Neil Davidson

DBA in Space

Neil Davidson — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:33:00 GMT

Every now and then, you come across an idea that makes your heart jump and your skin tingle. That happened to me a few months ago, when Richard and Anthony pitched a small group of us an idea. "It's called DBA in Space", Richard said. I don't remember the rest of the pitch. "DBA in Space" is one of those phrases that's so simple, remarkable and clear that it sticks and it sticks hard. Sure, lots of people have done much hard, gritty work over the past few months to make it happen. Sure, there's...(read more)

You're so vain, I bet you think this blog is (not) about you

Neil Davidson — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:20:00 GMT

Bob Sutton, Evidence-based management, and the no @ssh0le rule....(read more)

Dog-whistle marketing

Neil Davidson — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:13:00 GMT

Marketing steganography. Read on to find the hidden message....(read more)

Some of the best books about software and business

Neil Davidson — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:32:00 GMT

If you want to read about software and business, these books by Scott Adams, Fred Brooks and others are a good start....(read more)

Hype 2.0

Neil Davidson — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:23:00 GMT

There's been a whole load of hype around Web 2.0 and now Search 2.0. In the World 2.0 we live in, '2.0' has taken on a radical new meaning. It's a whole new version of 2.0. It's 2.0 2.0.Does anybody else have any more examples of Hype 2.0?...(read more)

Ajax – the dancing dog of software development

Neil Davidson — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:42:00 GMT

Ajax is the dancing dog of software development. Creating platform-independent, highly interactive, installation-free applications is a noble aim, and Ajax is a very clever solution, but it is not a solid foundation for the applications of the future....(read more)

Corporate dystopia - how can we avoid it?

Neil Davidson — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 09:35:00 GMT

As Red Gate grows bigger, I’m concerned that the culture will change. Some change is inevitable but I’m keen that it changes in a good way rather than develop into a corporate dystopia. In software companies a them and us mentality often develops. The development team view the marketing team as woolly-thinking powerpoint bunnies; the support team think the developers are arrogant nerds; the developers and testers fight battles over trivial points. Nothing ever ships. And when it does, it doesn’t work. And everybody blames everybody else. We’re trying to prevent this happening at Red Gate in several ways....(read more)

How we write software

Neil Davidson — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 13:12:00 GMT

I’m proud of the software that we write at Red Gate. The people here produce awesome software that’s well designed, well written, well tested and well documented. And we’re trying to scale up. A year or so ago we could run a couple of development projects at a time. We’re still a small company, but we can now run five. In a year, we’ll be running ten in parallel. What are we doing to make this happen?...(read more)