Conferences

Here’s a first for me; I’m live-blogging from a keynote.  Diving straight into it, so please excuse the sparseness of the notes.

Robert Wahbe trying to lay out the vision for the cloud from Microsoft; trying to establish that the future is the cloud.  I hate buzzwords, but I think the point of the metaphor is to draw together private vs public application development.  If you build your internal private apps as a private cloud, it should be easy to move to a pubic distributed architecture.

Factors driving the move to the cloud:

• Extension of existing applications
• large data sets
• high perf computing
• events
• marketing campaigns (high spike traffic)

Talk about Travelocity’s use of the public cloud.  Focus on scalability, and new products to handle the traffic.  Capacity on demand is the buzzword that they use, and I wish I had a server room like they just showed. 

How easy is it to do this is the question they raise?  I’m still a skeptic.  Biggest problem is not a greenfield scenario, but migration from an existing infrastructure.  Let’s see if demo guy (I missed his name) can convince me. 

Ooh, a Contoso application; I’ve been stuck on AdventureWorks for too long.  Somebody bring back Northwinds.

Ooh, we all need AUTOMATION!  AUTOMATION is what we need! Really?

OK, the VMM service deployment looks cool.  

OK, ADHD just kicked in, and I’ve heard blah, blah, blah for the last couple of minutes.  Apparently, Systems Center will let you do all kinds of one-button stuff.    Now, can I get management to convert from an app that had no clue about that 10 years ago but is still critical to my business?

Now, SQL, and Sharepoint with Amir Netz.  Project Crescent looks interesting. Wow, I like the animation.  I think there will be a lot of future in Management of Business Analysts.  Too much information can cripple a company just as bad as too little; there’s going to have be some training in “what are good questions to ask?”  We’ve finally got the tools to tell us “42”, but do we understand our businesses well enough to understand how we got there?

Average number of devices is 4, so a lot of us are now carrying 6 or 8.  I have two on me right now (work lappy and iPhone), and two at home.  I feel geek-deprived.   Must buy more gear.

Windows Phone 7 interface is nice, but I thin Microsoft has a long way to go to win the smartphone wars.  I really don’t want to go back to carrying multiple devices (smartphone for personal, and smartphone for work).   

Just realized that my butt is starting to hurt; that’s a good indicator that a keynote is running long.  Time for the mid-keynote stretch. 

I’m wondering how many butterflies the Kinect guy has right now; the first few gestures slipped a little.

Second half of the keynote?  Yeesh….  I hope there’s a power plug in the building somewhere.

I chuckled a little when the guy said that “if you’re an ASP.NET developer, you can write Sharepoint Applications.”  I think of all of the swearing that my ASP.NET developer buddies do when you mention Sharepoint…

OK, I’ve done as much as I can for now; I’ll try to blog more today around the sessions. 

I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter; I especially don’t like to walk away from something I enjoy doing.  However, I’ve recently had to re-evaluate my workload (both personal and professional), and I realized that something had to give.  For me, that something was the Atlanta SQLSaturday 2011.

Now, before you panic, the project is still continuing without me; there’s still a team working very diligently to pull this together.  I’m just no longer working on it.

My reasons for stepping away were many:

• My personal life is getting very complicated. I’m getting married this summer, and there’s a lot of details left to work out.  On top of that, I have two wonderful kids from my first marriage.  My family deserves no less than my best, and that means I need to put them first.
• Volunteer work should be fun work.  If you’re leaving a volunteer project more stressed than when you went in, something’s not right.  In my case, I was too invested in the SQLSaturday project to really allow it to grow; I have certain ideas about what should be done, and it’s time to let others take it in a different direction. 
• Volunteer work should enhance your professional and personal skills.  In my case, I’ve let some of my technical goals slip because I’m investing too much time in volunteering.  I need to finish my technical certifications, for example.
• There’s other tasks to be done in the Atlanta SQL Server community.  I’ve spent the last few years working with SQLSaturday and AtlantaMDF; one of our original goals for SQLSaturday was to help feed the user group, and to be honest, that hasn’t happened.  Stepping back and looking objectively at the situation has made me realize that there’s some foundational work that needs to be done in the user group in order for it to truly benefit from community outreaches like SQLSaturday.

All of that being said, I’m still going to be doing volunteer work; I just need to make smarter investments of my time.  One of the harder lessons in life is knowing when to walk away from something in order to let it (and yourself) flourish.

Last night a small group of us (Aaron Nelson, Audrey Hammonds, Julie Smith, Tim Radney, and me) met to discuss this year’s upcoming SQL Saturday; our goal is to make it a bigger event than last year, but still try to keep it very community-centric.  Here’s a couple of bullet points that I can tease you with now:

• We’re still looking for a venue, but our hope is to have at least 7 tracks of content.  We know that we’re going to push for attendee numbers between 300 & 450 (limited seating in the Atlanta area).
• Our tentative date is September 24; that’s right before PASS Summit.
• We’re playing around with the idea of a pre-con on the Friday before.  Deep-dive for a low-cost.
• The event shirts WILL kick a$$.
• We’re trying to figure out how to work with sponsors to make sure that they get a lot of value out of this; after all, they’re footing the bill, and we want to make sure they leave our event satisfied with the exposure they get.
• If we can swing it, we’re thinking about one MAC-DADDY prize for attendees.  

A lot depends on finding the right location; good location = more attendee seating = more sponsor funds. Hopefully, we can secure something in the next week or so.

Keep you posted as things develop.

I just submitted a couple of sessions to SQL Saturday #70; I feel like I’ve been way off my game in terms of service to the community lately, so hopefully this will provide me a bit of a kick-start.  Even if I don’t get accepted (the list is growing longer each day), it’s at least a reminder that I need to get back out there and present.

Here’s the links to the sessions, btw:

Dirt, Spit, and Happy FLWOR- Hands on with XQuery

From DBA to Data Architect: Changing Your Game

Just got word that my XML session was moved from an alternate topic to a full-fledged presentation.   The only problem?  I already submitted a trimmed down version as a Chalk Talk, and it got accepted.  Soooooo… here’s my plan:  I’ve got the weekend to beef up the XML presentation and add some spiffy new material to it.  It’s gonna be a busy couple of days.

BTW, I’ve enjoyed walking around Seattle the last couple of days; it’s a beautiful city.  Can’t wait until the conference starts and I get to see some old friends and learn some new stuff.