The Hobbyist and the Professional

Ronald Bradford
September 17, 2006

I first coined this term in February 2006 in a paper titled “Overcoming the Challenges of Establishing Service and Support Channels” for the conference “Implementing Open Source for Optimal Business Performance” View Paper.

I must have referenced this several times, time to give this topic it’s due notice. In summary it targets three areas:

the lack of appropriate database design in open source projects
the lack of coding standards
the lack of sound programming principles

Here are the bullet points from the slide in a presentation.

Hobbyist

Download-able software and examples
Online tutorials
Books like Learn in 24 hours/For Dummies

Professional

Formal Qualifications
Grounding in sound programming practices
Understanding of SDLC principles
Worked in team environment

Middle Ground Developer

Time to skill verses output productivity
Depends on environment and requirements

Tagged with: Databases General Open Source

My take on PyCon Australia 2026

Ronald Bradford
August 30, 2026

PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community. With specialized tracks and dedicated tutorial and engineering days there was a wide variety of content available.

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

Ronald Bradford
August 18, 2026

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.

Curating DuckDB Datasets Leveraging AI

Ronald Bradford
August 17, 2026

In Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing I described datasets assembled the manual way — download, schema, load, validate, document — over hours or days per source. This post is the follow-up I promised: what changes when AI assists the same workflow, using DuckDB as the target engine and GeoNames as the first example.