Scott Klein has put together the first annual Geek Golf event. Scheduled for May 8th, 2010, it’s being held at Binks Forrest Golf Club, 400 Binks Forest Drive, Wellington, FL 33414 (www.BinksForestGC.com). It’s $95/person. I’m not a golfer, but maybe I’ll drop by and just be a cart driver!
Just booked the travel, going up the afternoon of March 5th and returning on an early evening flight on the 6th. They haven’t build the final schedule yet, but the list of submitted sessions and speakers looks strong, should be a good event. The location has been changed to the Microsoft Charlotte Offices on 8050 Microsoft Way, Charlotte, NC 28273, and looks like a Hampton Inn just up the street that has an airport shuttle. Register soon!
I’ve been a fan of the OLPC project, even buying to raffle off at an event just so I could give one a test drive. Interesting hardware and quite a few countries are using them, but it didn’t quite take off as hoped, and I believe that is due in part to the fact that Intel and others wanted to make a profit in the same areas that were targeted for OLPC. Free market I guess, and maybe it even spurred the current round of netbooks that are selling like crazy (I have one of those too).
Saw this over the holiday break, their next proposed project is the XO-3, a tablet type machine with camera and other goodies for a supposed $75 each. They never got the price point on the original XO below $200 that I know of, so $75 seems ambitious. Of course, just like the first time it may trigger more innovation, and certainly the launch of the iPad will be generating a lot of interest in that form factor.
I watch my children use the computer and there is value even at a young age. My not quite three year old can use a mouse and play the basic games on www.starfall.com, and I just wish there was more and better learning content for kids in that age range. Maybe the OLPC project will succeed, or maybe it will just drive innovation, but I’m taken by the dream of enabling children to learn sooner and faster – it could change the world within a generation.
As I mentioned earlier in the week I had promised Andy an interview, we finished it up yesterday and the results are posted on his blog. See what you think!
A couple weeks back I asked for reading suggestions, and I got a bunch! Here’s the list so far:
I’m reading Titan right now, a biography of John D. Rockefeller and looking forward to many of the rest, should be a good change from what I might normally pick up.
Got a reading suggestion? Post it as a comment, within these guidelines: No romance novels, no religion, no politics, no conspiracy theories, no Presidential biographies after Kennedy (recommend one for him), which will enable me to write about it if I read it. Plus, you have to have read it and think it was good.
Our next meeting is February 9, 2010, We’ve got Ronald Dameron coming to speak this month on Database Hardening using Powershell. We’ll be broadcasting on on LiveMeeting again as well, you can join us for the presentation which should start around 6:45 pm eastern. Here’s the link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=24PPGB&role=attend.
Dave Schutz will be leading the first ever SQLSaturday in Columbus, OH on June 5, 2010 at the Fawcett Center in Columbus. Registration and call for speakers is now open.
January has been a slow month for me as far as PASS involvement, I show about 10 hours logged for the month, most of that on calls or email. I’m still thinking on the speaker bureau project and expect to send Rushabh some early options in the next couple weeks. Work on the online store is still in progress, right now PASS HQ is evaluating Cafe Press and Zazzle to see which might fill our needs best to sell PASS branded items.
We had our monthly Board of Directors call on Jan 14, and it was a low key call for the most part, no motions up for vote, just discussions of various things in early phases. One of the topics brought up by Rushabh was wanting to hire four additional staff people for PASS HQ. Over the past couple years we’ve realized that for things that need to be done consistently it just doesn’t make sense to rely on volunteers. I don’t mean that to sound bad, just the reality is that volunteers are subject to reality spikes where life or work intervenes. When that happens volunteer work gets pushed down the stack, and there are things that just have to be done – the bi-weekly Connector newsletter for example.
Our philosophy right now is to use volunteers when we need SQL technical expertise, or when we are developing a new idea or process. Once it’s working and stable, we will transition it to HQ. I agree with this strategy, but it’s starting to put pressure on HQ to do all the work that is tasked to them – leading to Rushabh’s discussion of hiring more staff.
