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Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.01]
The Tiny Stack (Astro, SQLite, Litestream) I spent many years in the LAMP stack , and there are often many more acronyms of technology stacks in our evolving programming ecosystem. New today is “The Tiny Stack”, consisting of Astro , a modern meta-framework for javascript (not my words), and Lightstream Continuously stream SQLite changes.
Read moreAnnouncing InstanceHunt
InstanceHunt identifies the instance (families/types/classes) available for a cloud service across all the regions of that cloud. The initial version is a working example of several AWS database services. Future releases will enable advanced filtering and will cover other service categories (e.
Read moreMastering MySQL 5.7 EOL migrations
In a recent podcast on Mastering EOL Migrations: Lessons learned from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 I discuss with my colleague Adam North not only the technical issues that become a major migration but also key business and management requirements with having a well-articulated strategy that covers:
Read moreData Masking 101
I continue to dig up and share this simple approach for production data masking via SQL to create testing data sets. Time to codify it into a post. Rather than generating a set of names and data from tools such as Mockaroo , it is more practical to use actual data for a variety of testing reasons.
Read moreA reliable and dependable application requires observability
Observability (o11y) is a critical pre-requisite component in software architecture when advocating for and preparing organizations for making informed decisions on the success of their application. Open Telemetry from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is the goto standard regardless of your choices of monitoring tools.
Read moreAWS RDS Aurora wish list
I’ve had this list on a post-it note on my monitor for all of 2022. I figured it was time to write it down, and reuse the space. In summary, AWS suffers from the same problem that almost every other product does.
Read moreOur Data Security Moonshot Starts With Prevention
The recent re-announcement of the Cancer Moonshot highlighted a common enemy to many endeavors to improve our society as a whole, and that is using common sense and already known methods.
Read moreSpoiler – Owning your data isn’t good enough
While this is a catchy title, if you use Software as a Service (SaaS), or an online cloud provider, do you actually own and have total control of your business data and its infrastructure?
Read moreWhat is the right length of a blog post?
A question without a definitive answer. Finding opinions from authoritative sources can also be easily obscured due to search engine optimization or even the choice of words used while searching.
Read moreCan a picture replace a text description?
Data visualization, data storytelling, and data lineage are all ways to better describe and visualize a specific situation for a set of data. Generally, I find these techniques are used as a means to uncover or identify information that ultimately pertains to individuals.
Read moreA summer sabbatical
In recent weeks I have been sharing more informal thoughts and in the upcoming weeks, there will be a period of greater radio silence. After three decades as a professional, I am taking the entire summer off.
Read moreWeekly Musings – July 8, 2022
A very succinct description of the responsibilities of leadership by Jawad Nagda (infographic below) shows a number of key features of management that are also needed in data storytelling such as empathy, integrity, and listening.
Read moreWeekly Musings – June 10, 2022
A large part of my work week was spent u-hauling across 1/3 of the country. This was a very mentally intense time, indeed 8-10 hrs per day of concentration working with dangerous equipment and sometimes in unpredictable situations with little break was harder than sitting at a desk.
Read moreWeekly Musings – June 3, 2022
This week I wanted to share more about Observability and the CNCF foundation project Open Telemetry . Observability is a necessary foundation for any information system however observability does not answer questions that are essential for a successful business to operate.
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