I drove up to Jacksonville Friday afternoon for the 2009 Jacksonville Code Camp led by my friend Bayer White. I left early enough to beat the Fri afternoon traffic and to give me some quality book store time before the 7:30 pm speaker party. Attendance at the party was good, I’d guess the majority of the speakers were there and it was well organized – wrist bands to identify members of the group and name badges (much appreciated!). Saw a lot of old friends, but ended up leaving early because not only was it a smoking bar, it was a real smoking bar and if you’re a non-smoker, you’ll appreciate how painful that can be. Notes for Bayer for next time:
That left unexpected free time, so I went looking for a late dinner, wound up at Ted’s Montana Grill having a bison burger and doing some reading, nice relaxing dinner.
Sat morning I came over about 8 am and noticed the lack of signage to the event. I knew where I was going, but it was easy to spot those looking for Code Camp by their driving. They did have a person waving a sign at the garage which was a nice touch. Then the lack of signage hit again, everyone looking around to try to figure out which of the many nearby buildings was the right one and ultimately people trying to follow people that looked like there were there for the event too.
Registration seemed to go very smoothly, nice full color event guide and a choice of a t-shirt or small bag. Plenty of coffee and donuts, decent number of sponsors set up though most of them seemed to be local. Especially at Code Camp I was hoping to see more of the tool vendors, I don’t follow the .Net tools as much and would have found it useful to watch some demos in person. One of things I noticed in the event guide was the branding – all the tracks had a sponsor name associated with it. Not a bad idea, just not sure it’s a good idea either!
I sat and watched the traffic flow for close to an hour, watching the sponsors and attendees interact. It’s the same pattern I see at all events and it works ok, but I keep thinking that we need a better (or additional) pattern – something that benefits both sponsors and attendees. Having the table and the giveaway or raffle works for some basic brand building and contact generation, but it doesn’t encourage the transfer of a lot of information and I think it could. More on this later, but as far as this event I thought the sponsors were treated well and getting good traffic by their tables.
Bayer started the day with a keynote and I was reminded my love/hate of key notes. It’s great to get everyone together and set the tone, but it takes a long time to get everyone seated – probably 200 in this case. Went pretty well, though I was on the fringes of the crowd and could barely hear Bayer speaking (no microphone).
First session of the day was about where clauses by Scott Gleason and I was astounded to see 60 people attend. It’s not that I don’t know there is a definite gap between developer and DBA, but this helped to clarify for me the depth of that gap. More importantly, it reinforces for me that too often the SQL presentations at Code Camps are really DBA centric and need to be developer centric. We tried this some earlier this year for the Orlando Code Camp and struggled, had a hard time getting a good set of sessions that weren’t DBA/admin focused. Fun to watch Scott present, this is I think his second or third time out and he’s great at connecting with the audience.
Took a break to assess logistics, was just noting that they had a coffee maker set up but no big carafe and had the interesting moment of watching an attendee grab the pot while the coffee continued to run. Accidents happen!
Next session was Why Do You Use a Staffing Company by Megan Hopkins from Kforce. I know Megan from her involvement with oPASS and SQLSaturday and I’m always interested in the hiring process. It was interesting to hear the comments from attendees about the value – resume comments, meeting them at the interview site for moral support, the general idea of having a support system during a trying period. That makes sense, but I was hoping to hear some deeper values. One of the values Megan cited was that they often bypass HR during the interview process where the key point is making sure you’re being assessed by someone with the technical skills to do it well, rather than a HR person who is looking for exact matches based on keywords and dates. She also said that HR tends to push for lowest salary to save the company money, where staffing people are trying to drive the salary higher because they are paid commission. One comment Megan made was that candidates should always expect a briefing about the potential employer prior to the interview. Obvious maybe, but still important. Part of that is “culture matching”, making sure the entire job is a good fit from the start. I thought a great point was that if you are working through a staffing firm you should get paid every 2 weeks, not when they get paid.
After lunch I went to an search engine optimization presentation by Jared Nielsen. He said Yahoo is better than Google for branding (showing your message), but not for direct conversion to money. He mentioned that Google includes page load time as part of it’s scoring. Most sites ignore what is passed through when pages are viewed a search engine. Home page should be the least visited, it’s goal is to segment traffic. Cache as much as possible as often as possible.
My presentation was the last of the day and it was nice to have 60-70 people present to talk about basic query plans and caching, show developers some of the magic behind the scenes. Took a lot of questions and had a nice time, no problems but fewer demos than planned due to the number of questions. Checked in with Bayer White before leaving and the final count was 460. That’s an impressive number! I heard a few people comment that it was noticeably better than in past years and I agree, the combination of a good location, good logistics, and good leadership all made a difference. Kudos to Bayer for a first class effort!
