This past weekend was the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta, and I attended and presented as well. Actually I only attended half the day since my wife had planned a dinner party and I had numerous chores to complete during the first half of the day.

The event was held a Metro State College in downtown Denver, and it was a beautiful day, sunny, warm, and nice. That was good since parking was a short walk from the classrooms where the various sessions were held.

I arrived and there was an Open House being held at the college the same there, and not too many signs up for the event. The website had good directions, and that helped, but it would have been nice to see more signs directing me to the event. As it was I ended up coming in the back side of the building (I wasn’t aware), and found the room I was speaking at first before wandering over to the front side.

I did like that each classroom had a scheduled posted outside it so you could see what was happening all day in each room. There were also good signs directing you to the various parts of the building. When I did get to the front, there weren’t vendor tables or much in the way of announcing this event, but I saw people I know, so that was OK.

The presentations were in a mix of auditoriums and classrooms. None of the 5 or 6 sessions I peaked in, or attended were too full, so room placement went well. Plenty of pizza was there for lunch. I missed it, but we saw students walking by and grabbing pieces at the end, which I’m glad the organizers were happy to allow.

Apparently over 400 people came, so it was a good success. My session on The Modern Resume – Building Your Brand, was one of the last ones, and I had about 30 people in there and it went well. People seemed happy, not many questions, but no one left and they seemed interested.

Overall I think they could improve this event and publicize it more, but it went off well, people seemed to enjoy it and I’ll be happy to support it next year again.

I'm not sure that I'm wise, but I do feel old quite often. I noticed that after my talk at SQLSaturday #8 in Orlando, Devin Knight, brother of my business partner, Brian Knight, wrote a series entitled the Wise Old Man (#4 is linked in there). I was both amused, surprised, and a little flattered that I'd inspired someone else to write based on my talk. I wasn't sure how well it would be received, but apparently people liked it.

I think most of what I brought out in the talk was the same type of stuff that you see in many self help books. It's common sense, it's based on experience, but it's nothing earth shattering,  just a little organized. If you saw the talk you might debate that, but I think I at least kept close to the slides :)

Common sense is just that, it's common knowledge and ideas that most people would think of. What I find often is that we're all busy, and we often focus on a problem tightly and don't necessarily know how to think outside our own box, or we forget to approach it from a common sense perspective. Instead we try to be clever, or assume we're not thinking it through if we don't come up with something new.

Building your brand online really isn't much different that how you might do it offline, but it is much more powerful. You have a huge reach online, and you can either use that to your advantage or ignore it at your peril.

Over the next few weeks I'll try and get more thoughts down on the talk and see if I can expand on it. I've been searching for a new book project, and this might be the one I tackle.

 The whole idea of having free events, bringing learning to people locally wasn't something that I was thrilled with. It's a lot of energy and effort, and there have been more than a few times that I questioned the wisdom of putting resources into these events. However once I've attended one I think this is a good thing for the community and while it might not pay back in terms of direct ROI at the event, I'm hoping the karma will do us good down the road.

It hasn't taken much of my time, other than a few hours over the last year talking on the phone, or often, listening to Andy talk about the event and the details, hassles, and difficulties. It's a strange role for me, someone usually working on details. Here I have to listen and offer suggestions, think strategically, examine things with a more critical eye. I've learned a few things while doing it and to some extent it's rounded out my business experience and knowledge a bit more.

The idea of a free event is interesting. My concern was that we were delving too far into the conference arena with 5-6 tracks per event and not getting any of the payback. It seems that building a local event that's free is a lot of work for relatively little payback. To some extent I still believe that, but I was amazed how many people Genuinely stopped by and thanked Andy for the event. More than a few of them really appreciated the effort, thanks speakers after sessions, and wanted to come learn. Taking time out of their Saturday to come learn a bit more about SQL. The speakers also seemed to appreciate the chance to speak and interact with people. In some ways I really think this gets closer to the community than any of the other events I've seen.

And that's what it's about. Most people, or most IT workers never get to go to a conference. Quite a few go once or twice in their careers, but it's the few that get to go somewhere every year. I've been lucky, attending 1 conference most years, 2 quite often, and even 3 or 4 major conferences in some years. That's unusual and I appreciate that I've been very lucky.

So SQLSaturday provides a great chance for many people to get some training, some learning, at no cost to their company. It gives them a chance to experience a bit of the conference atmosphere and meet some of the professionals that work hard to lead the way and help others. I don't think that these events will displace conferences and large scale events, but I think they can really help more people get a chance to get motivated and excited about their career.

I enjoyed it, and while I'm not big on the travel, I'm sure I'll get to a few more of these events next year.