Distilled PM Advice

I wouldn’t say that I’m a great PM by any means, but I’m fortunate to have had years of fun shipping products as part of my career. To cut to the chase, here’s some of the lessons I’ve learned in their distilled forms.

Protobuf and gRPC ramp-up project

It’s been a couple of years since I worked with gRPC and Protocol Buffers. It was part of the online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) through Georgia Tech and something that we touched on in the operating systems course, but other than that, I have basically no recent experience with something that is core to a bunch of systems.

Truthfully, what stuck with me more from OMSCS was the RPC/gRPC part, and the Protocol Buffers side didn’t stick as well. Now that I’m onboarding at Temporal, I see quite a bit of use of Protocol Buffers, especially in SDKs that share a common contract with the server. Now I’m refreshing myself on Protocol Buffers and gRPC through a very small sample project.

Project overview

We’re going to create a very basic chat server and client application. The client application can retrieve a subset of recent messages or send a message from the user.

Video: Fundamentals of CI/CD for SQL projects

In a July 2026 episode of Data Exposed, I discussed the setup of Azure DevOps pipelines for SQL database CI/CD backed by SQL projects. Learn how to keep your database protected by firewall rules, leverage passwordless authentication, and create a strong foundation of database CI/CD pipelines.

Building automated pipelines with your SQL database projects enables you to build a rich CI/CD ecosystem to ensure that your application is being deployed with good quality code and at high confidence of success. SQL Database Projects are compatible with just about every automation environment because fundamentally they’re built on top of the .NET SDK, a free and cross-platform development platform. You can develop the Microsoft.Build.Sql projects in VS Code and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

Code analysis with SQL projects

SQL projects are a development capability for SQL Server and Azure SQL where your database objects are stored as code with integrations for CI/CD capabilities like code quality checks and dynamically calculated deployments. This article walks/runs through the fundamentals of code analysis with SQL projects and how it is useful both for local development and as a CI check.

Introduction to SQL projects

SQL projects are a development capability for SQL Server and Azure SQL where your database objects are stored as code with integrations for CI/CD capabilities like code quality checks and dynamically calculated deployments. This article walks/runs through creating a new SQL project and deploying it to a database from the command line and any text editor. The tooling ecosystem around SQL projects includes VS Code, Visual Studio, and the SqlPackage CLI. Learn more about all of this at the Microsoft.Build.Sql projects documentation.