I am thrilled, nervous, overwhelmed, humbled, grateful, but mostly LUCKY.
I’ve been involved with the Pass community since 2014. In 2017, I began presenting at local user groups and SQL Saturdays. So far I think I’ve only done three SQL Saturdays and two local user groups.
I blog, but only barely.
I write stuff on Medium occasionally, but that’s more about life than tech.
I want to do more, but life (mainly my health) gets in the way. It’s a struggle to find the energy to get out of bed every day, manage to be engaged and productive at work, and raise my four children (18,16,13, and 8 years old) with my husband who is battling his own health issues. The last year and a half has been terribly rough. I went from training to compete in a fitness competition to getting several scans of my brain seemingly overnight.
Things are getting better though! I’ve been feeling much better lately and my job is going very well. I found out earlier this week that I’d be presenting at Summit. Yes, it’s last minute. I was tempted to turn it down, but I know that one month is plenty of time to prepare without OVER preparing.
How did I get so lucky? I am sure there are speakers out there who have done much more than I have in the Pass community that are scratching their heads about my selection, even if it was clearly last minute and due to spaces needing to be filled. So I am going to tell you!
I started attending Summit in 2014. 2014 through 2016 I learned a great deal. I took several sessions on T-SQL topics because I’m mainly a database developer. I was briefly a DBA, so I’ve also taken some sessions on random DBA topics just so I could be more knowledgeable. Reporting, BI, and ETL have all come up through my career, but they were never the constant. T-SQL was. For the first few years, the T-SQL coverage at Summit was FANTASTIC.
Somewhere around 2016 or 2017, the T-SQL coverage at Summit dropped significantly. Last year (2017) I submitted a session called SHARPen Your BILMScript. I had recently begun working with BIML and I’d been trying to work with C# for years. I really enjoyed the subject so I submitted my session. Of course it wasn’t selected. BIML is a niche topic, I don’t work for Varigence, and I don’t have my name on any BIML technical books. I didn’t submit any T-SQL sessions that year because usually there is an abundance of T-SQL sessions at Summit, and they’re done by well known speakers like Aaron Bertrand. I can’t compete with that!
At Pass Summit 2017 there were barely any sessions on T-SQL. While I admit there was probably more than I found when I searched for them, from my perspective there was not enough. For 2018, I decided to submit two T-SQL sessions. The call for speakers came and the selections were made, but I was not chosen.
At some point between then and now I decided that I would start making SQL videos and blogging more (inspired by Bert Wagner I suppose). I’ve made one video so far. Shortly after I posted that video on YouTube, I was contacted by Pass and asked if I could present my Behold The Power of Dynamic SQL session. Whoa.
YES!!! Of course I will present!
I know I must’ve been chosen because Pass had a spot open and realized that their T-SQL content was lacking, and I happened to have two sessions covering that area. I saw the hole from prior years and I tried to fill it. I was in the right place at the right time.
Like I said before, I was LUCKY.
See you at Summit
PS. I have a degree to teach. I was going to teach math to high school students, but life is funny and I ended up becoming a software engineer instead. It’s time I combine my experience with my education and share what I’ve learned the last 12 years.