Ryan McCauley

SQL Server developer, data mining enthusiast, general solution-finder, supporter of innovation, and fan of making T-SQL do really fun stuff. he/him.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

I feel like this every year highlights the difference between “the data” and “the story” better than any other example I can think of.

[Ana @wavelettes]

Spotify wrapped is people waiting all winter for like 2 sql queries that’s wild

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@hannnsssen @SketchesbyBoze First read this book in class about 25 years ago and it’s amazing - thank you for the reminder to read it again :)

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@jb_61820 @Madisonkanna 2/3 are huge and something a lot of developers I’ve worked with (and me earlier in my career) commonly miss - developers don’t just write software or build things, they make somebody’s job or the customers’s life easier. If you can see the points of friction and fix them, do it.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@rrhoover Find my phone, though never an issue until I got the watch to begin with :) I go camping often so the compass and waypoints without my phone out are really nice, and I also filter notifications so I actually check my phone less. Rarely use any actual watch apps.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@austinkleon If you liked peewee, the recent “Peewees big holiday” was shockingly fun. I’d also recommend “coin heist” if you’re up for a kid-friendly heist movie - not amazing but pretty fun as well and enjoyed it with the family. This is a great list that we’ll use!

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@LWaterbury @LaComtesseJamie Came here to say that it looks like a baller Perry. My youngest just started crocheting too and yours is off to a great start!!

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@andruyeung For my current employer, it was 20 weeks paid parental leave (birth and adoption, both parents) in the US where zero is required - we’re done having kids so it’s a benefit I’ll never personally use, but it made clear that they support families and flexibility isn’t lip service.

[Sarah @heyaimsarah]

For the past four years it’s been my job - nay, my PLEASURE - to be the tweeter behind the @OKWildlifeDept account. This is my final post.

It’s been my absolute honor to roast and ratio some of you into the ground in the name of science. Let’s take a trip down memory lane: 🧵

[Emily @the_aiju]

it was such a weird thing as a kid that everyone kept calling me a “computer genius” bc i knew how to…read what it says on the screen. what was up with that.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

Maybe everybody already knows this but if you use Excel, you Control-Shift-V might be the greatest shortcut ever. It pastes just the values, no formatting, as plain text including flattens formulas into their result. It's saved me SOOOO much grief. That is all.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@orblightning @lauriewired I used to have a bunch of downloaded demos from farbrasch that were like this - insane amounts of graphics demo crammed into tiny EXE files and there were whole competitions. They don’t all run on newer windows though :( https://t.co/OfPmmar7qw

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@MSPowerBI Are there any plans to add “Analyze/Explain the increase” functionality to Report Server? I’ve been hopeful for years and I just had another case where’s I’d love to have used it so crossing my fingers…..

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@ahmadaccino I think the most basic audio feature the Mac is missing is permanently disabling an audio output. When I plug into my dock, the Mac says “sweet, speakers on your monitor, let’s use those” and I say “no, bad Mac” and switch back. Then next time I dock, it says “sweet, speakers…”

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@DynamicWebPaige I want a 20-questions style interview process that asks me questions like “will people access this over the internet” and “are you okay writing your own database queries” and then uses that to recommend 5 platforms/frameworks with reasons why they’re ranked that way.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@t_redactyl Hmm I don’t know that I’ve ever said it out loud but it’s like pip in my head - pip pea. I suppose that’s wrong no matter what, and a podcast I listen to keeps calling it pie P I so I figured that’s the official way. What I’ve learned from your two answer poll is that there’s >2

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@jkellyjr @StaceyKade Just bought it and reading it now - I’ve been waiting eagerly and I’m trying not to go too fast because I know I’ll be sad it’s over once I finish and have to wait a whole year for Cold Eternity!

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@sewistwrites If it’s non-fiction then Weapons of math destruction by @mathbabedotorg late last year (sadly my most recent NF book) and for fiction, Last to Leave the Room by @see_starling last month. Honorable mention of Dead Silence by @StaceyKade just before though.

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@tobinjstone Oh man, last election I thought it would be funny if I wrote myself in for “Mine inspector” because there were no official candidates and got a few friends in too. “Surely there’s no way I win” - I wonder how close I got or if I’m the Mine Inspector now and nobody has told me…

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

@philkellr @richter_ac I think it’s super similar but I made the mistake of calling it “2D Minecraft” to my kids once and they lost it, insisting they’re nothing alike…

[Ryan McCauley @SqlRyan]

Whenever I see an interface that looks like it’s been around a while, I wonder what the story is. Here’s one :) Now on to wondering how long it’s been since the Outlook rules editing screen has been touched…

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in "temporary" solutions!

I also had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember... there are no "temporary" checkins :)

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