The call for speakers is still open and will close April 6th, there's still from for a few more sessions. it's coming up on May 2, 2009, at The University of North Florida Campus, 1 UNF Drive, Jacksonville, FL 32224 (same location as last year). I've submitted two sessions and will definitely be attending, it was a great event last year and I'm hoping for the same this year.
I know it's a short time frame between the end of the call for speakers and the main event - chalk that up to my biz partner and event owner Brian Knight getting hit with the double whammy of an Outlook crash and a crush at work. Announcements on the final schedule should go out by Apr 13th.
Note: I was working on this at the Summit and then it got lost in the draft folder, so unfashionably late here are a few comments about the event.
I flew out from Orlando on Sunday, had a reasonably pleasant flight to Dallas, actually arriving 15 minutes early. So far so good...except, there was still a plane at the gate, so we had to wait. And wait some more. Turns out that the plane at the gate had a mechanical problem, so they had to offload the passengers, and then before moving it, add 2 tons of fuel. Probably more detail than we needed, but interesting. Why would fuel need to be added? I'm assuming for balance, but you'd think that you'd only care about side to side balance, and how does taking passengers off change that? Sorry, I'm always curious!
Onward to Seattle and very nice weather until about an hour out, then it got gray and rainy. Met Steve Jones at the airport, took a town car ($45 if you're wondering, nicer than a taxi at the same price) in to the Sheraton, checked in, and then checked in at the Summit over at the convention center. Normal conference registration process, quick and easy. Then off to get coffee, and started running into people we knew, starting with Rick Heiges, and then Arvin Meyer. Had coffee, then back to the convention center to get ready for the reception, setting up at a table near our MVP Lead Alison Brooks to use our normal networking plan. It worked, but we made the tactical mistake of picking a high top table instead of one of the lower chairs. High table was easier to see and be seen, but we had the only 2 high chairs, so we had a lot of people standing up.
The reception went well, lots of SQL people present, and I'm sure I've missed some, but it included Robert Cain, Jessica Moss, Bill Graziano, Rushabh Mehta, Allen White, Alexander Kuznetsov, Brad McGehee, Paul Nielsen, Pinal Dave, Simon Sabin, Itzik Ben-Gan, Jung Sun Kim, Roy Harvey, Ron Talmadge, Greg Linwood, Peter Ward, Arnie Rowland, Michael Coles, Chuck Heinzelman, Plamen Ratchev, Rodney Landrum. And though not a SQL guy, our Florida developer evangelist Joe Healy. It was just nice to sit and catch up with people I knew and meet people that I knew online but not in person.
On Monday we all rode buses to the MS Campus and headed off to the rooms for presentations by various parts of the SQL dev team. As much as I hate to say it, I can't tell you the session titles or even the presenters! I can tell you it was a nice facility, and that I saw a few nice techniques for providing feedback about what ideas/features were the most interesting. One was a just a simple raise your hand if you (really want this feature, find it interesting, don't care) so they could get a quick count, another was based on having a budget of x points, assign points to various ideas indicating which ones you would fund with your budget.
Monday night we had dinner with all the SQL MVP's present in Bellevue and again, it was a nice time to relax and talk. Not so much networking at this point, more just relaxing and talking about whatever. Repeat for Tuesday. Tuesday night was a social gathering downtown. See Steve's blog for more details on that!
It was a good event, and I suspect a great event in a year just before a new version release. It was definitely worth the time and expense to make the trip the first time just to see it all happen and meet new people, but it is a long trip for me and don't know if I'd want to make it every year. One thing you can easily tell is that MVP's are definitely important to MS. Not just kinda important, they clearly have a special place within and across MS, and MS spends a lot of time and money to facilitate that. Imagine you've built a product and you can find 10 or a 100 people that really love your product, use it every day, and spend time showing how it could be better - wouldn't that be useful? Then institutionalize it so that every product has that kind of support, and you start to see why MS tries so hard to maintain the MVP program.
This was an interesting year to watch the local Code Camp. Shawn Weisfeld organized it the previous two years, but following his move to Dallas Jessica Sterner become the power behind the Code Camp this year and as much as she was involved in the prior two years, leadership transitions are hard. Think about how it goes at work when you have plenty of other people to provide continuity and you're involved in every day - then think about how it affects a once a year volunteer effort. I'm pleased to report that all went smoothly...or at least seemed to!
