Current and Upcoming Projects

After finishing my review of the Rogue C# series and uploading it to Amazon, I’ve been getting things in order and deciding what’s to come for 2026. Here are a few notes:

Rogue C#

I definitely need to finish this series. It’s a software project, not a Game of Thrones sequel.

It’s actually more than a software project, though; it’s a one-man software and book project with the documentation being written, and at least somewhat finished, at the same time as the code. The recent review was aimed mainly at finding typos and obvious technical errors and making it good enough for Amazon and that still took a lot more time than I anticipated.

I need to do a complete review of the actual code with the articles as a guide. That process is going to be part of any continuation that I do and should be interesting and worth documenting on its own. It’s been about 2 1/2 years since I wrote the last chapter of the series and I’ll be reviewing, and questioning, all the decisions I made then.

There’s also the question of A.I.. While I remain committed to writing my own code and content, it’s ridiculous to ignore the possibilities of how tools like Gemini or Claude can legitimately assist in software creation. The technology is not going away; it needs to be used responsibly and I want to provide guidance on that in future projects.

I’ve been looking for a good way to monetize the series going forward; I can’t do this stuff for free forever. The offline edition that I just published is one way and, if you’d really like to support work like this, please consider purchasing a copy. I’m also considering a Udemy course.

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MySQL Explained

Back in 2015, I wrote MySQL Explained, a basic introduction to Oracle’s MySQL database software. It was last reviewed in 2017. I can’t believe it’s been nine years since then but time flies. I’ve been wanting to get back to doing a new and improved version for both MySQL and MariaDB, the open source fork of the software.

I put together an outline of a new version a couple of years ago and was immediately intimidated by the size of it based on everything that I felt needed to be in there. Both software titles have advanced even since then with MySQL now on version 8.4.8 (LTS) and MariaDB on version 12.1.2. The book also needs to be re-written from scratch because of how much more I understand now about presenting this type of material than I did in 2015. I would use the same learn-by-doing approach that I used in my recent Self-Guided SQL but with an even greater focus on specific tasks.

It will be a huge job but it needs to be done. I know that the book has been picked up by some college courses over the years from direct reports and the size of some of the orders I’ve seen on Amazon. I’d like to get an modern update out there to serve those who are obviously interested in learning about the software. Just like with Rogue C#, a Udemy course might be a good idea.

Meanwhile, the 2017 version is still available on Amazon if you would like to check it out. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

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Side Projects

As I wrote in my first post of 2026, I’m trying to do more with the site and the YouTube channel with, maybe, some content that isn’t directly related to technology. I’ve also been taking another look at my reading list lately and you might notice some of the selections on the side bar to your right.

Meanwhile, the two book projects should be more than enough to keep me busy and will provide plenty of content for the site and YouTube so stay tuned!