It’s the end of the year, and I’m looking back at the events and travels I’ve had this year. I keep a list of travels on my blog for speaking as a kind of Speaking CV, and United (my primary airline) provides me with a summary of travel each year.

Since I’m planning and looking forward to 2019, I thought I’d recap a few of my travels.

New Events and Places

Every year I try to visit some new places and events, getting the chance to meet new people and learn about events and places. There are so many to see and attend that this is a never ending goal, but that’s part of the fun.

New places I visited this year: Cork, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Jacksonville (personal), and Hong Kong (personal).

New Events for me: ISACA Ireland, Music City Tech, Microsoft Inspire, SQL Sat Pittsburgh, Certified InfoSec.

I did a few new virtual talks, even though I don’t really enjoy these. I like feedback from in person talks but the Milwaukee and Queensland user groups got me to speak.

Revisiting Fond Memories

I was lucky enough to get to revisit a number of places this year. Of those, I enjoyed getting to do some live SQL in the City events, in addition to the streamed ones. I did 4 of each, so a good SQL in the City year.

It was also great to get back to Baton Rouge, Louisville, Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Oslo, and Cambridge for events. Those are some of my favorite places for SQL events and I’ve been at all of them 3 or more times.

I was also luck to spend a few days in Washington DC and New York City, two amazing places in the US.

Of course, as usual, London was the most visited destination. 6 times in 2018, and probably close to 40 trips there in my life.

Missed Out

I missed out on SQL Bits in 2018, the first time in quite a few years. Unfortunately this conflicted with other commitments at home, and will again in 2019. Hopefully that will change in 2020.

I also skipped the VS Live, Dev Connections, Ignite, Build, and SQL Intersection events. I’ve enjoyed those over the years, but this wasn’t the time to go, and next year might not be either. We’ll see what happens.

All in all it was a great year speaking, and with travel that was manageable. Hopefully that continues in 2019.