• Jeff Moden (1/25/2014)


    Also, spend an hour to either sit down and design a simple business card with the area of SQL Server that you'd like to work with on it (as well as your contact info, of course), or spend a sawbuck or two to have someone print up a hundred.

    It doesn't even take a sawbuck or an hour to do this. Vistaprint.com will print 250 basic business cards on their standard stock (it's kinda glossy, but heavy and stiff - plenty good for this purpose) and send them to you for only the cost of shipping (I paid $6.95). You do the design right on the web site, and it takes about 15 minutes. If you recognize that you can put anything into the form fields when designing the card, regardless of what they're labeled (e.g., you can put your Twitter handle in the "Address" field with no problem), you can get a card that includes whatever you need on it. Vistaprint will try to upsell you along the way, but it's easy to click "No thanks" to decline the offered upgrades.

    I got some of these to hand out at PASS Summit, SQL Saturday, local PASS chapter meetings, etc. My employer doesn't provide me business cards, probably wisely so, because I don't have much work-related reason to hand them out. For networking purposes, I don't want to use my work contact information anyway, because I want folks to be able to reach me even if I leave my current job.

    Jason Wolfkill