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

How easy is it to use the VillageSQL MCP extension?

Ronald Bradford
October 2, 2026

VillageSQL published Access MySQL over MCP with vsql-mcp . The extension serves the Model Context Protocol from inside the database, so an agent talks to MySQL over Streamable HTTP without a sidecar holding a credential.

Getting VECTOR capabilities in MySQL 8.4 using VillageSQL

Ronald Bradford
September 20, 2026

For this quick verification of the 0.0.7 development branch of VillageSQL with the new vsql-vector plugin. Recreate the VillageSQL Percona Live presentation using MySQL version 8.4 and SVECTOR. Demonstrate a more detailed example using SVECTOR(1024) string embedded data.

Improving container security in your CI/CD pipeline

Ronald Bradford
September 3, 2026

At PyCon AU 2026 , the presentation Your Python container is 90% stuff you didn’t ask for by Scott Norris at Chainguard really exposed the impact of being lazy in container management for security purposes.