So to finish up my look back in 2025, I’ll dig into what I did outside of speaking and writing as my role as Advocate at Redgate.
Advocacy, Mentorship, and Community Engagement
While speaking and writing, 2025 reaffirmed the importance of advocacy and mentorship. I continued to support professionals navigating career transitions, offered guidance on neurodiversity and sustainability in tech, and contributed to inclusive, community-led events and initiatives reflected in my broader online presence and speaking engagements. I’m still co-organizer for the Data Platform DEI User Group in the Microsoft Community and am ramping up the PDX WIT Meetup in Portland, all while maintaining a few 1-on-1 mentoring opportunities with a few individuals.
I don’t commonly call out those I mentor and do so to protect their privacy, but I do want to say something for all the hard work each person has done. This quieter, relational work doesn’t always show up in headlines, but it remains a deeply rewarding and meaningful part of the year’s impact.
I want to give a heartfelt shout-out to the mentees I am endlessly proud of: Heidi, Vitalija, Maria, Tracy, Amy, and Libby. Each of you impresses me beyond measure with your never-give-up attitude, often supporting one another, and your intentional focus on both self-care and career growth. You show up every day carrying far more than what your job descriptions ask of you, and you do it with grit, generosity, and grace. It’s an honor to mentor you, and just as meaningful to call you my friends.
I also want to take a moment to thank those who have stood by me during some of the more challenging moments this year: Tracy, Heidi, Miranda, Kimberly, Marsha, David, Buck, and Pat. I know I have a tendency to operate like Rambo, an army of one, but your support, steadiness, and willingness to show up have meant more to me than I can adequately express. You reminded me that strength doesn’t have to be solitary, and your presence and care truly mean the world to me.
I also want to extend my thanks to the people who make the work at Redgate itself such a joy. Kirsty Roper, thank you for being an incredible manager, as your trust, support, and leadership make it possible for me to do my best work. Grant Fritchey and Steve Jones, you are phenomenal humans as well as fellow advocates, and I’m grateful every day to work alongside you. I say farewell to some wonderful peers on my team like Louis Davidson and Ryan Booz while sending a warm welcome to Pat Wright as he joins the team as our newest advocate. I also welcome our new team members Louise, Fergus, and Tony- your energy and perspectives are already making us better. We’re stronger together, and I’m genuinely excited for what we’ll accomplish as we head into 2026.
What’s My Day Job?
Now there’s a few out there who know me well enough to know that the above is NOT all that I do and that I NEED A LOT to keep me busy. If I get bored, I get in trouble. Due to this, I work throughout the week with the marketing and product teams, but even more so with engineering at Redgate. I’m an engineer at heart and it’s just really, difficult to beat that out of me. I am very proud to keep the “Oracle sky” flying high at Redgate. In the last year, we’ve launched a number of products and enhancements for Oracle in Redgate products.
Redgate Monitor for Oracle launched on August 29, 2025. It was a huge undertaking for the engineering team and I want to recognize the work that was done by the Polymon team who also worked with me on the initial monitoring work for MongoDB and MySQL. I had 3 decades to take on multiplatform and this team took it on in ONE YEAR!
I made AI look at Github and count how many releases included enhancements for Redgate Flyway for Oracle, (I’m pretty sure ChatGPT was swearing at me under its AI breath) as I see changes coming through all the time, but it’s important that I don’t confuse work with an actual release that included Oracle changes, and in 2025:
- Flyway Desktop had 11 releases.
- Flyway CLI had 7 releases.
- Oracle Schema Compare also had 2 major releases
Changes included dependency handling, native connectors, advance encoding, partition management, comparison and drift management. Most of these enhancements were due to the Iron Horse team in engineering and the Flyway product team and I really appreciate their collaboration and effort.
AI Advisor
You didn’t think everything I’ve covered here represents the full scope of my work, did you? In addition to my role at Redgate, I continue to allocate time each week to support my previous company, Silk, as a consultant, and I’ve also had the opportunity this year to advise 28 organizations as an AI Advisor. This work spans industries, data platforms, and maturity levels, and it keeps me grounded in the practical realities of how AI is actually being adopted, or struggling to be adopted, inside real production environments.
What makes this advisory work especially meaningful is its technical depth and intentionality. I work with organizations to define clear, outcome-driven goals for AI, assess the readiness of their data, platforms, and teams, and design governance and policy frameworks before models ever enter the picture. Establishing guardrails around data quality, security, lineage, risk, and accountability early on is not optional, but should be foundational. Done well, it allows AI initiatives to scale responsibly and deliver value without eroding trust or introducing hidden operational risk. Helping teams build that foundation is both intellectually rewarding and, increasingly, necessary.
Github
As part of my speaking and advisement, I’m also writing a lot more code than I have done in years. Where I was doing more architecture and white papers in previous roles, now I’m back to building the actual solutions from the code level. The code is most often in *SQL, python, PowerShell, BASH and whatever else is thrown at me. I’m working on Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, multiple AI and cloud vendors, too.
I made 69 contributions just to my own repositories this last year. It’s increased in the last six months as I started to invest in my own code, not just for the company, (which isn’t counted in those totals.)
Looking Back
Reflecting on 2025 reinforced some timeless truths:
- Technical fundamentals still matter, even as AI and abstraction layers rise
- AI needs intentional guardrails if it’s going to help instead of harm; and multi-platform realities are now a baseline expectation for data professionals.
Across keynotes, deep technical sessions, articles, podcasts, and mentorship, the year was about intentional momentum . I choose to build on decades of experience while staying grounded in what engineers and teams actually need today. I have no doubt I’ll hit publish on this 2nd part of the year in review and remember people and areas I should have focused on, but I’ll stop here and cross my fingers I covered what I should have.
As I look toward 2026 and beyond, I remain focused on practical AI integration, thoughtful multi-platform strategy, and sharing lessons that help the community solve hard problems with confidence and clarity.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
