I was working with a client recently and one of the managers said they wanted to encourage innovation inside their organization. That sounded good, but as I thought about it, I wasn't sure what this means, or if it's really something that matters. Let's take a few examples and think about this in a modern organization that builds and operates software.

If I am a developer, I get a series of requirements or tickets where I have to write code. Perhaps I need to take inputs from a user, query a database, and produce a result. I might write code in C# 7 instead of C#6. Maybe I'd use a lambda instead of creating a new function. Perhaps I decide to ensure I use the stored procedure type with named parameters rather than submitting SQL as a batch. Is that innovative? It might be a better way to write code and improve the quality (or security or maintainability) of the code, but is it innovation?

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We all experience technical debt when building software, especially software that has been around for years. Most of us have likely encountered code that we are loathe to touch and modify. At least, we don't touch it twice. We might change things once, but when it doesn't work as expected, most of us put it back in it's previous state and move on to something else.

At the same time, it's hard to define what technical debt is or point it out to managers, who often can't grasp the concept of why technical debt matters to a development team. They can't understand the reasons why new code built on older code takes longer and longer to produce. It's a nebulous concept that can baffle both people new to software development and those with years of experience.

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Many technical people dream of starting a company and having it grow to an IPO. The history of computing is littered with the successes and failures of companies that attempted this. As a young man in high school, I saw the explosive growth and success of Apple, dreaming of working for them or duplicating their success. In the late 90s and 2000s, I tried a few startups before I founded SQL Server Central with my partners. I had success with that company, though no IPO :(.

I've seen many friends start companies, often consulting ones, though a few have built products. Building and running any enterprise is hard, and startups are no exception. There was a post on Hacker News looking for advice and business lessons from others, and I enjoyed reading the responses. I wouldn't read much deeper than the first level of responses, as many of the subsequent comments are less interesting.

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It's my fault.

That's what I think if there is a security incident with my employer that involves the database. It's almost my first thought when I hear about issues at other organizations, thinking a technical person is at fault. Since I've been a developer and administrator, and I know how complex systems are, I usually stop myself and try to learn more before I assign blame.

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I play guitar as a hobby. Not great, but I enjoy it and find it relaxing. It's a good break from my day periodically, killing a few minutes before a meeting. It's also a nice way to unwind at night. I find it better than playing games or my phone or streaming more Netflix shows. I enjoy those as well, but there is something different about music.

I tend to use acoustic guitars, meaning no electronics. However, I have had electric guitars in the past, and have even used pedals to alter sounds. When I saw this article about design lessons from guitar pedals, I was intrigued. It has 5 lessons from these devices, which are for other digital gear. However, I think they could apply to software as well.

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The last year has seen a number of large tech companies lay off large numbers of staff. The list for 2023 includes large companies, like Google (12,000), Amazon (9,000 this time), Microsoft (10,000), and Meta (10,000 this time), but also small companies like Zoom (1,300), Rapid (115), and Roku (200). It's not just tech companies, however, as Disney (7,000), Gap (500), 3M (6,000), and David's Bridal (9,236) are letting people go. There are plenty of other companies who have let people go, which is interesting to me as the economy has grown in the US, though profits were down. It's hard to know whether these layoffs are really important for all these companies or whether these layoffs are management's decision to group their bad news with everyone else's and take advantage of the opportunity to shrink labor costs.

In any case, layoffs are sad and stressful. Certainly, the people being let go are traumatized and I don't want to minimize the impact to their lives, but this can be hard for the survivors as well. This isn't just a Silicon Valley situation, but one that affects many employees all over the world. Whenever there is a large staffing change in an organization, those that remain can be traumatized and unproductive. This is one reason that public companies must notify and disclose layoffs to investors.

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Who should create documentation for software? In many companies, it's the developers. In fact, in Redgate, often our developers are tasked with updating articles for products on our documentation site. We do have a streamlined process that has developers can submitting changes in some format (markdown? ) and an automation process that automatically updates the site as part of a release.

However, we also have marketing people who are in charge of external articles and communications. They ensure that our product learning and university content is updated. They work with technical people to produce, edit, and publish content. These could be developers, advocates such as Grant or Ryan, or even partners. Our Friends of Redgate also help with content.

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One of the challenges for both database developers and administrators is doing more, often with less. Many companies continue to grow their database estate, both in width with more platforms, and in depth with more instances of the platforms they have.  Some companies will look to shrink their staff, especially when adopting a cloud platform, while others may add more databases, but not increase staffing to match the additional load.

In either case, what many have found over the years is that the cost of labor is high. Both for developers that write code against databases, and administrators that manage those platforms. While licensing can seem to be a large number, compared to the cost of labor, it isn't usually a significant number.

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One of the most amazing benefits of working at Redgate Software is the ability to take a sabbatical every five years. One of our staff wrote about this recently, and I found myself reflecting back on mine, as well as thinking forward.

The article notes that many people either learn or travel during theirs. That was somewhat of my experience, where I spent my first one learning skills and volunteering at home. My one-year look back is still interesting to revisit today. Unfortunately, my flagpole base failed in strong winds (sad face) and broke the pole. It's still on my list to rebuild a new one. I still look back on my volunteer time with fondness and try to get back to Habitat every year.

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Data modeling is something that we should all be doing when altering the schema in our databases. I'd like to think that most people spend time here, but I don't think that's the case. I think plenty of people think "I need to store a piece of data" and they pick a string or numeric datatype and start stuffing in values. If in doubt, just pick a string. It's why I think we have lots of dates stored in string columns because that was someone's first thought.

There was a post recently that talked about storing data in its highest form. It was interesting to me because these are the type of decisions I try to make when designing a table. What is the best form in which to store data? The authors talk about picking not only a type that easily converts, but the fields that make it easiest to work with the data in different ways.

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