Tag: Professional Development (Page 3 of 6)

SQL Saturday Recap: #477 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)

January 13, 2016 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #477 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)

This past Saturday marked a great landmark for Atlanta — the first “BI Edition” SQL Saturday, and, for many of us, our first SQL Saturday of 2016! Atlanta has been hosting a regular SQL Saturday event for many years now, always with tremendous attendance. Based on the amount of interest in the regular SQL Saturday (usually around May of each year), it was great to see a BI focused edition launched.

With the regular event in the Spring, having this event in January was a great way to space out the two Atlanta events probably about as equally as they could be. And, for a first event, it seemed to be a tremendous success with a registration wait list and around 300 in attendance.

The event was held at the local Microsoft facility in Alpharetta, GA, where the monthly Atlanta MDF user group meetings are held. All told, the facility was a pretty good choice of venue (and definitely a convenient location), but suffered from some overcrowding. The facility had about half the sessions in roughly classroom sized rooms and half the sessions in much smaller conference room sized rooms. While these smaller rooms made for an interesting and more intimate setting, they ultimately filled up very quickly.

Unlike many SQL Saturdays, the event kicked off with an opening keynote and presentation in the large room (multiple rooms joined together technically). I enjoy it when a SQL Saturday begins with some sort of all-attendee opening remarks, it provides nice symmetry to the event (which always has a final closing remarks session), so hopefully more events will adopt this.

Dandy Weyn presenting the opening remarks at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2016, BI Edition.

New Year, New Beginning

January 1, 2016 / jpries

2016 is here at last, and it’s already shaping up to be an exciting year. Most notably, after 12 years, I decided to put the Professional Development skills that I’d been honing over the past few years into practice and start the year off with a bang — by interviewing for and accepting a Business Intelligence position with another organization.

I’m not going to pretend it was easy, leaving a stable job with an amazing organization after so many years, but it was a necessary one. And, I won’t say that more than once, I didn’t ask myself if I was being crazy. Personality types such as my own value and prioritize security and stability, sometimes to our detriment, to where we find ourselves in situations which are so stable and comfortable that it becomes difficult to challenge ourselves and grow and easy to fall into a routine. But challenge is crucial to continue growing, learning, and advancing. I’ll dearly miss the people at my previous organization, but I look forward to the adventures ahead of me.

So, here’s to a great, and definitely interesting, 2016. My challenge to you for 2016 — if you find yourself too comfortable and stable, find a way to challenge yourself in some new way, whatever it is. Make a plan, get out there, and do it! And don’t forget to document it in your Professional Development Plan!

PASS Summit 2015 Recap — My Third Summit

November 5, 2015 / jpries

Now in my third year, I recently attended PASS Summit in Seattle, Washington. This was my second visit to Seattle for PASS Summit, with my first Summit experience in Charlotte, NC. Having experience my “first time in Seattle for Summit” last year, I had a pretty good idea of where things were and what things would be going on and when and for the most part, things followed the previous year’s pattern very closely.

I arrived in Seattle a few days early so I could work some sightseeing in. While it’s generally not a good idea to try to have a rental car during the conference, in the days leading up to the conference when you want to see a lot of places, it’s the way to go. I rented a car from the airport and made my way down to Portland for a couple of nights.

I spent my first two days of vacation, Saturday and Sunday doing some geocaching and exploring the Portland area. The weather was overcast but nice the first day and lots of rain the second day. I’d really wanted to see Mt. Hood, but unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate at all.

Mt. Rainier while driving down to Portland after arriving in Seattle

SQL Saturday Recap: #410 – Chattanooga, TN

June 29, 2015 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #410 – Chattanooga, TN

This past weekend, I had the privilege of volunteering to help Chattanooga, TN execute their first SQL Saturday — SQL Saturday 410! Being only about a two hour drive from where I live, I was very happy to see another nearby city launch a new SQL Saturday event. For a first-run event, the event went very smoothly and I witnessed no show-stopping glitches. While there were small things that could be improved here and there (there always are), I felt the event was executed very well and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. All told, there were about six full sponsor tables setup in the registration area and a couple of the typical raffle-only sponsors. I assisted with event photos and room proctoring. And, of course, Micron was present again with their always popular bacon-scented t-shirt!

