the last time you saw a post about “we had x problem and here is how we solved it” where the focus is on the solution?

Instead we get micro-missives about single methods out of context, “written so terribly that they should float in the Doldrums forever”!

I can’t bring myself to read this type of grocery store rag any longer.

People do things and people make mistakes. Sometimes the two intersect.

Smart people learn from, and fix their mistakes. They adapt. They overcome. They improvise. They don’t sit on the sidelines. They don’t heckle. They don’t hesitate.

So, I’ve been busy unsubscribing and reorganizing on the positive.

I saw someone give a warning a few weeks back about x number of negative tweets gets you an unfollow. Great advice. I’m doing this.

If you’re writing crap, then you won’t be able to ship. If you’re writing crap, maybe you’ll ship just a few times. If you’re not writing crap, then you’re shipping and shipping people tell the best stories. Those are positive stories.

I have a lot of things I have been wanting to build, wanting to try. I think this year I will. Whatever the reasons I did not prior, it matters not. I’ll try my best, but I won’t be lashing myself to the whipping post or wringing my heads over a 50 line method. It’ll get refactored just like it always does, or maybe it will just go away because it isn’t needed any longer.

Or, just maybe it will just work and that’s good enough for right now.

I caught up with an old friend yesterday. Over the holiday, he completed a triple ironman in 49:49:40. Straight through. No stopping. Swim. Bike. Run. 49 hours later, he finished.

He wasn’t always training and he didn’t start competing young. I would have said he was never going to do these things, period. He started four years ago and he didn’t do it any way but his own. He’s always done things that way. He put his mind to it, and made things happen. Four years and 49 hours later, he’s in pretty damn elite company. That’s what he wanted to do, and that’s what he did. So very Yoda.

I was truly inspired by it. I want to live up to something like that.

As a very wise man told me once, “Steer Into the Fear”.

And that is the first move, sliding into your own ship and sailing it yourself. I’m not inviting the lizard brain on this ride. I’m in charge of the damned tunes on the deck and this is how it is.

And I will use this song to lead you on.

Weird is new and weird is why this world is a great place to be.

—

Godin has always embraced different ways of doing things, challenging the status quo, and going his own way. He’s the ringmaster in the creative tent, ]]> I saw this morning that Seth Godin’s next book is titled:

We’re All Weird

Weird is new and weird is why this world is a great place to be.

—

Godin has always embraced different ways of doing things, challenging the status quo, and going his own way. He’s the ringmaster in the creative tent, paving the way for people to do things their own way, whenever they choose to do so.

The thing that strikes me about him and his writing is that he is so very unassuming, so very simple. So how is it that something so simple always feels like a jolt when you read it for the first few times?

Because simple is so very hard.

What he is challenging people to do is very hard for them to accept. Simply go out and do. Seth would say not to listen to the lizard brain that says “but you’re weird, that idea is weird, its all so weird”.

It is a scary thing to be prodded into simple action; go build something, go do that one thing you’ve always wanted to do. Do something remarkable; be someone remarkable. That is a massive challenge.

But you could just go do it. You could be weird.

—

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I remember how weird it seemed when the first iPhone came out with its singular button. How weird the touchscreen typing seemed to be. I guess it is still really weird to have to pay so much for SMS messages, that is still not terribly self-evident to me.

Today the button just is, and we really don’t use it much. The keyboard? Nobody is pining to go back to a separate pull out keyboard are they? Well, okay, BlackBerry users are, but they are a dwindling bunch, no?

Facebook just changed its UI today. Everyone is screaming how weird the new layout is, the noise in there is deafening: “Stop the change”, “Bring back the old”, “we hate this”, ad nauseam.

The new layout just is. Within a month, the change will be all but forgotten and accepted for what it is, the Facebook layout.

When VHS faded into DVDs, streaming movies were beyond our comprehension. When streaming started to happen in music and moves, it seemed weird to not have physical copies of your own. I paid for it, I need a “physical” copy!

In short order, we’ll see that our misuse of the term “physical” isn’t what people have been thinking. Streaming won’t be weird any longer, it will just be.

Weird is simply the starting point of something else. It is difficult to stay weird forever. Weird is a transitional state. Things very often go from weird straight to accepted.

People meet, its weird, and they move into another phase. One blurts out an honest  idea and a relationship moves from weird to brilliant in the sharing of a single pint.

—

Weird is what we all bring to the table. Weird is new and hopefully, we all have new things in spades. New ideas, new experiences, new friendships.

If you’re afraid of being weird, you’re just afraid of new, afraid of change, afraid of the inevitable.

New is going to happen; you may as well be a part of it. Be weird and be you, because most problems, most businesses, and most people need more weird in a bad way.

Either way, you’d still be weird anyway.

Netflix’s lack of understanding their customer in the information age is simply unacceptable.

The outcome of poorly executed company strategy and every knee-jerk decision at the corporate level is a potential social wildfire. How much ]]> I admit, I didn’t expect to have thoughts on the Netflix implosion, but I guess I do, and so it goes.

Netflix’s lack of understanding their customer in the information age is simply unacceptable.

The outcome of poorly executed company strategy and every knee-jerk decision at the corporate level is a potential social wildfire. How much damage and how long these fires last is uncertain, and that should be well enough reason to avoid them at all costs. Certainly their costs can be high: Reputations are tarnished, PR and the hype machine must spin into overdrive, which in itself always carries some amount of risk, and the company becomes hugely unfocused as the events play out.