If you visit the Code Camp Site you'll see both a brand new look and code behind the look, all done by Fabio Honigmann. It's nice enough that I've asked him to do a 'makeover' of the SQLSaturday site which is functional but decidedly not flashy.
The Friday night prior to the event the standard speaker get together was held, and it worked out nicely. Outdoor seating, about 30 speakers attending, great weather, and quiet enough to have a normal conversation. They had wrist bands for the attendees so the restaurant staff knew who was part of the party, but forgot the name badges - something to remember for all events, it definitely makes networking go a little more smoothly. It was a nice way to relax at the end of a long week.
The event was held March 28, 2009, at the main campus of Seminole Community College. For those in the Orlando area it's the same site they used two years ago and the one we used for SQLSaturday #8 last year. The room layout was a little different, they were planning on 350-400 attendees and they needed 11 rooms plus sponsor space. It ended up being just a little confusing, because the buildings have letters (Building J) and the schedule used letters for the rooms (Room G), and...they had last minute room changes. They did a good job of announcing the changes and trying to explain things, and they had a few people directing traffic too.
They had some signs up for parking, but no greeters (just like Wal-Mart, I think they get everyone off to a nice start) . Check in went smoothly, and the wait time couldn't have been more than a couple minutes at any time. They also had one person devoted to walk ins. Only a few sponsors set up, and I saw a few more coming in after 8 am, but they were getting good traffic thanks to the raffle tickets. They had a light breakfast set up; fresh fruit, croissants, coffee, and the prize table so everyone could see the books they had a chance to win. David Caylor handled most of the logistics and it seemed to go smoothly - no line for coffee, plenty of water, soda, and ice.
We had one SQL track (I was the nominal track chair, which just involved picking the sessions for the track) and I attended as a spectator this time, starting the day off with a session by my friend Wes Dumey on data warehousing. Other sessions where done by Ryan Duclos, Michael Antonovich, Kendal Van Dyke, and Shervin Shakibi.
What could go better next time? I think a 9 am start would give the sponsors a little more time to set up, and I'd like to see more sponsors - easier to come by in the .Net space than SQL Server (or at least it seems to me). Speaker check in was way back behind the main check in tables, that felt confusing. I definitely think they caused some confusion with using letters for rooms instead of the true room number. I think the final attendance was around 400, nicely done, though I keep thinking that if I can get 275 people to come to a SQLSaturday in Orlando, surely there must be a lot more developers in Orlando...say 10x as many? Jessica, Fabio, David, shouldn't you be trying for 1000 attendees? (Note: we've talked about growing both events, and the challenge is finding bigger space that is within the budget).
Things went very well, congratulations to the Orlando Code Camp team for doing a very nice job!
My friend Brian writes Databases, Infrastructure, and Security and like me, he writes about an eclectic mix that goes beyond SQL to Windows and life, but the part that makes me recommend that you visit his blog is the emphasis on security. Brian is always there with reminders about vulnerabilities and he's got the Active Directory experience to bake the whole cake and not just logins and permissions within SQL. Worth reading!
I'm been in tactical mode lately, building an advertising management system for one of our projects. Actually it's v2, the first one is working and doing what needs to be done (definitely minimalist), but as we started looking at wrapping up the major development we decided to add a few things that had been on the wish list - but with the caveat that the time and resources to make the change were time boxed.
I tend to look at all development work from a data perspective. A lot of that comes from being a DBA of course, but also from being a business owner. I want to be able to answer the questions that matter to me, and in some cases I may not be asking the questions a developer would expect. That DBA experience also leads me toward normalized designs and in truth designs that often more complex than needed. Of course the hard part is knowing that you've exceeded the complexity threshold. The opposite end of the spectrum is the agile design approach which embraces YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it) and focuses on building for today.
Time boxing (or cost boxing) is an easy way to answer the question about too complex, though it separates the zealots from the pragmatics pretty quickly. Once you know the resource constraints, you then build a solution that you know you can get done. Survivorman is an example of this - I remember an episode where he had the choice of building a fire to feel safe, or building a platform so he could sleep off the ground and avoid most of the insects and worse. He could not get both done, he had to pick.
