May 24, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Costs and Rewards of Speaking
May 24, 2024 at 2:56 pm
I agree with you Steve. Presenting is terrifying and also fun. My first presentation I did was actually as a guest presenter at a university course where the professor had taught databases but hadn't actually touched on indexes. I had a presentation ready that I thought would be 45 minutes so 15 minutes for questions and introduction. Turns out I had about 65 minutes of content so had to cut some stuff out part way through. Things didn't run how I thought they would because I hadn't anticipated that my poor little laptop would run the demos inconsistently (quick when I ran them at home, and slow during live demo).
After that, I hosted my live demos in an Azure VM where I can have more reliable performance. And I've done a few presentations at SQL User groups, even hosted my own user group for a while, but recently I've cut back on presenting. It is tons of fun, but it also comes with cost like you said. Travel to a location, hotels (as I want to enjoy the location for a little bit too, not just present and return home), and food all add up. Remote presentations are definitely cheaper, but I feel like you lose your audience a bit. Half the fun is explaining something and seeing the "light" in someone's eyes as things start clicking. The "Ah-ha" moment. You don't get that with a remote presentation.
I really enjoy presenting, but recently, I have been having trouble finding time to prepare for the presentation, let alone the time to present. It takes time and effort to prepare for a presentation as well which can be challenging while working a M-F job. I work on a computer for my entire day at work, so after work I often don't want to be on a computer for another few hours to prepare a presentation. When I am done work, I often don't want to look at another computer for the rest of the day. I have so many personal projects I'm working on but just no energy to work on them after solving database, C# app, web app, etc. issues. Maybe one day I'll get back into presenting as I do enjoy it and my presentations are technical but fun - I like to explain the concepts and then do a live demo of the concepts in action. Only annoying bit of that approach is when your live demo contradicts what the concepts say. My dumb laptop decided to run an antivirus scan (eating up resources, not scanning SQL Server) during a demo. Wasn't running during the INSERT on the clustered index, but was running on the insert on the heap. So my demo showed that a HEAP insert was 5 times slower than an insert on a table with a clustered index. Gotta love it when the demo and concepts contradict and you have to come up with a reason on the fly in front of everyone.
But I am happy we have so many people who present and who are willing to present and spend their time, money, and energy on the community. Those people are AWESOME!
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
June 17, 2024 at 4:20 pm
Preparation is tough, though I think for many people the tradeoff is reduced stress. At least, once you've presented a few times.
Always love seeing new presenters at events, and I try to make it a point to encourage and complement them, as well as thank them for the talk.
June 17, 2024 at 5:29 pm
The other thing that helps is once you do the presentation at least once, you get a feel for what parts engaged the audience and what parts were boring and your next presentation can be improved with a LOT less work.
Making a new presentation is a lot more work I find. My biggest problem is that I am chatty when I am interested and excited about a topic. So a 1 hour presentation on something I am not interested in is a challenge a the presentation will be too short, but if I am interested, I can talk for 2+ hours without much trouble and have to tone it down to be about 45 minutes so it fits in the allotted time slot. Now, that being said, I haven't presented in a few years now so my presentations are in need of a refresher so they are appropriate with SQL 2022. I think my most recent presentation was on Service Broker in SQL Server 2017. But, from my understanding, service broker hasn't changed much since then (and earlier), so it'd just be spinning up a new VM and getting things ready for demo and I could present. I like Service Broker but you have to plan to use it and have a good use case for it or it can create more problems than it solves. My company used it (no longer uses it) to sync data between systems in a near-real time manner. INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE occurs in database A, we replicate that over to database B asynchronously. No need to worry about blocking or deadlocks on database B causing performance impact on database A which was a key feature we wanted. Plus, the 2 databases were on 2 different instances hosted on 2 different physical servers. So we needed minimal impact to server A while syncing across to server B with near-real time data. SSIS was an option, but we would be triggering it every minute even if no data changed and that's not efficient for SSIS. Modifying the application wasn't an option as the app was a 3rd party app where we didn't have source code. I'm sure there would be other options that could have been just as good (or better), but this solution worked really well for us while it was live.
But I agree - preparation for a presentation takes a LOT longer than the presentation does. There is the research to make sure you understand things well (especially for new versions of SQL Server), the dry-runs to make sure you can fit it in the time slot, leaving time for Q&A but not too much time and making sure you are not just "reading the slides". If you are just reading the slides, you are going to lose the audience as they are able to read them too.
With all of the advancements in webinar technology (Zoom, Teams, etc.), remote presentations are a lot easier to do too. And if you have some video presentation tools (such as OBS Studio, free tool, with a little bit of a learning curve, but is great for doing live presentations once set up correctly), the travel costs go away. This is a pro and a con though in my mind. Half of the fun of presenting is seeing people's faces while the other half of the fun is talking to them after the presentation or event. Plus it is nice to go on a vacation after the event. I know every year I went to Seattle for PASS (I only went when it was in Seattle), I booked my flight for the Friday evening before PASS and would come home on the following Sunday. I get to learn (and get paid to learn) throughout the week and get to explore and enjoy a bit of a vacation before and after the event. Win-Win. Mind you, I never presented at PASS, I was always an attendee. One day I hope to present there, but it won't be for a few more years for sure. My job now has my DBA duties as more of a secondary (or tertiary) task, so I do a lot of reactive support instead of proactive support. As such, going to conferences and such to learn (or present) won't be in the work budget. Maybe one day that will change, but currently that is the situation for me. Presenting is such a terrifying experience (especially if you've never done it before or if you are an introvert like me), but it is also exhilarating, rewarding, and fun.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
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