I’ve done a lousy job of encapsulating my thoughts about the Professional Association for SQL Server’s Summits for the last few years, but here’s a quick thought about one of the reasons I love this conference: the stretch.
What do I mean by stretch? It’s the exposure to new ideas, new concepts, things I may never use. It’s easy for technical people to get obsessed about our struggles of the day; we invest a lot of mental energy into figuring out problems that require immediate solutions, so we often pick educational sessions that fit into our current solution requirements (i.e. I’m having issues with ETL, so let me go pick up a few sessions on BIML). That’s satisfying, but it’s not a stretch.
The stretch is thinking about issues and problems which I don’t see ahead. It’s the creative detours, the opportunities to explore ideas that are just, well, fun to think about. There’s two benefits to this; first, by allowing the mind to wander, it actually gives me a chance to have an inspirational moment about my current issues (the “aha” moment). Second, by learning a little bit about something foreign to me, it gives me an advantage if the situation ever arises that I may need to know something about that topic (i.e. we don’t use Azure now, but we might in the future).
What’s your stretch at Summit? I’m going to squeeze in a class on R, and maybe some USQL.
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