Last night was a big success for the first annual Baton Rouge User Groups Networking Night, an all-user-groups invited event that saw members of the Baton Rouge SQL Server, .NET, Java, IT Pro, SharePoint, Women in IT user groups, plus members of user groups in Hammond, Lafayette and New Orleans (all about one hour away) join for a night of short-format speeches on career and professional development. We also were joined by a bunch of new folks from the public who'd never been to a user group meeting before - they picked a great first meeting to attend!
To the ~60 folks in attendance last night, the other seven speakers who made it a great event, our two Platinum SQL Saturday Baton Rouge sponsors, my all Sparkhound colleagues who joined me to speak, my wife who was volun-told into speaking from an HR perspective, and my friends in the user group community, thanks for being a part of that great event last night!
I was one of the eight community speakers and enjoyed presenting a thrown-together talk with a simple and concise title: "What You Need To Know About Being a DBA and What You Need To Know That You Don’t Know Yet". It was a ton of fun to present and share in the laughter!
It's a short slide deck and I pushed my 10-minute window a little bit, but thankfully our timer and stage-hook-master Jeremy Beckham from BCBS allowed some lenience.
If you are curious to see the "big list" of things you need to know to be a DBA, here's a link to download my PowerPoint slidedeck.