Category: SQL Family

What a Difference a Year Makes

Words: 665

Time to read: ~ 3 minutes

2018 has been a busy year.

Blog

Let’s talk blog numbers for a moment… They say a picture paints a thousand words so I’m going to keep the word count down.

That’s 42,680 views across 34,920 visitors. Now seeing as last year it was 11,079 views across 9,061 visitors and that’s a 285% increase…yeah I’m pretty damn happy with that!

2018 was the year that I started to get more and more into the PowerShell community so I’m happy that 3 out of the top 4 posts were about topics that merges both the SQL Server and PowerShell communities.

• Wait! There are JOINS in PowerShell???
• Dealing with System.Data.DataRow
• Turning off Passive Voice spell-check in Word 2016
• Importing Excel into SQL Server using PowerShell

I’m not going to read into the fact that my post with the highest views of 2018 was about me being a fan-boy of the work of somebody else. Mainly because it’s awesome and I’m a fan-boy of the work of a lot of people.

As for the Passive voice post, well it annoyed me and I was so happy to find the answer that I had to blog about it. Thank you to a certain German Fashion magazine forum for continuously sending traffic my way because of it!

Travel

SQLBits, SQL Saturday Oslo, SQL Saturday Reading, PSDay UK, etc.

It’s probably been my busiest year with regard to travel. Combine this with my moving back to Ireland from London in June this year and I’ve now reached the age stage where I can’t fully remember where I’ve been.

To combat this, I’ve enabled Google Timelines to help keep track of where I’ve been. Here is what it’s shown me since July 2018.

The amount of information that I’ve been taught, the people that I’ve finally met face to face, the beauty of the places I’ve been definitely makes me want to keep the travel going into 2019!

Shout out to Drew Furgiuele ( blog | twitter ) who I didn’t manage to meet when we were both in SQL Saturday Oslo. We’ll have our coffee/alcohol/workout/handshake eventually!

Learnings

While it has been a busy year for blogging, travelling, and meeting people it has come at a cost. One that I’ve only felt lately when I sat down and tried to a brief forward plan of the upcoming year.

I’ve been receiving an enormous amount of PowerShell help from the PowerShell community. They are extremely welcoming, open, and willing to aid knowledge seekers (so much so that I’m having a fun little argument with them about which community is more welcoming: PowerShell or SQL 🙂 ).

Catching up with some SQL webinars and reading some of the SQL blogging community’s posts has shown me that I haven’t been keeping up to date with the SQL Server announcements and new technologies.

This is something that I am going to have to actively aim to rectify in 2019.

Ideas

2018 was amazing for seeing a small subset of what someone can achieve with the technology out there in the world. To say that I’m bursting with ideas wouldn’t be far from the truth, thanks to a combination of procrastination and under-used time-management skills.

I’m going to be aiming to see if I can turn 2018, the year of ideas, into 2019, the year of actions.

Reflections

Hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 3 years but this will be the first reflection that I have done.

Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve accomplished, learned, and realised with 2018. Yes, even the realisation that I need to increase my effort on SQL Server learning.

What get’s measured gets done!

Looking forward, I’m not quite sure what’s next. I’ve a couple of SQL Server and PowerShell days/conferences that I’m looking forward to. I suppose it’s time to stop reflecting and start planning.

To everyone who I’ve encountered in 2018, thank you.

To everyone who has encountered me in 2018, I’m sorry. I need more caffeine at the time.

To everyone I’m going to meet in 2019, looking forward to it!