So far in my career, I've made other people money with my work. I want to change that, and I think software is fertile ground for an entrepreneur. We can create machines that do stuff all by themselves, generating value and thus money while we sleep. I will learn and simultaneously teach others how to build a sustainable software business. My main focus is how to make money with SQL Server, but I will include other technologies. This endeavor will go beyond technical knowledge, incorporating marketing, sales, and customer service to figure out what your customers (or your boss) wants, and how to get them to pay you well for your efforts. I've created some basic resources to help you. Enjoy a daily list of curated SQL Server articles (SQL Server Sundae) or read what I've written on SQL Server.
When you setup a monitoring system for SQL Server, you often use thresholds to determine when an instance is healthy. You might say that you want to be alerted when CPU use is over 90% or when there’s only 10% of disk space left. The trouble with these thresholds is that they will often throw off false positives, or send you an alert when really nothing is wrong. Simple thresholds often have to be tuned to the individual instance, since a server with 10 TB still has 1 TB of space left at 90% disk use. Read more
I am doing a reporting proof-of-concept (POC) for my company. Business intelligence (BI) is often the last thing that gets thought of during an application’s life cycle because it’s only really necessary after you get customers. Before that, the main focus is on application features. Soon after launch, your coworkers and your customers start asking questions about usage and adoption, and customers start to ask for summary information on their data as well as just dumping their data. If you’re the only guy in charge of the database, this is often overwhelming. Read more
It’s Monday morning and your inbox is a mess, full of error messages and customer complaints from the weekend. A job has failed that is now impeding an entire department. You fix the issue, go to a meeting to explain what happened, and you know that something like this will happen again, and you know that you could have prevented in the first place. Silently, at your desk, you wonder if there’s a way out of the cycle of crisis, recovery, and burn-out. There is. Read more
I am a budding software entrepreur located in beautiful Boise, Idaho. I like creating software, because our work frees people from meaningless, repetitious tasks, often giving them a lever to move the world. I've worked on everything from a small ERP system, to trucking software, and now I'm on a team with a great group of people writing software for the marketing space. My favorite technologies include C#, SQL Server, and Linux (if only Microsoft released a *nix SQL Server).
My non-work hours are filled with family and travelling, hopefully both! (<-- That's my beautiful wife and me in Switzerland). I won't say no to either a Homeric epic or a snifter of cognac.
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