When I first started using databases it was innocent enough. I just wanted to store some simple data. I think I was using MS Access via the JET Engine. Remember scott/tiger? I lost a lot of hair late at night pushing Oracle and our systems to the limits at Paypal.

Read More

I am a geek for public data sets. I stumbled across this data set and wanted to use it for a sample for testing, teaching, etc. It’s a pretty cool example of a MongoDB use case, so I thought I would share.

Read More

I thought I would post up some useful queries to analyze profiler output. I created a gist on GitHub with some of them, and enumerated a couple of the more interesting ones in this post.

Read More

Read More

It’s been about 8 years since I began blogging, and today it’s time for a change.

For most of these 8 years I have been using Wordpress for my blog backend. It’s been a fun ride, but I have fallen in love with a new platform. The reason is pretty simple, but first a little background. While I was playing with my Wordpress setup for the 99,999th time I was pondering, why can’t I just use Git for this stuff? Better yet Github. Why is this so tough? Why can’t I just get a simple ‘developer feeling’ blog theme, and edit it like I do code every day? Why can’t I just use straight markdown?

John Moore, one of our insanely talented Customer Data Engineers and pretty damn clever Developer told me about Jekyll. He said:

Enter Jekyll

Jekyll is a framework that converts simple markdown into a blog made up of static HTML. It can be hosted seamlessly on Github using Github Pages and all the tooling and workflows that come along with Git and Github. But it’s so much more simple and wonderful than that. The reasons I chose Jekyll boil down to:

• Jekyll uses simple HTML files, no need for any LAMP stack components.
• A developer look and feel, with a emphasis on wonderful typography, simple presentation, and code snippets!
• I can write in simple markdown.
• I can check my changes in using Git, and they can live on Github.
• I can use the same workflow for blogging as I do for coding. Huge plus.
• Customization is dead simple
• Hopefully a simplified and less often upgrade process
• Security

So, welcome to my new blog. Over the coming days (well most likely weeks) I will be porting my old content from Wordpress over to Jekyll. Wish me luck, and I hope you enjoy reading up.

Before I go, I want to give some credit where credit is due. I couldn’t have made the conversion over without the good writings, code, and theme’s from these guys:

• @mdo
• Barry Clark
• Mike

Read More

My presentation at the San Francisco MongoDB User Group at Geekdom.

Read More