Speaking

This is long overdue but life and distractions happened. It’s been a little over two months since I returned home from PASS Summit 2025.

Thank you for attending my PASS Summit 2025 session Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation! I will have a more comprehensive post in the coming days. Slides and demo code are now available in Github as well as through the PASS Summit website. Github will always have the most recent version of the code. There have been additions and bug fixes!

• Github repository
• PASS Data Community Summit session info

In less than one month, I will be speaking not once but twice at PASS Data Community Summit 2025.

Thursday, November 20th at 1 PM I will be in the Community Zone to share my experience as a mentor for FIRST Robotics Team 3003, TANX. Hobby Huddles were a new addition to Summit last year. These lightning talk-sized presentation about something the speaker does outside their day job are a lot of fun to check out. But how do I take something I can talk about all afternoon and compress it down to only 10 minutes?

In the blink of an eye, summer has passed. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for things to get back to “normal” after 10 weeks of events and travel, personal and professional, starting with high school graduation and finishing with college move-in.

Amidst all that, I had three speaking engagements as mentioned in an earlier post. Three different talks, delivered in very different places - putting it all together was more work than I’d anticipated.

It’s been a minute since I’ve gotten out to speak at events, but the second half of 2025 is going to be packed.

First Things First

Thanks to every who came to my session, Asnwering the Auditor’s Call with Automation. Slides and scripts are posted to my Github.

The Event!

This was Syracuse’s first SQL Saturday, held at the Onondaga County Public Library’s Central Library location, located downtown. This made it a bit of a “homecoming” for me. My first job out of college was across the street from this building and my colleagues and I used to eat lunch in the (no longer there) food court. I haven’t been to this part of downtown Syracuse since 2005, and downtown Syracuse at all since 2019. A lot has changed!

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at the first-ever SQL Saturday Syracuse on September 7th, 2024. I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation

I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation at two upcoming events, one virtual and one in-person.

1. DBA Fundamentals Virtual User Group Tuesday, April 9 2024 at Noon EDT
2. Capital Area SQL Server User Group on Monday, May 13th at 5:30 PM.

As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information and compiling it into something usable by auditors could take you hours or even days. But with automation, you can pull it all together in a matter of minutes while you’re getting that second cup of coffee from the kitchen.

As PASS Summit approaches this week, I’m re-reviewing my evaluations from SQL Saturday Boston and I’d like to give feedback about feedback.

Why Feedback?

Both speakers and event organizers depend upon getting feedback about every session delivered at SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, PASS Summit, or any of the user groups (in-person or virtual). This feedback is valuable to speakers and event organizers alike.

• For speakers, it helps us understand if we’re doing OK when we’re in front of the room, but more importantly we want to know what we can do better.
• For event organizers, it’s helpful in understanding what content attendees want to see. As a former event organizer and user group leader, I’ve even used that feedback to say “hey, we should invite this person to speak at a future meeting.”

Ratings on a scale of 1-5 are okay, but when you’re looking at product reviews on Amazon you aren’t just look at the stars, are you? The written reviews are what matter most when you’re making a decision about garden hoses or cheese graters. This is your opportunity to tell the speaker what works in their presentation and what doesn’t. This is information that can’t be conveyed via 4 stars or an emoji. We need actionable feedback.

First Things First

Thank you to everyone who attended my session “Answering the Automator’s Call with Automation.” My slide deck and demo code are now available on my Github.. This was a new session and I’m pretty happy with how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if it would “land,” even after doing my run-throughs at home. Now that I’ve delivered the material to real people and had a conversation or two about it with folks, I’m feeling much more confident.