Extracurricular Activities
Recently I presented two sessions at SQL Saturday #43 in Redmond, WA. The night prior to the event, many of the presenters had dinner together at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers in Redmond. One of the other presenters asked me why I was presenting. He wanted to know what I was promoting. In truth, I wasn’t promoting anything. My reply was, “Well, I guess I just enjoy doing it.”
I wasn’t promoting a book (though I had one come out last October), a product, or a company. I guess you could say that I was promoting myself, but that wasn’t really why I was there. I was presenting because I like doing it. I do presentations at work regularly, but those are internal presentations for small audiences, many of whom SQL Server is not their primary focus. I enjoy those, but not as much as I had enjoyed presenting at SQL Saturday the previous year. I feel passionate about SQL Server, and I enjoy sharing that passion with others who are passionate about it as well. I enjoy sharing my passion with those that are new to SQL Server and are still developing a passion of their own.
Being the totally selfish person that I am, I decided that I needed more extracurricular activities like this. I have several things lined up for the near future. Here are the things I have planned that I’m allowed to talk about.
1. I’m hosting this month’s TSQL Tuesday – a monthly blogging event created by Adam Machanic (Blog|@AdamMachanic) – official announcement coming soon
2. I will be serving on the faculty of SQL University for two courses in the next two weeks:
· Degree Seeker (certification) Week (week of 7/5)
· Advanced Troubleshooting Week (week of 7/12)
3. I’m writing an article for an upcoming issue of SQL Server Standard Magazine from SQL PASS
4. I will be presenting to the West Michigan SQL Server User Group/SQL PASS Chapter on July 27th at 6:45 PM Eastern Time/ 3:45 PM Pacific Time via Live Meeting. Topic will be Advanced Tuning
Additionally, I’m launching an internal event at work called SQL Luncheon. This will be a monthly event hosted by members of the PQO Operations SQL V-Team and geared towards Operations Engineers and other technical workers who work with SQL Server but are not DBA’s or SQL Developers. There will be a 15 minute presentation on a focused topic followed by a 15 minute Q&A session where any SQL Server topic can be covered. The topic for July will be “Recovery Models: What are they? Which one should I use?”.
There is also one other extracurricular activity that I’m not allowed to discuss yet. Mum’s the word.
