I’ve been a bit busy this year. I kept submitting to places and for some oddball reason I kept getting picked. I was selected for Atlanta as well but had to remove myself because of work. I had to also remove myself pre selection from Maine thanks to work. Boo work.
So let’s recap shall we?
Madison was awesome. Thanks to Jess and the team there for a fantastic event. I loved that they had 75 minute sessions. That’s definitely my speed for my build a clusters talk as I usually find myself running out of room. It is an 8 hour drive from Cleveland. I got my wife to come with me and she watched me present. It was nice to spend a weekend together even if she had to go back to the room early because she didn’t feel well during the afterparty. I also found a new favorite beer, go find yourself some spotted cow.
http://www.newglarusbrewing.com/index.cfm/general/index
Columbus marked the one year anniversary of my speaking start. So this event will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s a quick drive and Peter Shore and David Maxwell who run it are great guys and do a really great job. My session this year went well, except I had a total brain fart and somehow forgot to go through the installer to show how you span an instance across the nodes of your cluster. I threw the slides up on the SQL Sat site for this talk and added that in at the end. So I hopefully caught myself there. Otherwise it was another lovely day in Cbus.
I just came home today from Indianapolis for SQL Sat Indy. I have family about 10 minutes from the venue so I was able come in Thursday night and have dinner with them. It was nice catching up. I also spent Friday in Adam Machanic’s Query Tuning precon. Well worth your monies. All of them. I mean the dude is awesome to watch and will teach you ways to manhandle the optimizer. He wrote Whoisactive and giving him monies for that precon was thanks enough for that tool alone. As for the day Hope Foley and her team did a fantastic job. The event ran smooth, lunch was delicious, and a few fellow speakers came to my session. That actually made me pretty nervous. I think I did a good job in my talk and hopefully I taught some people some useful clustering facts. A special thanks to Drew, Andy, Rob, and Ben for attending.
Speaking of my Clustering talk, there’s no way I can keep doing it in an hour. It’s just way too much stuff, so I’ve got to come up with some new material for next year. Well, speaking of next year my wife and I are going to have a baby in March. I won’t be traveling as near as much as I did in this last year. I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to travel and present. I love the entire SQLSAT and SQLFAMILY concepts and what they stand for. I never thought I’d be a publited speaker or enjoy it. Now I can’t get enough. I’m already really sad in thinking about how I can’t get out next year to travel around near as much due baby number two. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for our second child but I knew this would happen. I’m just bummed out about it. This will give me a year or so to hopefully come up with a few talks and keep blogging. I’ll be at the Cleveland and Cbus events but that’s probably it.
I also will probably step down from helping run the Cleveland RUG. I’m secretary and speaker coordinator right now. I’m glad to help and book things. I know I won’t have the the time to devote to this sort of stuff when I’m a parent of a newborn and 4 year old. When they get a bit older I’ll be able to get back into it. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. PS ONSSUG is booking for March 2017 and onward so get in contact with me if you want a month. 😉
As for future talks I have two that I want to try and create. One is on Distributed Replay and the other on Storage Spaces direct. I think the Replay one is going to happen for work as I might need to learn it, now ish. So hopefully I can give that in Columbus and my RUG next July.
One last thing. Before my session an attendee said to me they had saw someone tweeting about me and then they had decided to follow me and come see my talk. It was the most surreal speaking moment to me. I have a pretty low self value of myself if I’m honest. I’m just a dude who had to learn clustering and now enjoys going around and teaching and helping other people with it. I never in my life would have thought someone would come watch this session let alone say they saw me on twitter and decided to show up. I’m really blown away by this.
I think that I am a poster child case for imposter syndrome. Infact at the start of my talk when I mention my title, senior sql dba, I say that’s a load of crap. I just break a lot of stuff and have to google how to fix it. I could probably go on this track but that would lead to another 1000 words and to be honest my living room is a mess and I just want to go chill right now and place some xbox before bed.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading and talk to you soon.