2019 was a busy year for me. I presented sessions in over 10 countries, averaging speaking at two conferences per month. I also helped organise Data Relay and attended all five days which is always a fun (yet tiring) experience.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed myself last year and I hope 2020 brings more of the same! I do intend on not speaking at as many conferences this year although to be honest I did say that at the start of 2019.
I do want to get back into blogging more often this year. I didn’t publish as often as I wanted to last year and the simple reason for that was….time. So this year I plan on getting some cool stuff out there.
I’m currently writing this in Dublin airport waiting to head over to London to present my Chaos Engineering for SQL Server session at Conf42.com. I’ve been diving into the world of Chaos Engineering recently so hope to get a few posts out about it in the next few months.
I’ll also be continuing to explore running SQL Server in Docker containers and on Kubernetes. There’s so much great stuff happening in those areas that it can be difficult to keep up at times! The two main things I’m looking forward to are running SQL Server Edge on a Raspberry Pi (if they ever give me access to the container image) and WSL 2 going GA.
Another thing I’ve been enjoying is delving into the world of Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary OS for a while now but had to refresh my laptop over Christmas in order to install Windows 10 as it’s needed for an upcoming project that I’m working on (can’t say too much about that at the moment but it’s quite exciting!). So I installed Windows 10 and then decided to install Fedora 31 instead of re-installing Ubuntu.
I can’t really say why I went for Fedora. There’s a tonne of distros out there (I seriously looked at Manjaro) but I guess the main reason was that Microsoft has two linux SQL Server 2019 container images, one for Ubuntu and one for Red Hat. Plus I suffer from Shiny Tech Syndrome so wanted to try something new.
I’ve also recently purchased a Pinebook Pro. I needed a backup laptop for when I travel (at least that’s what I’m telling myself) so nabbed one. The price can’t be argued with ($200) and the reviews online are all very positive so am looking forward to getting my hands on it. One of the really cool things is that it will boot from a SD card so I’ll get to try out Manjaro after all! 
I’ll definitely be posting a review about it once I’ve had it for a couple of weeks (in fact that might get wrapped up into a larger post about either my linux experiences so far or my current travel kit…haven’t decided yet).
Finally to mention, I’ve also started helping organise a brand new conference in Ireland, Data Céilí. This conference is run by the team behind SQL Saturday Dublin and the response we’ve had so far as been amazing. We’ll be selecting sessions in the next couple of weeks and then prompting the heck out of it!
I reckon that should be enough projects to keep me occupied for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading and I hope 2020 is a blast.