I left shortly after that to head home, wanting to get home in time for dinner with family. Didn’t turn out to be that simple though. About 50 miles from home started to get a serious vibration in the serious wheel, out of no where. Pulled over to check, didn’t see anything wrong and nothing flat, so start out again holding the speed to about 50 where the vibration seemed tolerable but not good. Pulled over again and this time I saw the problem right away, the left front tire was deformed, there was a visible hump/offset/dent in the tire itself! Hard to imagine the forces at play to cause that kind of damage but yet not produce a noticeable impact when it happened. Drive on or change the tire? Decided on safer to change and amazingly had it done in 10 minutes. Not that it should take longer, but usually something doesn’t want to work right. Back on the road, vibration gone, all is good.
But…no more than 5 miles from home on I4 traffic hits a complete stop. Not crawling, stopped. I was directly in front of a rest area about 3/4 of a mile from the closest exit, watched people coming up behind divert into the rest area to try to bypass the slowness, though clearly they could see traffic stopped over there too. Turned off the truck and just watched, thinking on things traffic after reading the recent book about it. Watched people treat the emergency lane as a forth lane so that the Highway Patrol had to drive on the grass to get by. Watched people pull into the rest area, see that it as stopped, and then drive aggressively back across the grass to get into the emergency lane. Some cutting across the center median to go back the other way until the police stopped (or slowed it down) anyway. Only pattern I spotted was that big four wheel drive trucks in particular seemed to dislike waiting in line, but I even saw a Jaguar (car, not cat) bouncing across the median. Once everyone realized they were truly stuck they seemed to calm down, people out chatting and talking on cell phones. One big thing I noticed was that there was no information provided – nothing on the radio, nothing on the DOT web site, etc. Transparency here would help, not only would people be able to call and adjust plans and schedules, but cars further up the road could divert cleanly instead of stacking up. In total was parked there a solid 45 minutes and then finally about to make the last couple of miles home for a late – and solo – dinner!
I’ll be attending SQLSaturday #16 in South Florida on August 8th and doing two presentations, one on statistics and one where I’ll be co-presenting with my friend Wes Dumey on being a consultant. Four full tracks plus sunny South Florida, can it get any better? I’m including the schedule below, and if you look at the first one can only guess that Devin was a bit tired when he entered his session:-)
08:30 AM Devin Knight Knight Best Practices and Performance Tuning SSIS Jorge Segarra Policy Based Management 101 Michael Antonovich Identifying and Removing Duplicate Records Michael Stark SQL Server 2008 Spatial Data
9:45 AM Brian Knight Introduction to SQL Server Analysis Services(SSAS) Pam Shaw On Demand Report Subscriptions Andy Warren Social and Not so Social Networking for the DBA Dean Richards Tuna Helper - Proven Process for Tuning SQL Wes Dumey Transitions: From Employee to Free-lance
11:00 AM Brian Knight Loading a Data Warehouse in SSIS Kendal Van Dyke Configuring SQL Access for the Web Developer\Admin Wes Dumey Building a Data Warehouse using SQL Server 2008 Jeffrey Garbus Choosing Indexes for Performance
01:00 PM Mike Mollenhour SQL 2008 Data Mining Pam Shaw Tips & Tricks for dynamic SSRS Reports Andy Warren Introduction to SQL Statistics Mike Mollenhour SQL Smoking Mirrors
02:15 PM Herve Roggero SQL Server Security Jeffrey Garbus Indexing for Join Optimization Adam Jorgensen Performance Optimization Techniques Max Trinidad PowerShell and SQL Server
03:30 PM Adam Jorgensen Dive into Querying Analysis Services with MDX Kendal Van Dyke Working With XML in SQL Server Jeffrey Garbus High Availability options in SQL Server 2008 Michael Antonovich Save Time by Merging It
I'm flying up Friday afternoon to participate in SQLSaturday #7 which is being led by John Baldwin and his team of volunteers. I visited the user group there about a year ago and while there we discussed the possibility of a SQLSaturday - it's nice to see a seed planted them finally bloom! Looking forward to seeing Robert Cain and Stuart Ainsworth again, and meeting a lot of new people as well (working on my networking skills). If you're in the area hope you'll come visit, hard to beat a day of free training.
I went over last night to do a presentation to the group managed by Bonnie and Lynn. Had 11 in attendance, very good for a group that only recently started and in a smaller city. Had planned to get over there an hour early for some quality Starbucks time first, but ran late and got there just in time for a quick sandwich and then to the meeting. After the usual group kick off intro, launched into my usual free form not really following the slides presentation style and we had a lot of fun talking about statistics and the basics of query plans. Interestingly, most of the group were more development focused and one was a true novice - and I'm not complaining about that! Evangelizing SQL is always good, and I appreciate those that are willing to spend time learning things that might help them at some point. I was scheduled for an hour but knew that there was extra time available, so we ran about 75 minutes, and then moved into a discussion about networking.
