The legendary W. Edwards Deming once said “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Playing Batman: Arkham Shadow recently, this quote kept resonating as I watched Commissioner Gordon - a dedicated public servant - struggle against Gotham’s broken system. This made me reflect on what effective executive sponsorship really looks like. Early in my career at Comcast, I experienced transformative sponsorship. Our development team needed Macs for coding (this was pre-WSL - yes, I’m dating myself here). Corporate policy prohibited Macs on the network. Instead of telling us to “make do,” or intentionally violating corporate IT policy, our executive sponsor recognized the systemic barrier and took action. They funded and built a parallel network infrastructure that enabled our success. Our team went on to deliver exceptional results because we were properly empowered. ...

Over a month ago, my journey with gopuff came to an end. It took me longer than expected to process all the emotions and think about what to do next. I poured myself into building our industry-defining, vertically integrated, quick commerce business. The first few years were the most productive of my professional career, and I enjoyed every minute. I didn’t feel the need to write a farewell post. It was, however, an excellent set of lessons for my children. The top ones were ‘don’t count your chickens (I believed I could retire on the equity)’ and don’t sacrifice your quality of life for a business. No matter how much they tell you they respect and need you, it’s not the same sentiment as I get from the kids when college tuition payments roll around 😃. ...

Devops is many different things to many different people, but nearly all practitioners agree that infrastructure as code is a critical part. So rather then use the Azure portal UI to create our desired resources we are going to script it in code. We will have confidence that we can create, destroy and eventually scale resources as needed. In this post we will create a Azure static using terraform, step by step. ...

The CosmosDB SQL is very flexible in returning objects and view projections, but it cannot Update documents via its SQL dialect.

The CosmosDB SQL API is very flexible in returning objects and view projections, but it cannot merge documents via its SQL dialect.