T-SQL Tuesday #153 – The Conference That Changed Everything

Words: 585

Time to read: ~ 3 minutes

Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly blogging party created by Adam Machanic, maintained by Steve Jones (twitter | blog), and hosted this month by Kevin Kline (twitter | blog).

This month, the topic is:

Tell us the story of how attending an IT conference or event resulted in an amazing career or life opportunity.

I have gone to my fair share of conferences, especially since I still think I’ve only been in the community for a relatively short time.
Less than a decade so far.
This duration is a guess, though, because I don’t want to take a more extended look if that number is too low and I start having scary thoughts.

The idea of picking out a single IT conference is also a scary thought.
The number of standout events is more than any professional should be lucky enough to have.
In any event that I have gone to, the talks have been more than knowledgeable; they have been inspiring.
To leave a conference without a renewed energy and motivation to dive into the plugged tech is rare, and it only happened to me once when I went after flying & driving for more hours than I had slept in the previous days.

So it’s not the tech side of events that I want to extoll; it’s the “softer” side, the people & the memories.
I will be cheeky and say that my answer for this T-SQL Tuesday will be all of them, but for different reasons.

SQL Pass for meeting up with the dbatools team and meeting with Jess Pomfret (twitter | blog), Chrissy LeMaire (twitter | blog), Constantine Kokkinos (twitter | blog), Andy Levy (twitter | blog), and John G Hohengarten 👞 (twitter).

SQL Bits, as an attendee, for meeting up with Mötz Jensen (twitter), Dan Alexander (twitter) and Rob Sewell (twitter | blog).
SQL Bits, as a volunteer, for joking and laughing with Neil Holmes (twitter) outside the event to keep warm and realising that Erik Darling (twitter | blog) despairs my taste in whiskey.

Data Grillen, for meeting a great man in Reitse Eskens (twitter | blog), being dazzled by Ben Weissman (twitter | blog) & William Durkin (twitter), and finding out that Hamish Watson (twitter | blog) isn’t as cool as I thought; he’s cooler.

SQL Saturday Boston, for realising that Andy Mallon (twitter | blog) is a fantastic person to be able to organise, invite, welcome, and help host an all-day event with aplomb.

SQL Saturday Cork, for having non-tech chats on a cricket pitch with Kevin Kline (see starting paragraph) and Sander Stad (twitter | blog) on a rare sunny Irish day, talking about random topics we realised all interested us.

Data Scotland, for meeting up with people I had come to know online but not had a chance to meet face to face; Brett Miller (twitter | blog), Craig Porteous (twitter | blog), Paul Broadwith (twitter | blog), Johan Ludvig Brattås (twitter), Cathrine Wilhelmsen (twitter | blog), and John Armando McCormack (twitter | blog).

And for any PowerShell conference, for enlightening me to the genius of Mathias Jessen (twitter | blog), Adil Leghari (twitter), Chris Gardner (twitter | blog), and Adam Russell (twitter | blog).

I will have to stop before the memories stretch out, and I get caught up in them all evening. There are too many people to name in a short blog post, and the amount of memories makes me re-think the amount of time I’ve been in IT, leading to Scary Thoughts again.

The Conference that changed everything? All of them, and hopefully each one that will have me next.