If you've been following my blog you'll know that one of my current interests is networking and I look for chances to poll technical audiences. I asked first mind you, and everyone wanted to talk, so we did. About the same results as I had from the oPASS meeting earlier this week as far as interest and tools. I changed one question, asking first how many are good at networking and only had 2 people say that they thought they were, and then asked how many had received network training - none. I think that's pretty real, some of us have natural networking ability or learned it by working with someone who did. A couple were working on blogs, and I had the usual range of responses about whether to mix personal and professional stuff in a blog, with most opting for a blog to have touches that make it personal (human), to show the person behind the writing. Here again that I think if you start by engaging them in conversation and then talk about networking you get much better results than just asking them to introduce themselves or to each other.
Afterward most of the crowd met up for a drink and discussion, and that was nice as well. Not all groups do that, this one has a nice dynamic and it was nice to feel like part of the group and just talk socially for a while before the hour plus drive home!
Kendal Van Dyke is headed over to present to them next month, and Jack Corbett is going over later in the year (Sep I think).
I'm going to West Palm Beach on Apr 29th to visit Scott Klein and his group. I'll be doing a presentation on statistics in SQL Server and also a discussion of PASS. If you're in the area hope you'll attend for the session and some networking. The meeting is held at CompTec, 1750 North Florida Mango, Suites 302 & 303, West Palm Beach, Fl 33409. Pizza and schmoozing starts at 6:00, the presentation begins at 6:30.
Scott Klein invited me to speak to his group in West Palm Beach, so I'll be going down on May 7th, 2009 to do a presentation and also to do my evangelist thing for SQLSaturday (Scott is setting up to do one in August, details soon). If you're in the area the address is 301 N. Olive Ave,West Palm Beach, FL 33401, and it will be held in the McEaddy Conference Room on the 12th floor.
As I mentioned last week I drove to Miramar for the South Florida Code Camp, arriving in time for the Friday night speaker party that we (End to End Training) hosted, and spent a great three hours just talking shop. Saturday morning I went over about 7:30 to see how things were going, no line at registration, plenty of people already moving about. Had about 8 sponsors on site, probably more than were web only. Everything started smoothly and host Dave Noderer seemed unstressed - a good sign! I spent a couple hours in the morning heads down on a project I needed to get done, then spent some more time wandering and looking in on sessions. Lunch was the standard pizza & soda, but I saw quite a few hit the on site cafeteria (snack bar?) and I got take out from Subway.
My session was right after lunch, I did my presentation on statistics to a crowd of just over 30. Had some good questions, and more DBA's than I expected - probably half the audience, more than I usually see at a Code Camp. I left to head home about 3:30, it's a long drive and I wanted to get home at a decent time. I had a follow up email from Dave, more than 800 registered, verified more than 650 attended. Truly amazing to get that many people to attend an event, I wish Orlando Code Camp (coming soon!) would grow to that size.
The only negative I heard was a few people got cold pizza, but even they were still smiling. Everything else seemed smooth to me, both as an attendee and as a speaker. Wait - one thing; Dave, next year can we have real half and half and not that yucky powdered stuff?
The fifth annual South Florida Code Camp is coming up this Saturday, Feb 7, 2009, at Devry University, 2300 SW 145th Avenue, Miramar, FL 33027. This will be my second time attending and I'll be doing a short presentation on SQL Server Statistics. It's a huge event, they have 700+ registered as of today and 72 (yes, 72) sessions scheduled. Dave Noderer is the lead for the event and does an amazing job of making a large event look easy to do, I'll be glad when I attain that state of enlightenment.
I'll be catching up with DotNetNuke Dude Stan Schultes, XML pro Scott Klein, and a host of other speakers that I don't see as often - it's about three hours from Orlando to Miramar.
Come say hello if you are attending!
The fifth annual South Florida Code Camp is being held on Feb 7th. They've got a huge schedule of sessions, probably the biggest you'll see at a free event. This will be my second year participating, I'll be giving a short presentation on SQL statistics and spending the rest of the time catching up with people I usually only see once a year. Definitely worth attending if you're in the area, or even if you have to drive down from the Orlando area.
I attended the Tampa Code Camp this past weekend. It was located at the Kforce Building in Tampa, a very nice facility, good parking, and only a couple blocks from downtown Ybor City (lots of stuff to do) - this is also where the Tampa SQLSaturday will be held in January 2009. Attendance looked to be around 200-220, which seemed to be down somewhat from previous years but still easily a success.
I did a presentation on how statistics affect performance in SQL. The 'room' I was assigned was one half of the cafeteria, another presenter had the other half. Looking at it I was expecting to have everyone struggle to hear/understand, but the layout brought the attendees in closer than usual and the noise turned out to not be a factor. If anything, having attendees within normal conversational distance made it less formal and more fun.
