Teams

Legacy teams don’t need cake: they need a seat at the table. With modernization efforts, new systems often get the spotlight and celebrating those wins is important. But beware the “cake in the break area” trap. If your legacy support team’s main interaction with your modernization effort is a leftover piece of cake, you’ve fallen into that trap. Legacy engineers keep the present running while the future is still being built. They bring deep institutional knowledge, production support experience, and insight into why systems were built the way they were, knowledge earned through past rewrites, migrations, and upgrades. ...

Most database contention isn’t a database problem. It’s an application design problem that the database makes visible. If you haven’t already, start with the Prepare, Investigate, Report framework … it covers how to debug and report database issues before you get to the harder stuff here. Database contention is vexing because its roots are often in the application code, not the database itself. What Causes Contention The most common cause is application design that doesn’t account for how the database manages concurrency. When you hold locks for too long, the database is doing what you asked. Deadlocks are almost always an application design issue, and timeouts normally are too. ...

If your “database ticket” says “it’s slow” or “it timed out,” you’re not asking for help … you’re asking someone else to guess. I’ve watched good database engineers (DBAs) lose days to vague reports that are basically “something happened” with a request for help. Not because teams are careless, but because nobody taught them what DBAs actually need to investigate: the query, the error, the timing, and the context. DBAs want to be helpful. But their expertise is best used when developers can solve common issues independently and escalate the non-obvious ones with enough evidence to act. ...

This is a two-part series on how software engineers and database teams work together effectively. Good database collaboration starts with developers who can debug common issues independently and escalate the hard ones with enough evidence to act. When things get harder … deadlocks, timeouts, hidden triggers … the problem usually lives in your application code, not the database. Prepare, Investigate, Report - a framework for debugging database issues independently, reporting with evidence, and knowing when to escalate Database Contention Is an Application Problem - why deadlocks and timeouts usually trace back to application design: transactions, locks, frameworks, and triggers

I once came back from a week off to find that a time-sensitive task had simply waited for me. Nobody dropped the ball … the ball was never passed. The team didn’t lack talent. They lacked the setup to succeed without me, and that was my fault. Your vacation is a stress test for your team’s resilience. If work piles up like garbage during a sanitation strike every time someone is out, the problem isn’t their absence … it’s that you didn’t give your team the tools they needed before a coworker left. ...