I’m Phil Beazley, a database administrator and programmer. I spend my days with SQL Server and much of my spare time building software. Lately that has meant coding agents, shared application templates, and getting my old Amiga BBS answering again.

Unattended is where I write about that work, including the experiments that didn’t work out. The archive has the projects and debugging stories. Here’s a bit about how I got here.

Databases

I’ve worked with Microsoft SQL Server for most of my career, from version 6.5 through 2025. I design databases, tune queries, plan capacity, and handle upgrades and migrations. Keeping production running also means security, high availability, disaster recovery, and data governance. Some of the checks I keep coming back to are collected in Eleven SQL Server Checks, Ordered by Return on the Hour Spent.

From 2015 to 2023, I led a DBA team at a top-ten global bank. Our onshore and offshore engineers managed more than 200 instances across several platforms and data centers, holding over 70 TB of production data. We handled upgrades, hardware migrations, clustering, AlwaysOn, recovery cutovers, and roughly a thousand tickets and changes each month, with 24/7 on-call coverage. I also led the work to scrub sensitive data from non-production systems for GLBA and SOX audits. That became a centralized system for cleaning the data when we refreshed those environments.

Before that, from 2005 to 2015, I worked as a DBA for a specialty insurance carrier, a bankruptcy firm, and the State of Texas, with contract work for Match.com along the way. I designed schemas, wrote stored procedures, kept systems running, and handled large migrations, version upgrades, and re-platforming.

Before the DBA jobs, I owned and ran an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a website hosting company from 1997 to 2005. During that time, I did pretty much everything - hardware, system admin, networking, billing, development, and design. I also got my first taste of SQL Server (6.5 on NT, baby!) because our largest client had wildly outgrown their Access database. These were the original CGI days and Perl was a big deal for me. I created most of the ISP management suite in Perl. I also led the local users group. Shout out to Perl Mongers! I also worked with iHTML and ColdFusion on products we’d now describe as SaaS.

PowerShell

I learned PowerShell because I needed it to manage all those databases without doing everything by hand. I built a central collector for data dictionary, environment, security, and performance metrics across several platforms. Working with the DevOps and application DBA teams, I also automated deployments using Git, PowerShell, T-SQL, and FileTables. Along the way, I started an in-house PowerShell mentoring group and ran its sessions. I didn’t have time for traditional programming, but PowerShell handled 97% of what I needed day to day and kept me interested enough to learn more.

When I came back to application development, I built my first web apps with PowerShell. The reusable parts of those became Podex, a PowerShell, Pode, and htmx framework. It’s a novelty and a proof of concept, and I still think it’s pretty cool.

Application Development

I started out as a programmer, and database administration pulled me away for twenty years. In August 2024, I decided I could do it again, which is where this log picks up in Back to Programming.

Since then: KeyStrike, a real-time multiplayer typing game that was my excuse to finally learn React; htmx-debugger, a browser extension for debugging htmx swaps; and a full-stack template, Spernakit, that grew into a fleet of eleven applications sharing one upgrade path.

AI Orchestration

I use Summon to work with a team of named coding-agent sessions. Each has its own conversation and working folder. A shared room, mail, work board, and diary let them hand work to each other and show me what is waiting for my review. They run through the provider CLIs I already use.

Since late 2025, a lot of my work has been getting coding agents to do useful, verifiable work unattended. Three provider wrappers turned into aidd, a local control panel for planning AI coding work and checking the result. It keeps plans, runs, audits, and approvals together, runs agents headlessly, and can give coding runs their own Git worktrees.

The Projects tab has the full list, including StarSync, which keeps local copies of my starred GitHub repositories.

The agents have given me plenty to write about: five false reports out of twelve in one test run, the quality checks I trusted before trying to break them, and the run that reset my working tree. I made Spernakit and aidd public in July 2026. aidd went private again while I reset its history, then returned on September 7 as v3.0.0 with one commit behind it. The longer account starts with Building with AI.

Certifications

  • 2016Microsoft Certified Professional: Developing SQL Data Models
  • 2016Microsoft Specialist: Design and Implement Big Data Analytics Solutions
  • 2016Microsoft Certified Professional: Querying SQL Server 2012/2014
  • 2016Microsoft Certified Professional: Administering SQL Server 2012/2014
  • 2006Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: SQL Server 2005

Before all this

I served in the Marine Corps from 1992 to 1997. I worked as a Marine air-ground task force (MAGTF) planner’s enlisted assistant. I held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, but it expired long ago.

I started with the TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam, and Commodore 64, then moved on to the Commodore 128 and a run of Amigas: a 500, a 2000, a 1200, and finally a 3000T - my last non-Windows computer. I used it for my first year in business before Microsoft pulled me away. At fifteen, I was maintaining an Amiga-based information display system at Odessa College.

The Amiga is also where I started Virtual Reality, my C-Net BBS in my hometown of Odessa, Texas, on October 19, 1989. When I moved to North Carolina for the Marines, I renamed it Autumn’s Harvest Inn. The Inn took its first call in Swansboro at 2:18 in the morning on January 28, 1993, and ran through 1996.

I was Midnight, its sysop. The board answered 24 hours a day and belonged to five networks, including FidoNet (1:3614/118) and CCNet, which I co-founded. It was an official C-Net beta site and the home of Spectral Neurologix, my line of add-ons: SN DoorMenu, MainMenuLine, SureChat, and dozens more.

On September 20, 2026, the Inn booted again from a 2001 backup inside an emulated Amiga 1200. The old user file, menus, door games, and artwork survived. The message volume didn’t. Moving it onto a real A1200 is still ahead, but software I wrote in the 1990s is running again. Read Autumn’s Harvest Inn Is Answering Again.

Elsewhere