The holidays have passed and it’s a new year. You probably have a gift card or two and haven’t decided how to use it yet. Allow me to help:

Buy that fancy keyboard you’ve been coveting. Yes, the $100+ model. And get the good mouse/trackball while you’re at it. Just do it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a “knowledge worker”, developer, data wrangler, or technical writer. You spend hours every day at your computer, hammering away at the keyboard. Why are you still using that $10 membrane keyboard and $5 corded mouse that the company has a 10-year stockpiles of?

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.

All week, my phone has been reminding me (via photo memories) of the amazing experience I had at PASS Summit 2017. This can mean only one thing - PASS Summit 2023 is less than two weeks away!

I’ve written a lot about Summit in the past and many of the posts I’ve written about getting ready are still applicable today, so go check those out too.

Content and Scheduling

As always PASS Summit is delivering a ton of amazing content - an embarrassment of riches! And the topics are getting more and more diverse every year. Which is excellent because in the coming year(s) I, like many data professionals, will be asked to work across a variety of tools and platforms and not just the handful we’ve been using for a decade or more.

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.

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Boston on October 14th, 2023. This year’s session is Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation

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.

Last week I wrote about our FRC team, asking for support in in the form of a cheering section. Today, I’m asking for more assistance for these amazing students.

Things went better than expected at the Finger Lakes Regional event and TAN[X] 3003 was part of the winning alliance. This means that we earned an invitation to the 2023 World Championships. You can watch all of our qualification and playoff matches via YouTube links on The Blue Alliance. They also appeared in a local news segment about the event.

For the past few years, I have been a mentor for FIRST Lego League and now FIRST Robotics Competition at our school. When I was in high school, I participated in some of the early seasons of FRC and now with the addition of FLL, my kids have gotten involved at an earlier age and really latched onto it. So of course, I talked myself into helping out with the program. And they’re stuck with me for a while; my son is a sophomore, and when he’s a senior, my daughter will be a freshman and she’s champing at the bit to get into the “big” competition (after 2 years of FLL).

TL;DR: My home firewall/router is slow, please help me pick out a new one.

After replacing my firewall/router/WiFi access point one too many times, I’m ready to get off the upgrade treadmill and buy something better than the consumer-grade gear sold at Staples.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Garry Bargsley (blog | twitter) wants to know what activities we undertake to wrap up the year.

My ask is, what do you have planned for end-of-year activities for your SQL environment? Do you have annual processes or procedures you run? Do you clean up documentation? Do you just take time off and hope someone else does the work?

Fairly short post here. Due to the recent events around Twitter (which I will not get into), I’m making an effort to reduce or completely cease my activity on that platform. My Contact page has been updated with all of the below accounts/sites.