Back to the minimalist design. I had 2 weeks to redesign and fully implement the tables, workflow, invoice generation, and to connect to to a site was already up and running, with the final UI construction to support the design set aside as a later task. Two weeks is not long! As we worked on the design we had to make some hard choices, and the trick - to call it something - is to have a good feel for what is important and what's not, and the harder trick is to know what you can scrimp on now and change later without it causing major reconstruction.
As DBA's we should be masters of abstraction and refactoring. Between synonyms, views, computed columns, and triggers we have ways to put things in one place and make them appear differently or in a different place as needed. Only with a good understanding of the options and the final (someday) goal can you do good minimalist design, and there is definitely a subtle difference between good and not good.
You aren't always going to need it. Think about spending effort on the things that matter and setting yourself up to make changes later that will be easy refactorings.
Yesterday I was commenting on how a big part of stress for me is getting that sudden burst of work that leaves me so far behind it seems the only answer is to just work harder - but that doesn't often work.
I think we should all manage our own careers, tasklists, and stress - but what role does the manager play?
One part is that if you take my advice and decide to just take a break, it's very common for the manager to want to deny the break 'because you've got so much on your plate'. You can show them my blog post, but I suspect that won't change their minds! The alternative is to take a couple sick days anyway, and that works.
Another part is that they aren't managing well, and I'm as guilty of this at times as anyone. Assigning tasks isn't simple, and has to take into account skills, recent projects, review and career goals, other team members...and ideally, the stress/rest level of the person being given the task. One of the evil paradoxes is that managers tend to give the hardest/most important projects to their best people - part compliment, part realism, but over time the best people get tired and cranky while the less talented ones are cruising along happily. It's not always easy to tell, as a manager you definitely wish for a gauge on their forehead that will tell you their mood and energy reserves, but you have to infer it and that doesn't always work.
It can also be a case of not managing well when you're not holding them to intermediate goals, letting the deadline (and the stress) build up to the last minute. Yet another instance is giving them multiple things to do and not setting real priorities - is it this one or that one?
Perhaps the toughest part on both sides is when someone tells you they are stressed. Sometimes that's a nice calm conversation, sometimes it's work not quite as good as usual, sometimes it's a screaming fit. Most of us don't recognize the magnitude of the stress, we don't like to admit that we are stressed, and we definitely don't want to tell our manager (who is just supposed to know). Once we know someone is stressed, are we in a calm place to hear and respond - or is more like "we're all working hard right now"? And if that isn't enough, managers also report to someone, and that someone may not be as enlightened, causing a mildly complex problem to be that much harder.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and my first thought was that there is only so much gas in the tank - but that's not a good match. I think maybe better is oil changes. You can put off an oil change for a while, but do it long enough and real damage can result, causing more downtime than if you just took the car out of service for the couple hours needed for the oil change. The question is 'how long is too long', and that's where being human we tend to stretch it right to the edge.
Don't expect your manager to manage your stress, or even to care. Don't get me wrong, it's great if they do, but you have to be set to survive bad managers, or at least managers that don't read minds.
Registration has been open since the last Summit, but this year Bill Graziano and team have released the Summit 2009 site up two months earlier than last year, timed to coincide with the call for speakers. Some highlights from Bill:
168 sessions! That's a LOT of content!
As I gain more experience I've found that stress comes in three forms; stress that is there that you don't see, stress that you recognize but still don't seem to manage, and on rare occasion when you see the stress and manage to change your behavior to fix it. For the most part I'm able to recognize what causes me stress, and in a lot of cases it's how rested & focused I am that determines whether I fix or live with it.
Even when I'm oblivious (on purpose or not if that makes sense) to the building stress, there's always one signal that I can count on to recognize that I'm oversomething, and that is my todo list growing against pending deadlines - which in turn triggers in me "work harder". Even when work iharder consists of putting in place some efficiency that will help me later, it's the danger zone. More work leads to more stress or at least more tired, things take longer, the cycle grows. The exception is when you can clearly define it as "if I can x, y, and z done then I'm back to normal...and...I can see that happening in 7-10 days max". I suppose you could draft more rules on top of that, one perhaps being that this only applies if you haven't done this in the last x days, but that's not important. What is important that due to email, client visits, lack of ruthless focus, illness, over committing - whatever the reason and they happen, you're jammed up and thinking to just work harder.
