There are two kinds of people who work with data, and they usually don’t sit at the same lunch table.
There are developers, who want to ship features and would prefer the database just quietly do what it’s told. And there are database people, who watch those developers with the weary suspicion of someone who’s seen exactly what a missing index can do to a Saturday night.
I’m both.
I’ve spent my entire career living in both worlds at once. I’m a full application developer and a full database developer, which is either a superpower or a personality disorder depending on the week. I call it being a dataveloper: someone who builds the whole application, makes the database underneath it fast, and then translates when the two tribes start yelling at each other across the room.
That’s the short version. Here’s how I got here.
How I got here
I grew up in Miami and spent most of my life in South Florida. I’m a proud graduate of the University of Miami, because it’s all about the U. I got my start through a run of IT internships, including stints at Ryder System and Walt Disney World, where, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, they handed a college kid full security clearance. Getting to see how the magic actually works from the inside was an amazing experience, and one I’m still a little smug about.
From there I cut my teeth on big, unglamorous systems that companies actually run on, the kind nobody tweets about but everybody depends on.
At Restaurant Services, I led a team that redesigned and rebuilt the supply-chain management system behind Burger King, the not-remotely-simple machinery that gets food and supplies to thousands of restaurants without anybody running out of burger patties. It was a three-year project, delivered on time and on budget, which if you’ve been anywhere near enterprise software you know is about as common as a total solar eclipse.
Then I spent years knee-deep in Subway’s payment world, building out the platform that processed their transactions. I tuned a sixty-terabyte SQL Server database, wrote a C# app that chewed through 250 million transactions to build gift-card analytics, and architected a Data Vault to archive it all.
Sixty terabytes has a way of teaching you humility. And index strategies.
In 2016 I joined Brent Ozar Unlimited, where I’ve been ever since. It’s where both sides of my work, the code and the data, finally got to run together full-time, building products for the global SQL Server community.
What I’ve built
SQL ConstantCare is an AWS serverless platform that quietly collects SQL Server diagnostics from customer environments around the world, runs them through 90-plus diagnostic rules, and warns people about what’s going to hurt before it hurts. It’s the kind of system that has to work correctly at 3 a.m. with nobody watching, which is a genuinely fun constraint to design around.
PasteThePlan.com is a place to upload, share, transform, and untangle SQL Server execution plans. It’s quietly become one of those dependable corners of the SQL Server world that people reach for without thinking. If you’ve ever pasted a plan into a Slack channel and asked “is this bad?”, this is the tool that lets someone actually answer you.
StatisticsParser.com takes the wall of STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME output that SQL Server coughs up and turns it into something a human can read and sort. I built it because I got tired of counting logical reads by hand. Whoops. I mean, “for the community.”
I also founded dotNet Miami, and I’m still a little proud of it. It was not a user group. We actually refused to call it that. It was a community of South Florida developers, free to attend and open to everyone from the first-week student to the grizzled corporate veteran, built on one simple idea: together we can make each other more awesome than we already are. Members taught members, nobody had to sit through a bad sales demo, and we treated the other technical communities in town as comrades instead of competition.
And I created and co-host Away From The Keyboard, a podcast where we interview technologists about how they got started, how they grew, and, the part I care about most, how they unwind.
Which brings me to my own answer to that question.
Away from the keyboard
These days I live minutes from Walt Disney World, which means I somehow circled right back to a place I interned as a college kid. Life has a sense of humor like that. When I’m not staring at a query plan, I’ve usually got a novel open, most likely science fiction or fantasy, shout out to Brandon Sanderson. I like to unwind by playing retro video games (I’m still terrible at Halo multiplayer), losing at board games, or assembling Lego, which is really just infrastructure-as-code you can step on.
I’m also a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. That one deserves its own sentence. I replay the 2016 World Series in my head nearly every day, and I have no plans to stop. If you were also emotionally present for Game 7, we’re going to get along just fine.
So, hi
That’s me. A dataveloper who’s still genuinely delighted by a well-tuned query, an execution plan that finally makes sense, and a rain delay that ends in a championship.
Poke around the site. If something here is useful to you, or you just want to argue about indexes, science fiction, or the greatest Game 7 ever played, I’d love to hear from you.