These fires used to be in the control of the media. With blogs, Twitter and Facebook, this is no longer the case. Distributed complaints are much harder to reach, and therefore, much harder to quiet.

—

Netflix is a company that, prior to this fiasco, I routinely used as an example for how we should build our own business. Forgoing the monolithic apps of the past, Netflix has done an exemplary job of building a cloud based architecture that just works. Even through massive Amazon outages, Netflix was available and showed us how to correctly build a redundant system capable of withstanding the previously unthinkable.

Building chaos monkey and an infrastructure guaranteeing such a high amount of uptime takes a massive planning effort. Developers, ops, and management had to come together and put a plan in place that had never been undertaken before. All of this was a herculean effort on the part of the company.

So the question is, for all that planning, how did what started as a pricing change shake the company to its bones?

Were these recent decisions thought out as well as their platform was? Did they do the simple, “what if this? What if that?” scenarios I find myself thinking through late at night when I can’t sleep?

The simple answer is that they could not have.

As a response to outrage over pricing changes, they again made a quick and unclear decision to split the company into two in an attempt to further manage the situation.

This just added fuel to the fire.

—

I think we’ve seen evidence of what happens when customers ultimately don’t understand, don’t like or don’t believe in a company’s decision or direction. Facebook, AirBnB and now Netflix have all been caught in consumer wrath and all managed to make a situation worse by trying to manage it in a half-cocked manner.

Remember changes to Facebook’s privacy settings about a year ago? The follow up to the initial outrage from Facebook was a series of screens that further clouded what consumers had control over. After that they worked to smooth out the screens and ultimately give consumers a level of control that they were looking for.

Remember the AirBnB customer who had her apartment ransacked, identity stolen and the company’s mismanagement of the firestorm that ensued?

Seems to me that it boils down to these companies all trying to strong arm the customer and making decisions not based on any kind of customer input or data. The masses will no longer be strong armed, for at the very least, they’ll complain about it on Twitter.

Not making decisions based on real data, particularly for these companies, is simply idiotic, because they have accumulated vast amounts of consumer data just by the very nature of their business. Netflix customers visit the web site often enough they could have easily piloted changes to smaller groups of people. They could have just asked a few key questions.

Instead, they made a decision ignorant of this customer data and told their customers what they should want. It did not work. When that did not work, they did the same thing a second time. Until you know what might put the fire out, you probably should refrain from putting your company or your people in harm’s way a second time.

A simple query would have told them the number of customers using both DVD and streaming services. Another simple query would have told them which way people went when pricing split the two services.

If there were a million people still wanting the DVD service, then I would argue that is a million people too many to alienate.

—

Contrast all of this with Amazon or Etsy, who both make very small incremental changes to their websites often. They run these changes with subsets of users in order to perform real world tests of what their responses are going to be. The review the output of those tests and adjust accordingly.

They make decisions based on real customer input. The data drives their decisions.

When you know what your customers want, expect and will tolerate, you will not find yourself having the unpleasant task of trying to manage an unpredictable social wildfire.

My grandmother was born in 1926. She and her siblings were children of a pre-technical era.

I spent some time over the past few days cleaning up some photos of her from the ]]> Living a life immersed in technology, sometimes I forget the massive power that we wield with just a few keystrokes or mouse clicks.

My grandmother was born in 1926. She and her siblings were children of a pre-technical era.

I spent some time over the past few days cleaning up some photos of her from the 30s and 40s. My wife had some of them reprinted and the rest I made into a simple iDVD movie/slideshow, of which I made copies for several family members.

We gifted my mother with one of these framed prints this weekend. I can emphatically say that the power of a simple photo from the past made new again cannot be understated. My mum was absolutely stunned that we had printed a photo that meant so much to her and that she thought was beyond being printed again. The DVD was also very well received and people were genuinely happy to have access to so many family pictures that now so many can enjoy.

This post is not about what I did or how I did it. I just used the computer to do something decidedly low tech: Print a picture and make a slideshow on a disc.

My point is that not everyone loves the computer for the reasons we do. Not everyone reads Hacker News everyday. Not everyone cares that PhotoShop can make text look like it is on fire. Not everyone understands why Git is great. Not everyone knows what a unit test is for and why it is important.

This is okay; actually, this is a great thing that the geeks of today are missing.

—

My father can fix or build anything. Well, almost anything, as long as it isn’t a computer. His bug reports drive me crazy because all I get is “the printer is broken” or “Skype doesn’t work” or “there is a fluke in Amazon that I found” and I have to figure out what might be the problem from there. On the other hand, he provides me with some unique gems like “it would be great if there were software for x” or “this is too difficult, here is what I want” or “this makes no sense to me; here is all I wanted to do”.

You’d never run out of software to write if you hang around decidedly non-technical people and listen to what they are saying.

What does that “non-technical” term mean anyway? Actually, we rely on “non-technical” people every day; to build our homes, fix our cars and the like. It is these people who don’t live online everyday that are talking about the genuine state of computers today. I don’t think we can see it objectively anymore. We are too close.

It is likely that we have adapted our lives around the computer, instead of making them work optimally for us.

There are probably very simple things we could do, perhaps in the way of explaining software and services in a better manner that would open new worlds for people who use computers not as much as we would like to think they do.

It starts with not dismissing those people as “not technical”.

—

There are lots of articles on how any given technology works, on how a certain business is successful and how agile software practices are revolutionary.

I don’t see a lot of articles on how the computer simply makes life better for people.

I wish that I did.