Hi, I'm Derek Francour. I've worked in tech since 2015-- as a software engineer, database specialist, and solutions engineer.

A through line in my work has been a focus on the intersection between an application and its database. I find that those charged with maintaining databases often care too little for the concerns of the application, and vice versa. The knowledge that sits at that interface-- query tuning, schema design, data modeling, indexing strategies-- is where I have the most fun.

I've worked with SQL variants like PostgreSQL and SQL Server, document databases like MongoDB, as well as a lesser-known integrated database/language called M (a.k.a. MUMPS, Caché, IRIS-- if curious, this blog post by Maureen Daum is an excellent primer).

This site is where I share things I find interesting, or things I learned the hard way.

“Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.”

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

“Do the reading.”

“Do the reading. A lot of us are taught, … that you want to get by without doing the reading.

You can read the summary, or you skim, and you read the conclusion, and then you skim. Or you can fake it, or you get just enough of it to sound like you read it. We're given these strategies for getting by without doing the reading, for faking it more effectively.

And so something that I really learned as I became a professional, you would just be amazed at how few people in life are actually doing the reading. All the way up the chain of success and prestige, how many people are just pretending to know what they're talking about by relying on summaries of summaries or the received opinions of their peers, or just their sheer capacity to bullshit. If there is any single secret to the show, it is that we do the reading.”

…

“Because the point isn't the argument or information in the book. … The point is what happens in the time you spend engaging and wrestling with the book, or the movie, or the art, or the music, or whatever it is.

It's an interaction between you and the object that matters, you and the information. That's where something happens that creates something new, that gives you your own perspective on it. You can't do that in a summary.”

Read the full quote

This site is built with Next.js App Router and React, and styled with Tailwind.

I write my blog posts in MDX, an extension of markdown that allows me to embed React components where useful. Each post lives in its own folder (named for the slug), with metadata like author and date specified in frontmatter.

---
title: "How to Read MongoDB Explain Plans"
author: "Derek Francour"
date: "2026-01-31"
description: "Learn to read MongoDB explain plans and identify performance issues quickly."
draft: true
---