This turned into an interesting debate. I’m not opposed to hiring more staff in concept, but the request seemed very adhoc. My questions were; how are we going to pay for them, and are we sure that we are running at reasonable efficiency. Starting with money, just my guess on the cost would be about an additional $200k annually (possibly more). That’s about 10% of our current budget, and in this economy that feels aggressive. The other part is harder, are we reasonably efficient? That’s a hard question to ask without stepping on toes, but it’s important. Overall I’ve been pleased with the work that HQ does, but as you all know over time you can easily end up spending time on things that don’t matter, or that really don’t justify the ROI.
I don’t want to micro manage HQ, yet I feel that some efficiency gains are possible. One of the things that contribute to that is that I don’t have a firm grasp of how many hours my projects take on a weekly basis at HQ. I think I’d feel better if I could see the total hours how many are being allocated to Board support and how many are ‘overhead’ (things we’ve turned over to HQ). That might result in some Board members reassessing whether the cost was appropriate, and at least we would have looked.
Another board member stated that if Rushabh believed that we needed the staff we should approve it and not micro-manage, trusting that he has done the diligence. I strongly disagree with that, as I believe that my most important role on the Board is to make sure that we stay financially healthy, and that means asking for details when we talk about a large budget increase. I don’t want to audit how much they spend on paper clips. I won’t rubber stamp budget requests either.
At this point we’re waiting on more information before making a decision. We need firm salary numbers, information on where we are spending time (money), and we need to be pretty confident that we can support the budget increase (we don’t want to hire and then get forced into a layoff).
Ultimately I may well vote for the additional staff. What I hoped to show you here is that PASS is a business with a budget and staffing needs, and that early conversations about anything often look like sausage making – ugly!
Also, right now minutes have been posted through November 2009, available at http://www.sqlpass.org/AboutPASS/Governance.aspx (login required). I’d like to encourage you to read the minutes each month and ask questions, it’s a good way to stay informed about the overall direction of PASS.
Yesterday I posted the news that SQLSaturday is now owned by PASS, today I’d like to share a bit of the history behind SQLSaturday and why we thought it made sense for it to transition to PASS. I’ve promised my friend Andy Leonard an “exclusive” interview on some of the details and with luck you’ll see that in the next week or so.
We (Brian, Steve, and I) started talking about doing a community event here in Orlando in early 2007. I’d been to a few Code Camps as attendee and presenter and saw a lot of value in them, but if you were a SQL person there wasn’t enough content to make it compelling. Why not do a SQL event?
That led to SQLSaturday #1 in October 2007 which by any measure was a success, just over 200 attendees at the event. Pam Shaw and Wes Dumey liked the idea enough to host #2 in Tampa the following year, then Brian Knight did one in Jacksonville and we had some momentum. Since then we’ve had 30 something events with more in the pipeline. What seemed questionable back in early 2007 now seems obvious – there is plenty of demand for all day free events that focus just on SQL Server.
From the beginning we thought this was something that PASS should be doing, and in a sense they were trying to via the “PASS Camp” branding. The problem was that aside from the name, there wasn’t much else – no tools, no real knowledge share, no financial help, no coaching. We took some flak back in the beginning for not making it a PASS branded event, but we needed the freedom to innovate and spend, and we didn’t have time to wait on a committee to vote. We were never interested in making a profit and announced from the beginning our intention to build it and then give it to PASS if we could make it work. So we built it, and revised it, and built some more, learning a lot of little lessons along the way and trying to capture them as best we could.
Along the way I learned a few lessons, and maybe the most interesting was that these events provided a valuable place to find and grow those ready to take the next step – sharing their knowledge. If you were a SQL professional back in 2007 you didn’t have many venues as options if you wanted to do a presentation, most them paid events like the PASS Summit, Connections, and VS Live, and the free events available mainly targeted developers. Today if you’re wanting to start giving back and building your reputation there is usually at least one SQLSaturday a month and while it might require travel, our policy of trying to put as many new and unique speakers on the schedule as possible almost guarantees a chance to speak. Growing the speaker pool is a game changer to me – like ripples in a pond the effects go far beyond a single event.
