General

Today I wanted to call out a common mistake that I see at websites all over the country. Don’t add pages to your website if you’re not going to update them. I’m particularly talking about pages with names like “News”, “Articles”, “Blog Posts”, etc. They’re often added when someone first builds a website and is full of hope for how it will be used. And then it isn’t. Old News I’ve lost count of how many sites I visit where there’s a News section and when I visit it, there are two or three entries, often years apart.

2020-05-01

I was working with another client recently, and they were changing the working IT environments for their staff. What struck me as odd was that they called the new environments the Modern ones. Modern was actually the name of the environment. I’m sure they currently see the environments as the modern ones, but soon enough, it won’t be modern or new, and then the name looks really, really odd. In a few years’ time, they’ll have more recent ones, and it then gets tricky.

2020-04-21

I work with a number of clients in a variety of industries. I’m constantly amazed by the larger companies that simply do everything they can to avoid paying for things that they should be paying for. I’ll give you two simple examples. Many companies use TeamViewer. It’s easy to use and it works well for what it’s intended for. However I’d say that over 90% of the clients are using it as the free personal edition that says all over it for non-commercial use.

2020-04-14

I do quite a bit of online shopping. One thing that many sites have implemented, is an attempt to recapture your attention when you’ve added items to a shopping cart, and then abandoned the cart. This is seen as a feature in many implementations of carts for online stores. Manipulate them? Given it’s so common now, I’ve also found that many can be manipulated. For example, one clothing store that I like, will send me a reminder about my abandoned cart one day later.

2020-04-07

There’s another annoying trend that I want to call out. Every single day, I receive emails like this: I’m sure others get them too. Now I’m sure Tatyana is a lovely lady who’s just trying to do her job and struggling to find business for her company. But I haven’t the slightest interest in what she’s offering. Now I used to respond to these, and just say “No thanks” or “No interest”.

2020-03-31

As I work at different client sites, I see a lot of discussion about the cost of cloud-based services, in comparison with on-premises or self-hosted equivalents. One aspect that always seems to be forgotten is opportunity cost. So many times, I see people comparing raw incremental costs of virtual machines in the different environments. Invariably they aren’t making an apples vs apples comparison. They aren’t considering staff costs, training costs, power, real estate, support costs, etc.

2020-03-12

On our SQL Down Under email list today, someone asked: My title is DBA but my job is more into SQL Developer, fixing data involved in applications. Do you think if I study Power BI that I can get a better job? I get asked this sort of question regularly, particularly from traditional DBAs who see their roles disappearing. The most basic answer is to adapt what you’re doing across to roles that are still in need like data modelling, query performance tuning, DB design in general, etc.

2020-03-03

Most developers and analysts today are fairly aware of the impacts of technical debt. As technical debt grows, it takes longer and longer to get real customer or end-user work done. Worse, more and more time is spent triaging and squashing bugs. And one interesting aspect of technical debt is old tooling. Old Tooling I’ve written before about modern not being a synonym for better, but there comes a point where you need to modernise your tooling, even if it seems to be doing the job.

2020-02-04

I regularly enter passwords into websites, and am told after I’ve entered a new password, that I can’t use any special characters. Why exactly? If I see a site that won’t deal with special characters properly, it immediately makes me think there’s some pretty poor coding going on under the covers. Very likely, the developers haven’t thought through how the parsing of requests, etc. should be handled. It’s not just special characters either.

2020-01-21

Wow, it’s been a really big year in many ways. I had a list of goals for the year, and overall I’m pretty happy with where it’s ended up. One area that remains a challenge for me is personal health. But there are things I have in place that make me confident that one will be addressed better in 2020. I liked the way that a few of my friends this year posted that they aren’t making New Year resolutions, they’re just stating goals for the next year.

2019-12-31