Wow! The last five years of my career have been amazing. I went from attending a SQLSaturday a couple of times a year to being a coauthor of a book. Given all the obstacles I’ve had to overcome in life this truly is an amazing accomplishment. It’s on the list on things that isn’t suppose to be possible but shows that anything really is possible. I have way too many people to thank for getting me to this point in my career. You can read a little bit more about my background by reading about my volunteer work on my LinkedIn profile or in this blog post and read about some of my career obstacles in the book Let Them Finish: Stores From the Trenches.

First up let’s talk about Mala’s book. Click on that link and look at the names involved in this project. Just imagine the stories you will hear from all those data professionals. I’m truly honored to have been involved in this book and amazed I made the list given the list of people she was able to interview for the book.  This book will be available at Summit with a number of us available to sign it so don’t be shy buy copy find us and strike up a conversation. It already has one five-star review on Amazon don’t miss out on reading this!

Next, wholly smokes I actually wrote a chapter in a book and became a published author on Amazon. Say what?!?! This book is all about diversity and issues that are faced in the work force. But wait why am I in, well IT is full of men mostly and I’m a woman so I’ve had my challenges. So read the book to read about one particular challenge I have suffered from in 20+ year career.

Wow! What’s next, why leading co-authoring a whole book of course. Look for that in 2019.

But what a list of accomplishments:

• Talking at three SQLSaturdays one year
• To six the next
• To 18 SQLSaturdays, PASS Summit, virtual groups and local user groups, named PASS Outstanding Volunteer for November
• To 17 SQLSaturdays, an adventure in Europe with Data Relay and two of those SQLSaturdays, virtual groups and local user groups, speaking at PASS Summit, and now I’m a published author and featured in a book.

Let’s see what we can do to top that, no seriously let’s not that will be hard to do!

I’m seriously addicted to this speaking thing, but will be slowing done in 2019 and concentrating more on writing, but who knows what my definition of slowing down is I said that last year.