After the November election I talked to Rushabh about whether PASS might be interested in taking over SQLSaturday. It wasn’t the first conversation about it, but it was the one that that did it, and since then PASS has been looking at the time required to support it, writing a proposal to the Board about it, and then a vote by the Board to finalize it just this past week (I abstained from the vote).
The terms of the handover are pretty simple, we’re giving it all to PASS – domain, web site, source code, and all the knowledge we can find. The only direct cost to PASS will be for some software components and email software, no more than $1500 and maybe less if they can get it donated from the vendors. We’re not getting anything in return – no money, no free tickets to the Summit, nothing. I mention that because I’m on the Board of Directors and want to make sure that we have transparency on this issue in particular and no appearance of an insider deal.
I’ve already had questions about what will change. In the short term nothing, and Rushabh has pledged to continue the level of support to events that we’ve provided and to look for ways to enhance it. I’ll continue to actively participate in helping get new events set up over the next couple months as we finish the transition, and I’ll be a vocal proponent for trying to grow more events and to do more for the events and event leaders. Ultimately what makes SQLSaturday work are the local leaders that do all the work and I’m confident that they will hold PASS accountable!
It’s been more fun than I can tell you to start with a dream, put the sweat equity into it, and see it grow. I’ve been the most visible person on the project during the last 2.5 years, but I couldn’t have done it without the support of Brian and Steve as this took literally hundreds of hours away from our business. I also couldn’t have done it without the efforts of a lot of people who put huge amounts of time into each of their events. By no means a complete list, but here are some of the people that helped SQLSaturday grow:
I’ll still be writing about SQLSaturday events and participating in as many as I can make it to (my next one is Charlotte in early March), and I’ll try to share some of the info about the transfer as we get that done.
I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but for now I’m reposting the release from Rushabh Mehta, President, PASS:
It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce that the PASS Board of Directors recently voted to acquire the SQL Saturday Event brand and management. SQL Saturday is a very popular event brand started by Andy Warren, Steve Jones and Brian Knight in May 2007. Since then, over 28 events have occurred world-wide with an anticipated growth of 40-50 events over the next two years. This great program is a gift to the PASS organization from Andy, Steve and Brian and gives PASS control over the SQL Saturday domain, events, as well as the event management tool put together with collective help from the SQL Server community. Over the coming weeks, we will transition the event program underneath the PASS Community Connection Events umbrella and provide SQL Saturday events the management infrastructure it needs. We are also working to integrate our events portfolio to support SQL Saturday financially at the same levels as our PASS Community Connection branded events. PASS will invest in the event management infrastructure over the next year to make it more robust and also to add new management capabilities. I am also quite excited to be speaking at the next SQL Saturday event #33 which is being held in Charlotte, NC on the 6th of March. This will be the first SQL Saturday under PASS management!
It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce that the PASS Board of Directors recently voted to acquire the SQL Saturday Event brand and management. SQL Saturday is a very popular event brand started by Andy Warren, Steve Jones and Brian Knight in May 2007. Since then, over 28 events have occurred world-wide with an anticipated growth of 40-50 events over the next two years.
This great program is a gift to the PASS organization from Andy, Steve and Brian and gives PASS control over the SQL Saturday domain, events, as well as the event management tool put together with collective help from the SQL Server community. Over the coming weeks, we will transition the event program underneath the PASS Community Connection Events umbrella and provide SQL Saturday events the management infrastructure it needs. We are also working to integrate our events portfolio to support SQL Saturday financially at the same levels as our PASS Community Connection branded events. PASS will invest in the event management infrastructure over the next year to make it more robust and also to add new management capabilities.
I am also quite excited to be speaking at the next SQL Saturday event #33 which is being held in Charlotte, NC on the 6th of March. This will be the first SQL Saturday under PASS management!
Exciting news!
