It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything here, but looking back on the past year feels like the perfect way to start again. 2025 was the year I finally slowed down enough to look closely at where my time was actually going. I started tracking my days—not out of
For as long as I can remember—since I was 16 or even earlier—chronic suicidal thoughts have been an unrelenting presence in my life. They’re not fleeting or circumstantial but deeply embedded in my mind, shaping how I experience the world and how I interact with others. Despite the love, support,
Embracing Limitations: Finding Strength and Purpose in Hard Times For four years, I was honored to receive the MVP award for my work in the tech community. This award recognized my dedication and expertise, but this past year was very hard for me because of my health. Through these challenges,
I’m excited to be presenting at PASS Summit 2023, not only because it is PASS Summit but because of the topic. I do a lot of reading on productivity. Please don’t ask me how many books I own or blogs and newsletters I am subscribed to. But if you need
Twenty years ago, I stood in a courtroom and took an oath for a volunteer job I had no idea I would fall so much in love with or do for 20 years. I was sworn in as North Carolina Guardian ad Litem and was handed my first case with
It’s time for our monthly blog party and thanks to Gethyn Ellis ( t | b) for hosting this month. Gethyn asks us for the best Career Advice we’ve ever received. As with everything there is a story to go with it. My first job out of high school I managed to
I’ve been using Azure SQL Database for quite some while and have set up it in many various ways to run Ola’s Index Optimize and Statistics Updates on them. All of these have seemed way too complicated probably because I was setting them up once, not again for several more
Back in December 2019, I started presenting my session on mental health with lots of fear as to how the community was going to take my openness to the subject. I was pleasantly surprised that in the three-plus years so far I’ve only had one person say bad things to
EightKB is a wonderfully ran conference by my friends Mark Wilkinson (T | B), Anthony Nocentino (T | B), Andrew Pruski (T | B), and Marsha Pierce (T | B). They have rich, deep-dive content for every event and it is well attended. One problem they have though is getting
I wrote a blog post a few months ago about the tools I use on my jumpbox you can read here. Since then, I have automated most of the install with Chocately and so I’ll have the script later I’m going to blog it here. First, we need to install