Only a single SQL track (not unusual) but I think we (sql speakers) probably need to have a better focus on what SQL content we do at these events. Just as at any of these events the skill levels and interests vary widely, but I think they fall into two main groups; those that don't have a DBA and so need some coaching on routine DBA tasks (not uncommon to find out they do zero index maintenance), and those that want to understand performance/security together. I think SQL injection should just always be on the agenda!
As always I had some good conversations. Some related to PASS that I'll post separately, I talked with Jonathan Kehayias about career plans & consulting, Bayer White (new blog URL) has taken over the Jacksonville .Net Users Group and the related Code Camp so we talked about running user groups and events, talked with Pam Shaw of the Tampa SQL Group about how she was going to organize the facility for SQLSaturday, talked with Joe Healy about Bizspark, and more!
Biggest complaints: materials for attendees weren't pre-stuffed in the event bags, and the lunch line for pizza wasn't well organized.
Finished up the day with a late lunch at The Green Iguana - if you're in Tampa you should try their Baja Burger!
Last event of the year here in Florida. I'll be heading to the Tampa Code Camp to do a presentation on statistics in SQL Server, and I'll be at a sponsor table for the day on behalf of both End to End Training and JumpstartTV. This is typically a good event, curious to see if the Dec date helps or hurts - they had to change from the typical summer date due to size restrictions at the originally planned site. I'm looking forward to sitting in on a .Net session or two, I enjoy SQL but it's nice to see what's going on in related areas.
I'm writing this as I wait on a flight back to Orlando after spending yesterday with John Magnabosco and team at the IndyTechFest. I did a presentation on replication to earn my keep, but really I was there to watch the event in action and see if I could add a few ideas for my upcoming SQLSaturday in Orlando. In no particular order:
Attendance was over 450! Just incredible to bring that many in, and will move them to a larger venue next year. I attribute their success to a couple different items:
Nice airport, area seems nice, weather was nice. Definitely thinking about returning next year and spending an extra day to play tourist. I'm hoping I can get John to post some more stuff about the inner workings that have led them to their success.
I'm a couple weeks last posting this, but wanted to get my notes down anyway for future use. The goal of the event was 300 attendees, my guess (unconfirmed) was about 100 actual attendees, this due primarily to the hurricane that had just visited the area and having the location of the event change only 2 days prior to the event. The people I saw at the event were having their usual good time so on that level it was a success. Overall I thought the event suffered some from the change in leadership of the Jax .Net Group that happened last year and there is a learning curve to these events!
Somewhat harshly, this is the 2nd year that the Jax event has been so-so, compared to the Orlando/S Fla/Tampa Code Camps. I hope the Jax team will take a look at those other events in Fla and their own recent experiences to make next years event first class again.
Actually it was subset of the group, but Kathi & Julie from the St Louis SQL Server User Group did a great job of marketing my free Succesful Technical Speaking class. Microsoft was kind enough to provide both meeting space as well as lunch in a great show of community support. We had about 10 people attend and for most of them I think it was the right class at the right time, start the process of conquering the fear of 'I can't answer every question'.
I'm always re-evaluating this class in particular - should I rebrand it to Beginning Technical Speaking? Should I include how to use Powerpoint (I talk about technique but no hands on right now because it switches from ideas to doing), longer labs (some people tend to get very pale at at the idea of a 15-20 minute first time presentation!). I'm presenting the class again here in Orlando in September, I think I'll do one more iteration and then decide what approach to take for next year.
Part of the class is why someone wants to speak. Many reasons, but a common one is to build their resume/profile - nothing all wrong with that. Presenting is good, but you'll reach far more people by writing an article for SSC and probably have less stress because it can be a very deliberate effort. Not trying to talk anyone out of speaking, but if you're really serious, you need to do both. You'll reach different audiences and built two different skill sets. I've been talking to my friend Steve Jones about him building a writing class, but so far I haven't put forth a really compelling reason - but my best one is that not only does he have the writing experience, he sees on a regular basis lots of different styles, good and bad. We'll see!
But to return to speaking for a moment, I'll be trying to about 10 different out of Florida user groups next year to meet new people, sharpen my skills, and of course - to market my skills and training business. If you're looking for a speaker drop me a note via www.endtoendtraining.com (no, I'm not posting my email here!) and we can also talk about whether the speaking class might be a nice add on to my visit.
Just had a note from John Magnabosco, the schedule for the event on Oct 4, 2008 has been published. I'll be there doing a presentation on Replication, Steve Jones is doing one on Green Computing, and I see Kevin Kline has two on the agenda as well.
This is a true community event, with content on .Net, Sharepoint, Enterprise Development, and more - about 36 sessions so far. Hope to see you there!