The fifth annual Orlando Code Camp will be held March 27, 2010, at the Lake Mary Campus of Seminole State College (formerly Seminole Community College). Registration and call for speakers is now open. I’ll be helping out by making the selections for the SQL track again this year – speakers, there are a small number of slots available for SQL topics, so submit ones that will have the broadest appeal to the developer community!
In our world sometimes it’s worth the time and effort for in depth tuning to get the machine to run at something closer to max efficiency, in other cases it’s just not worth the time or effort or cost, easier to just buy a new or additional server. It’s not easy to know which one to do, and consistently doing one or the other by rote isn’t a great idea. I see a lot of people biased one way or another, including me.
For example, for a SQL server with only a couple drives, I’m reluctant to invest much time tuning to fix what is almost always really an IO problem. Equally, with an overloaded web server I’ll order one without much thought – cheap, adds redundancy, and trying to tune for more concurrent sessions isn’t easy, or often worth doing at all. As I said, my biases!
So let me change focus a bit, and say that businesses go through this same exercise when it comes to staffing. If you see your overtime hours (or at least hours worked) going up to the point of pain, do you hire another person or find ways to reduce or streamline their workload?
It’s amazing how often you can find the equivalent of a really bad query when you start looking at how people do things at work. Sometimes that’s because they don’t have the vision to see there is a better way, sometimes they don’t want to find a better way because having ‘free time’ might make them expendable, and sometimes they are doing work that they think matters – but would make you cry if you knew what they were doing.
Fixing this is hard, and harder to do without making it feel like you’re in a remake of Office Space. A detailed time study is a good start, having them log their time in detail for a week or two, and then supplement that with some notes from each employee on any tasks that they feel are tedious, time consuming, redundant, or just not really useful. To figure it out, you have to get down in the details – should it really take a DBA x hours to refresh the dev server each week? (Note: I mean really go through each process, not just say ‘it shouldn’t take that long’)
You have to remember that unless you have an extraordinary culture most employees are threatened by this type of tuning, as are most managers, where it can be seen as lose-lose; potentially they lose employees (which equates to power and being needed), and potentially they can be seen as incompetent for not identifying the inefficiencies on their own. Because it deals with people and because trolling through the tasks at that level of detail just sucks, the typical move is to hire someone rather than endure the pain. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, sometimes not.
I periodically assess my own effectiveness because if I waste time on things that don’t matter, it just means I work longer for the same money. Every time I do it I find places where I’m falling off track. Sometimes that is from not taking time to save time, sometimes just not seeing the forest for the trees. I bet if I had someone external evaluate my time use I still wouldn’t score well. Why? It’s not for lack of trying, but it’s just hard – hard to see past my mistakes, my pride, my biases, and hard to see the bigger picture.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. If you’re working too many hours, take a hard look at where the hours go. Anything you can do to get your hours back down to 40 is worth doing, and if you see ways to go below that, try selling it to your manager. There will be work to replace it, but hopefully it’s work that will mean more to the company and leverage your skills better.
Stuart Ainsworth will be coordinating the second SQLSaturday in Atlanta, this time on April 24th, 2010. Registration and call for speakers is now open!
The Breach by Patrick Lee ($8 at Amazon) was a gift, and wasn’t quite what I expected based on the title. Bad guy now good guy Travis Chase is out on a mountain hike to find himself when he finds a recently crashed 747, which poses the obvious question – how do you crash a plane that size and not have rescue teams everywhere? He heads down to help and finds that all is not what it appears, and is soon on the run. I don’t want to spoil the story, but he ends up trying to protect something, and that something takes this from mystery thriller to border line sci-fi. The plot is tricky and twisty, and the ending interesting if somehow not quite fulfilling. Wasn’t sure at the beginning, but it grew on me and was a nice few hours of entertainment.
Got the email today, SQLSaturday #30 has been rescheduled for April 10, 2010, due to projected bad weather on the original date this weekend. Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss did a great job of handling this, getting an email out early in the week to warn of a possible change and setting a deadline for making a decision. Kudos!
