The End of the Mentoring Experiment

Back in April 2011 Steve Jones and I launched The Mentoring Experiment. We had some ideas and some goals, but truly it was an experiment to see what we might do to drive more mentoring and mentoring relationships. We had some success at the experiments we tried, but in the end we found that it […]

Need Recommendations on Being a Better Listener

This past weekend I’ve been reading The Zen of Listening by Rebecca Shafir, part of my ongoing efforts to be better at many things and also part of research for an upcoming project. The book was a good starting point for me, with some ideas on the different types of listening and how mindfulness and […]

Books On The Desk

2013-05-05 16:28:52

Give the Gift of Feedback

I bet if you think about it there are lots of times when people ask what you think about a problem. We in IT are geared for that, we love to solve problems, and getting a new problem sparks the same kind of salivation that your dog does when he sees a new bone land […]

PASS Election Results Posted

Congratulations to Wendy Pastrick, James Rowland-Jones, and Sri Sridharan on winning a two year term on the PASS Board of Directors. It was an amazingly close race, read the full results here. The remaining two candidates, Allen Kinsel and Kendal Van Dyke, will be leaving the Board at the end of this year. I hope […]

The Mentoring Experiment–New Call for Mentees

With both Steve Jones and I done with our summer break, we’re ready to continue with several experiments we’ve been thinking on for a while, and to do that, we need mentees! See this post for details. Want to be a mentor? Fill out the short application and we’ll have someone matched to you by […]

Call for Mentors for The Mentoring Experiment

We’re about to start our second experiment over at The Mentoring Experiment and we need mentors. Last time we picked a handful of people as mentors so that we could control that portion of the experiment. This time we’re just asking people that are interested to apply to be a mentor. You might notice we’re […]

Take The Survey from the SQL Server Connection Team

Saw this today, a survey posted to the SQL Protocols blog by Principal Group Program Manager Raghu Ram. I took it (wouldn’t recommend it without trying it!) took about 2 minutes, and the most interesting question is at the end, prioritizing work, with options including a focus on TDS compression, supporting new authentication types, multi-core […]