In most cases working harder is the wrong answer, what I call the death spiral. Instead, you go back to basics and prioritize...ruthlessly. Usually some of those have to have things don't really have to be done, and others can just wait a little longer. But it's not as easy as saying you'll just work 40 hours and go home, I wish it was! Sometimes it means closing the door and putting the head phones on, going all out or a few days to hit max productivity.
The other part - and the hardest lesson to learn - is that when you can't seem to get caught up, it's time to take a break. It's tough love, and doesn't sound like common sense, but we make bad decisions when tired and stressed. I wouldn't take this advice 10 years ago, and sometimes I still don't, but more often I do and it does help.
Think about that, and tomorrow we'll talk about it from a management perspective.
The call for speakers is open through midnight on April 10, 2009, so get busy submitting those abstracts! Work hard on the title and description, make it something that seems interesting and compelling for attendees. Expect the competition to be fierce and if you don't get selected, come to the Summit anyway and work on making a better pitch for the 2010 Summit. You may find my notes about growing new speakers to be useful (and unofficial!).
On a related note, not quite a year ago I wrote some notes about being accepted as a speaker for the 2008 Summit and thinking about a couple friends that weren't selected. At the time I was leaning towards inviting one or two people to co-present with me, but instead I've decided not to submit a session. Part of that is wanting to give someone else a chance, part of it is acknowledging that between my duties at the Summit as a Director plus my involvement with the PASS Ambassadors and the networking events I'll have a fully loaded agenda.
Not an easy decision, but the right one for this year.
I've been slowly looking at and experimenting with LinkedIn to see if it has value and if so, how to unlock it in a way that works for me. I mentioned it during my series on networking and since I've evolved a strategy that I think is interesting for now, though it can perhaps be richer still. We'll see! Anyway, the strategy:
My efforts are based on the idea that while I have a large network, I can't currently access it easily. Yes, it's nice to measure, but what if I want to hire an employee or find someone with certain skills to help out someone I know? Or want to try to get a SQLSaturday started in a city and don't know anyone there? Maybe a little vague, but the essence of networking is faith, you have to believe it will matter sometime - but that's also why I've time boxed my efforts for now. By the end of the year I'm hoping to grow my network to 250 (from about 60 now), and then if it looks like it's worth continuing, set a much higher goal for 2010.
I'd also like to point out that a valid way to "know me" is to be a regular reader of my blog. It's a conversation of sorts, and if you find value in returning here on a regular basis (and reading this far) I can easily imagine that we could have a long talk over coffee and get along well. If you're interested, join my network without any worry about not being worthy!
I was browsing the March 2009 issue of Visual Studio Magazine today and found that it's changing again. It's been integrated with the Redmond Developer News, VSM editor Patrick Meader is gone, and things will continue as part VSM part RDN. 40 pages this issue, with a 6 or 7 page special ad section in the middle. Seems to be a lot more content online than in the print version, probably because the print subscriptions are free. Free is good, but being the hard to please consumer it still seems like I'm not getting enough value for my money!
Coming not long after Dr Dobbs stopped their print version the slow death of the tech magazine market continues. There are still a few on the shelf at the book store and PC World seems to be surviving (so far), but the rest are getting thinner and thinner and I expect to see quite a few more cease printing by the end of the year.
Sadly I think it's us that is causing a lot of it. More and more people in our profession seem to be adopting the attitude that why get it in print if I can get it online. It is nice to have options, and it's definitely nice to find something in a search and not have to go digging through back issues looking for 'something you saw'. Yet the loss is portability and packaging. I keep a couple magazines in my bag to read when I end up having a few minutes to kill waiting on someone for lunch or a meeting (right now it's Entrepreneur and Scientific Amerian Earth 3.0). Could I take out the laptop, plug in the cell card, and browse online? Maybe, but most of the time I just don't want to bother. Maybe the Kindle fixes this, but can you bend over the corners of pages on the Kindle?
To me it's part of the downside of e-commerce that Steve Jones discusses and I don't know if we'll see the true value of the loss until too late. Can we change it? The free market is speaking and businesses are reacting, so my guess is no.....but if you want to try, I'd suggest revisiting the magazines you enjoy and consider a subscription or a renewal - if no one is interested, it's an easy decision for them to stop printing.
