Moving to using dash ‘-‘ as a delimiter

Spaces or tabs. Using 2 spaces verses 4 spaces. Defining variables as lowercase v InitCap, environment variables UPPERCASE or not, using underscore ‘_’ or dash ‘-‘ as a separator. These are all un-winnable discussions among your friends and colleagues. Side Note: What is critical for any business is there is a well-defined and enforced standard, no matter what that standard it.

I have while scripting in Bash always used underscore ‘_’, for commands or internal functions. I have probably taken on this because environment variables have IMO always used underscore, e.g. looking at my laptop now I have for example (TERM_PROGRAM, TEE_HOME, AWS_DEFAULT_REGION).

However in recent months I have changed my coding practices within scripting to always using the dash ‘-‘. What was list_clusters, became list-clusters for example.

Why? There is just one reason; the bane of millions of effective typists and coders; the QWERTY keyboard. The dash ‘-‘ requires the use of just one finger, while the underscore requires two.

Sometimes the simpler solution is well simpler.

Tagged with: Naming Standards Practices Programming Shell Scripting

Speaking at COSCUP 2026 — Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7

I am excited to be speaking at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan on August 8th and 9th. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and it is always a privilege to present to the engaged and technically sharp community there.

Producing Two Sample T-Test statistics with SQL

The two sample t-test for equal variance is a statistical test to determine if the means of two groups are different enough that the difference is likely caused by some underlying difference, rather than random chance.

Building your first VillageSQL Extension with AI skills

This is a technical walkthrough of the vsql-extension-builder recently released May 28 at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 and found at https://github.com/villagesql/villagesql-skills . Highlights Install VillageSQL pre-built binary first Install SDK with pre-built binary second Install the skill Run it with your AI tool The output can be found at https://github.