SQLSaturday Tampa 2020 (On Leap Day!)

Feb 29, 2020 is the date for SQLSaturday Tampa, number 951. The call for speakers is open through January 10th, so you don’t have much time to get something submitted! I’ve submitted a couple of sessions already and may also be on a panel that Dale and team are working on.

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – The Five Hats

I want to wrap up the notes on SQLSaturday by writing about my approach to managing events that I’ve evolved at SQLSaturday but definitely applies to most events and perhaps to many things beyond that. I don’t that it’s original, when I searched I found it be somewhat similar to the six thinking hats, but […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Large Printed Schedules

One of the things we’ve done most years in Orlando is to print poster sized schedules. This started out as a supplement to giving everyone a printed schedule and soon replaced it. Posting a handful of these is easy and when the schedule changes, you just send someone with a Sharpie to update them. As […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Owning Stuff

One of the choices you make as an organizer is whether to buy anything that you want use or give away at the end of the event. Owning nothing means nothing to store or hand over to the next organizer, no guessing whether it’s worth spending money this year to save money or make things […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Cupcakes & Ice Cream

For the past few years we’ve had a a local sponsor provide cupcakes as the “sweet treat”. We started with mid afternoon but found it worked well if we did right before the end of day raffle gathering. It’s a chance for a bit of networking and it’s a buffer to give attendees something to […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Coffee

I like to say that the goal for any event is to meet the expectations of attendees. The trick is to set the expectations because if you don’t, they will set their own! That’s the case with coffee. It’s not required to have coffee, but if you’re not providing that best to message it loud […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – SpeedPASS

This year for the first time in a long time we pre-printed the SpeedPASS for all attendees and we did it on perforated paper. This was really all about logistics, it’s a pain to have to provide a printer, paper, scisssors, and someone to staff the table for what feels like the penalty line of […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Post Event Speaker Survey

One of the follow up items I have from the event was to poll speakers on what hotel they used (see my previous post). In jotting down some notes about other possible questions it occurred to me that this is such a missed opportunity for PASS. You’ve got speakers who go to a lot of […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – Designated Hotel

Almost every year we select an “official” hotel for the event. For those coming in who don’t know the area it’s a way to avoid figuring out what is a good hotel in a convenient place and it’s a chance for speakers to hang out with other speakers outside of the event and related parties. […]

SQLSaturday Orlando Notes – 45 Minute Sessions

Earlier this Brent ran a poll about the preferred session length and more than 50% liked the idea of 45 minute sessions. Interesting, the idea of trying to fit more into a single day without making it longer, so I put it on the list. For SQLSaturday Orlando this year (2019) we set the morning […]