I’m Phil Beazley. Unattended is a working log of building with coding agents, and making the result prove itself: what I built, what I broke, and what I changed next. The archive is the long version. This tab is the short one.
Databases
I’ve worked with Microsoft SQL Server for most of my career, from version 6.5 through 2025. That has covered upgrades, migrations, performance tuning, and capacity planning, along with management, high availability, disaster recovery, security, design, normalization, and data governance. I still manage production estates every day. My working rules 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 70TB of production data. The work ranged from version upgrades and hardware migrations to failover clustering, AlwaysOn, unplanned recovery cutovers, instance standardization, 24/7 on-call coverage, and roughly a thousand tickets and changes each month. I also led the work to identify and fix NPPI in non-production systems for GLBA and SOX audits, which produced a centralized, data-driven scrubbing system for refreshing lower 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.
I started, 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! iHTML and ColdFusion were also at their peak and SaaS wasn’t a thing yet but we were doing it anyway.
PowerShell
I learned PowerShell because managing a large SQL Server estate by hand doesn’t scale. I turned that need into a centralized system for collecting and monitoring dictionary, environmental, security, and performance metrics across several data platforms. It also automated deployment with the DevOps and application DBA teams through Git, PowerShell, T-SQL, and FileTables. Along the way, I started the 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
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 whether it really passed. It runs agents headlessly, can give a run its own git worktree, and audits the output before accepting it.
See Projects for others, including Spernakit, Podex, and StarSync.
Most of what I have to say about this is unglamorous and lives in the archive: a 42% false-positive rate on agent-filed bug reports, nine checks that reported green while measuring the wrong thing, and the guard hole that led to isolated worktrees. In July 2026, I stopped building it privately: Spernakit and aidd go public. aidd went private again after that while I reset its history, and came back on September 7, 2026 as v3.0.0, with one commit behind it. The full AI series can be read here: 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 I moved on to the Commodore 128, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, and Amiga 3000T - my last non-Windows computer. I used it for my first year in business before Microsoft pulled me away.