He’s Bad at Taking Advice, but Man is He Smart

He in this case is Tim Mallalieu from the data programmability team. He and I used to work on the .NET Adoption Team in the field together before we both moved to campus. Tim, if I recall correctly, was the first outside hire we made on that team. We used to constantly argue about who was the second smartest on the team. He thought it was me and I thought it was him. We both agreed the Jeromy was the smartest.

Anyway, after literally years of haranguing, Tim finally started a blog. But he’s still not really listening to me. I told him he should start with a series of smaller posts and he didn’t.

I’m back working with Tim in a fashion as both my team and his team try and get a handle on how data is going to evolve as we move to service orientation. Most of the existing data paradigms and semantics such as table joins and transactions assume everything is together in one database. Obviously, as we break down large systems into smaller services, having everything in one database just isn’t practical.