SQLSaturday Orlando on October 8, 2022

This year we’re back at our usual location on the campus of Seminole State College for SQLSaturday #1030. You may remember that last year we couldn’t use the college and had to rent space at the Marriott. Beautiful space well suited to an event, but definitely not free. We have a strong preference for free […]

Notes on SQLSaturday Jacksonville 2022

I drove up to Jacksonville Friday afternoon to allow for bad traffic and immediately hit bad traffic, all four lanes of I-4 blocked that resulted in a 30 minute detour. Friday traffic in Florida, always something! Traffic aggravation aside, it felt good to be on the road to an event again, just like life used […]

Notes on the 2021 PASS Summit

I attended the three main days this year and wrote notes as I went. As I sat down to type them up I started by going back to look at my notes from year since both were virtual. Re-reading those and a few other posts I wrote around that time, these things came to mind: […]

Notes on SQLSaturday Orlando 2021

We held an in-person SQLSaturday here in Orlando last weekend (Oct 30th). We didn’t organize one last year, there was just too much risk and too much uncertainty, so it felt good to return to something close to normal this year, even in scaled back fashion. I’ve got a lot of notes to share about […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2021 – September Update

Just over 30 days until SQLSaturday Orlando and I’m using some vacation time today to catch up on event tasks. That’s deliberate on my part, I knew I was going to be taking a break and so it was ok to queue some stuff to do all at once. I’ve had a couple of recurring […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2021

We’ve opened up registration and the call for speakers for SQLSaturday Orlando, to be held October 30th at the Orlando Marriott Lake Mary. In-person! We weren’t able to get a space commitment from our partners at the local college, so we pivoted to looking at hotels and found that meeting space in October was being […]

The End of PASS

I think our profession was the better for having a professional association, even if it never quite did as much as I wanted it to. I put a lot of time into PASS over the years and don’t regret a bit of it. PASS helped me grow and maybe I helped PASS grow some too. […]

Platforms for Events

in my last post I wrote about thinking of the tools as being a separate thing from the event. Not a complicated concept, but does it matter? Maybe. Let me pose one version of what the future might look like. At a high level, it would be: something.org, the host for an open source version […]

SQLSaturday Doesn’t Have to Be a Platform

When we built the first SQLSaturday it was about 2 pages of HTML. No login, no tools, just get it done. Worked ok. Didn’t work so well for the second event in Tampa as they had to call me to make every change. Clearly we needed to “empower” and as there was no obvious alternative, […]

Farewell, Gareth Swanepoel

Not easy to say, Gareth passed away a few days ago. We’d both gotten busy and with Covid added in, we had not caught up in a while. Now, as often happens, it’s too late. I sure miss him. The memorial service is tomorrow, January 14, 2021 at 10:15 EST. Obituary and a link to […]