Of course I'm not sure if this is a case of being slow to adapt, or just hating to adapt - for me that is!
I try to go to a spring training game once or twice a year and it serves as a useful check point - if I'm too busy to go my priorities and task management need adjusting. This year my friend Chris & I managed to adjust our schedules so that we could spend at afternoon watching the Atlanta Braves play the Mets at Champion Stadium here in Orlando (Disney) yesterday. Terrific day for it, probably mid 80's and a few clouds, enough sun to merit some sun block. Nice seats in the upper deck on the first base side. It's not that I'm a huge baseball fan, but there is definitely something zen as well as American about sitting in the sun for a few hours, watching the game, and definitely not thinking about the challenges of work and life. Down economy or not, the game was well attended, probably 90% of the seats were full or better.
Some pictures from the game:
So even though I was there to relax (and did), the one thought that came to me was to wonder why in business don't have spring training. Obviously there are some differences and one of the big ones is that in business we are continually executing, but I think that's the problem that spring training fixes. We rarely have time to reassess our players, to identify weaknesses and strengths that change from year to year as people leave and join the team (or just grow more experienced), and to integrate new leaders into the culture of our particular businesses. I've made a couple deliberate attempts in my career to reinvent myself, and this seems like an interesting extension of that. Not a completely baked idea at this point, but imagine what you might do if you could just find a few days to stop, reassess, and refocus. Call it spring training, corporate makeover, or whatever, I don't think it happens enough.
Now on to some humor. One of the between inning games they played today was to pick someone from the crowd to listen to 15 seconds of a song and then guess the song. Luckily they didn't pick me, I didn't know the song or singer, closest guess I had was Steve Winwood. Not right, it was Peter Gabriel singing Shock the Monkey (lyrics here) and because I do like to think on things, I was then wondering....did they mean shock the monkey with electricity, or do something that would monkey cover his eyes? Naturally it was neither, according to Wikipedia it's a metaphor for feelings of jealousy. Which is a shame, because it's definitely entertaining to try to figure out what behavior would shock (dismay) a monkey!
We just had our bi-monthly SQL group meeting (www.opass.org) with Kendal Van Dyke presenting The Truth About Disk Performance & Configuration, a presentation built from his recent blog posts which in turn were based on some detailed testing of disk performance. We met on Wednesday instead of our usual Tuesday, and whether it was that or the topic (which I thought was interesting) our attendance was only 16 - I had hoped for more!
Afterward several stayed to talk and we had more good discussions on blogs and blogging, networking, MVP's, and more. Another topic that came up both during and after the meeting was how to build the next generation of leaders, both for user groups and for SQLSaturday. I'll be doing my third SQLSaturday in Orlando this year, and ideally I'll be training my replacement to take over in 2010. It's a big commitment - maybe not as big as you'd think, but still pretty big, and after putting so much effort into it I want it to be someone that will keep it going. Same thing for the user group, how do we get people to step, or even prepare them to think about stepping up? No great answers so far.
Our next meeting will be in May, date and speaker to be announced.
Had a note from Ken Starnes in Portland, the date for SQLSaturday #12 has changed to June 6th (same date as SQLSaturday #14 in Pensacola, but I think that will be fine since they are on opposite coasts!
Call for speakers is still open as well.
My friend Michael Lato sent me an email asking if I would take a look at his newest venture called WorkTamer. I've reached saturation at least for the next couple months, so had to decline, but offered instead to post his offer here in hopes that a few of you might offer him some feedback. I think we all struggle with task and time management and with every tool I've looked at it, it's success depends on whether you can mold it to suit you rather than vice versa. He seems to be putting some emphasis on that area, so maybe he'll have a winner!
In any case, here's the info:
WorkTamer Beta Program:We are looking for beta testers! WorkTamer is an all-in-one project, task and request management system built for IT professionals with one key unique feature: using the priorities that you establish, it determines the finish dates for all of your projects and tasks. It accounts for the work schedule that you enter as well as the calendar that you maintain in the system. This allows you to answer that difficult question: when can you have this done?Our beta testers will receive a 100-user account for 6 months as a thank you once the beta program wraps up. You can sign up for the beta using this link: http://www.worktamer.com/beta.cfm
