Does your search history look like this? show tables in postgres use database in postgres describe in postgres mom's friend actress from Sharp Objects I am a long time MySQL user. All of its admin commands are simple and make sense. PostgreSQL’s are complex, powerful, and impossible to remember. …

In a previous post I wrote about creating charts with Postgres, but let’s go beyond simple time series charts. Bump charts are 🔥 🔥 🔥 and here’s how to create them in pure PostgreSQL without any post-query transformations! What is a bump chart, exactly? A bump chart plots a datapoint’s rank among values instead of the…

In 2016 at RJMetrics (now Magento Analytics), we built out yet another chart builder called the SQL Report Builder. I was excited. RJMetrics long built itself on a reputation for being able to do reporting “without SQL” but now we’d get the best of both worlds. Business users and data…

The NJ E-ZPass website looks like the it was designed by a transit director’s nephew in 2000. Maybe it looks like work you did in the early aughts. I’ve made worse looking sites than this in my career, but in every case someone came along and redesigned it. …

There are two common strategies for structuring engineering teams: Functional teams that group engineers by specialization led by an engineering manager. Cross-functional teams that group engineers with different strengths, often led by a less technical business manager. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, but why settle for one? At RJMetrics…

Nothing is worse than trying to figure out what went wrong with application data and finding out your tables don’t have created_at or updated_at columns to store when rows are inserted or updated. Another benefit you get from having an updated_at column is efficient data replication into systems like Pipeline…