Break out of your comfort zone in 2020.

A few years ago, I was in a meeting at a client’s, and the discussion turned to teamwork. I jokingly said “teamwork is for people who cannot be trusted with complex tasks on their own”, at which point the whole room exploded in laughter (well, everyone laughed except the agile coach).

And even though my joke has since become a pinned tweet, it is in all fairness only true in a limited context. In most of our day-to-day work, we need the help of others, and they rely on ours.

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Please don’t feed auditors and lawyers

control

Remember that time when you accidentally truncated a table in production? Or when you forgot the WHERE clause in your UPDATE statement? You’re not really a seasoned professional if you haven’t. There’s even a very apt name for that moment in time when the realization hits you: The oh-no second.

But what if there was some type of control to prevent this from happening? Like more restrictive controls, perhaps some type of peer-review process before you clicked “go”? Or even…

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Not giving a shit about performance is tech-debt

For practically every piece of code you develop, there will be trade-offs. Sometimes, you can combine the best of two worlds, other times it comes down to some hard choices. For T-SQL developers, it typically boils down to a few key questions:

  • How much time can you spend perfecting code instead of just shipping?
  • Can we just fix it when it becomes a problem?
  • Is buying more hardware cheaper than paying for developers to tune their code?
  • Is better code harder to read, and will a junior developer be able to work with it?

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