My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper. He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I've ever known — grip … Continue reading His Hard Hat
7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26 I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone's trying to figure out right now. I work in data management. I've spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into … Continue reading Data Is Communication
Day 71 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in data management. It’s my day job. I think about how data flows through systems, how it gets organized, how it turns into something useful. I think about the architecture behind it — the tables, the databases, the business processes, the … Continue reading A Tomb or a Library
Day 50 — The 7-40 Challenge February 24, 2026 I spend my days writing SQL, talking with people about their data, and making sure systems talk to each other the way they’re supposed to. It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s making a movie about the guy who finds the duplicate data records. But here’s the thing nobody … Continue reading SELECT * FROM imagination WHERE creativity IS NOT NULL
Day 27 of the 7-40 ChallengeTuesday, January 27, 2026 I'm reading Carmine Gallo's book Talk Like TED right now, and in Chapter 1, he asks a question that stopped me on my walk this morning: "What makes your heart sing?" The answer came immediately: Being a husband to to my bride. Being a father to my son. … Continue reading The Rules That Make Excellence Possible: Day 27
David Willis 