Monthly Archives: November 2012

T-SQL Tuesday #36: What Does the SQL Community Mean to You (Me)?

By Airborne Geek on November 13, 2012

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T-SQL Tuesday #36: How rad is Community? Rad enough for me to say “rad.”

I hate doing this, but I’m throwing this post together at the last second, as with PASS Summit going on last week, I completely spaced that this was T-SQL Tuesday Week. I blame the fact that I dropped my #TSQL2sDay search column out of TweetDeck last week, but that wouldn’t even have helped, because I spent most of my time on the Surface, but that’s a different story/post altogether. Community is something pretty important to me, so I’m here trying to get this out the door by the deadline (I failed, see below).

T-SQL Tuesday #36 is being hosted by Chris Yates (blog | @YatesSQL), who chose this Community-related topic this month. It’s pretty fitting, considering a good chunk of us have just gotten back from PASS Summit in sunny (yes, really) Seattle this past weekend, where there’s a lot of “community” going on.

Hard to Avoid a Summit Story

Having been one of those that just returned from Summit on Sunday, it’s pretty hard for me to think about this without thinking about last week. I had a couple different things I wanted to say, but I’ve settled on the following, about being a and helping Summit FirstTimers.

Last year at Summit was our first time there. We’ve both been to a fair number of Tech conferences, so it wasn’t all  a new experience for us. This, combined with the fact that we already “Twitter Knew” a fair chunk of people, led us to not opt-in to the organized First Timers networking event (I’m sorry, Tom). Even with the fog machine, rock music intro the FirstTimers had heading into 6ABCD (which was pretty bad-ass), we were OK with this.

We’ve learned a lot about our Community since our first Summit, only a year ago.

This year, Tammy signed up to be an Alumni Mentor for FirstTimers. I was added as kind of an “unofficial” mentor to help her out, instead of having a group of my own, because, when you get right down to it, I’m a huge pansy. I was going to be OK just being there, but not being a mentor myself. That’s scary!

First Timers Sign for Groups 55, 56, 57

Groups on our sign. My rogue group became 57A.

As it turned out, there were a lot more people show up to the FirstTimers networking event than expected. I was standing there with our group’s (and two others’) sign, directing people which table to sit at, depending on which group they were in. At one point, Buck Woody, the guy with the microphone, and therefore the most powerful person in the room (turns out Buck Woody with a microphone is the best, but scariest thing ever), just told everyone to sit down anywhere, because it was taking too long to get everyone in. Next thing I knew, the previously-empty table I was standing next to was full of eager first-timers, along with Tammy’s table, and the other two groups on our sign.

Ohhhhhhhhcrap, I now have my own group of FirstTimers!!!

I had to get over being a pansy real fast. It did help by leading off by telling everyone sitting at my table that I guarantee I was the most scared person siting there. The time we had to sit there and listen to speakers and talk amongst ourselves actually went pretty fast. My group didn’t talk amongst themselves quite as much as I maybe would have liked, but they did have some questions about the conference, which I could answer and help out with. Plus, my head didn’t explode!

Where am I going with this? To me, “SQL Community” is sitting and talking face-to-face with people I’ve never met before…even though doing that scares the living crap out of me. After this experience, I’m sorry that we didn’t do the FirstTimers event last year. I’m going to make up for that in the future, though, by going ahead and volunteering to be a mentor of my own FirstTimers group in future years.

Timezone Fail

Bonus section!

Soooo, this post is late. I forgot that we’re GMT –6 now, because we’ve gone back to Central Standard Time. When I started writing this, I was shooting for 7:00p local. Then, at about 5:59, I realize the truth. Even then, this machine is showing 7:03, so I still failed.

And I’m the guy always crabbing about people saying “EST” when they really mean “EDT” 🙁

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PASS Summit 2012

By Airborne Geek on November 5, 2012

I feel really bad about not getting a post up about this before now. Since it’s to the point where people are already on their way to SEA or already here for this year’s Summit, it’s not like I’m going to be able to talk anyone into spontaneously deciding to go. I mean, unless you’re totally made of money and this last-minute of a flight and full Summit price wouldn’t be that big of a deal to you. In fact, I’m writing this (posted later) from the starboard-side exit row of a Southwest 737-700 rocketing along at FL400, typing on my Surface’s Touch Cover, which I’m only about 2/3 happy with (some of it is due to the seating arrangement, some of it due to not 100% being used to the keyboard yet).

SWA 2410 Flight Tracker
Not really willing to trade flying ourselves for this kind of speed and altitude, but I do it anyway.

This is only our second time to go to Summit. Last year was the first, and was also the first time that we met a lot of the #SQLFamily that we felt like we already knew, mostly due to Twitter over the couple-three years before. ‘Course, now we actually do know a lot of people, and they’re some of our favorite people around.

Summit gets talked up a lot about being a near-sleepless, heavy learning, heavy partying networking event that’s second-to-none. For a bit, before we came last year, I didn’t think it could be AS GOOD as everyone says it is. And, well, I was wrong. Every good conference should have your brain melted by the time it’s all over. It’s two, three, four days of hours of learning, lots of time about stuff that’s at least partially over your head; that does wear on you.

I’ve been to conferences before, so that part of it wasn’t new to me. What was new is all the other stuff–all of the stuff that happens after the sessions are over for the day. Everyone always says it, but it bears repeating: If you eat dinner by yourself (or maybe with some coworkers that came in a group) and then go up to your hotel room by yourself for the rest of the night, yer doin’ it wrong. Summit is not the place to be That Guy. I know, because I used to be That Guy.

I will be the first to tell you that being That Guy does have some advantages. It allows you to review what you learned that day. If you have enough/the right equipment with you, you might even be able to tinker around with some demo code you picked up that day, or experiment with some new way of doing your nightly index maintenance.

Those are all good things. Possibly even good things to do while you’re at the event. But, when SQL Family is involved, there’s something even better to do–hang out. Talk to people. Go to SQL Karaoke. Go to dinner with the guy who presented on your favorite topic that day (OK, that one might be hard to pull off, but I can tell you from experience, it IS possible). I think it’s better to take good notes during the day (I can type faster than I can write and still be able to read it later, so I plan accordingly) so when you review them a few days later on the airplane ride home, you are still able to apply what you learned. Even better, recordings of all the main conference sessions are available for purchase before and during Summit, which makes it even easier to refresh your memory about what you learned long after you’re back home.

In Conclusion…

If you’re going to be there next week, come hang out with us. I’m not quite one of the cool kids, but they humor me, so it’s all good. See, that’s another good thing about networking at Summit–as I’ve said beforeabout this group of people, they’re all awesome, and they all understand–What you do, why you do it, what keeps you up at night… All of it. This is why SQL Family are some of my favorite people around.

See you guys at the Tap House.

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