Despite being a new event, the organizers managed to recruit a good number of speakers and managed to fill out 6 different tracks of 5 time slots. A great feat! I’ve seen longer running events with fewer sessions available. A good number of sessions helps to increase the diversity and ensures that there is “something for everybody.” The venue itself worked out great with ample parking, ample rooms, and ample space in rooms. Only the first session I attended was near capacity, which was great (since nobody wants to miss a session due to not enough seats).

All told, I had a great time at the first SQL Saturday Chattanooga and I felt the event was very well done and I look forward to future events from the Chattanooga crew!

Registration and sponsor area

SQL Saturday Recap: #392 – Atlanta, GA

May 19, 2015 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #392 – Atlanta, GA

This past Saturday a time-honored event was held in Alpharetta, GA. That tradition, straight out of past — or is it future? was SQL Saturday Atlanta. Called by some the “PASS Summit of the South,” SQL Saturday Atlanta was the 392nd event in the SQL Saturday series and continues the yearly streak in Atlanta since SQL Saturday #13 in 2009.

It seems each year, the stakes are raised higher and higher as far as size, quality, and theme — and this year was no exception. With this summer marking the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future, it seems appropriate that the event was called Back to SQL Saturday and given a full, over-the-top Back to the Future theme. But, before we talk about Saturday, we first have to travel back in time — to Friday…

SQL Saturday Recap: #391 – Jacksonville, FL

May 11, 2015 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #391 – Jacksonville, FL

Being only about a 5 hour drive away, when I saw the session schedule for SQL Saturday Jacksonville publish this year, I couldn’t resist signing up for a road trip down. A session list rich with professional development and data visualization topics, both of which I tend to really enjoy. So, on Friday, I hopped into the car and had a nice drive down to Jacksonville for SQL Saturday 391, and it didn’t disappoint!

As per usual, the event was very smoothly run. Check-in was quick and painless (thanks, SpeedPass), and the sponsor area was easy to navigate with many familiar faces. Always good to see repeat sponsors! With a jam packed day of sessions, it was time to get started.

The first session I attended for the day was Mike Davis’s (B | T) presentation on Handling Interview Puzzles. Being someone who conducts a fair number of interviews myself, I was interested in hearing some opinions on those strange and sometimes difficult puzzle questions sometimes asked in interviews. The session did not disappoint with a number of great examples, many of which has been used at some point by Google.

Mike Davis presenting “Interview Puzzles and How to Handle Them”

Career Goal Planning

March 31, 2015 / jpries

A big topic that’s been making the rounds lately personally, around the office, and on the Internet is career planning and career path planning. Do you do it? Do you wish you did it? How do you do it? Do you use any tools or methodologies to do it? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone that says that setting goals is a bad thing. Even harder would be to find someone that says tracking progress toward those goals is a bad thing.

One of the common ways to document these goals and track progress toward meeting them in the SQL Server world is with a tool called a Professional Development Plan. If you mention a Professional Development Plan in the SQL Server work, that brings up one name: Andy Warren. Andy has done numerous talks and presentations over the years to spread the word of the Professional Development Plan to the masses and I’ve become a big believer in the system. But are there any other systems out there?

In talking with a coworker outside of the SQL Server world not long ago, he mentioned something similar — a Personal Development Plan outlined in a PDF from a company named MindTools. After speaking with him about it, I thought to myself “this sure does sound familiar” so I went to the website and subscribed to their newsletter in order to download the free PDF outlining what a Personal Development Plan is and the various worksheets to create one. While the process was a little bit too structured for me, there were some elements of it which I really liked, such as the Skills Audit, which I plan to incorporate into my personal Professional Development Plan template at some point (and will be linked to a future post). As their plan is free for the price of providing them an email address, I highly recommend downloading it and checking it out for ideas.

In reading an unrelated blog post the other day, I saw mention of an “Epic Life Quest.” Epic Life Quest? What is that? As it turns out, an Epic Life Quest is just another way of documenting achievements. While most of the examples I saw seemed to be a mix of career and personal achievements, I suppose you could easily choose to do one or the other rather than a mix (though a mix does make sense as personal life heavily influences career and vice versa.) The idea is pretty simple — you document your achievements, but in a way that you make a little game out of it. In the examples of others trying this, they commonly use 5 as the magic number. For each 5 achievements, you go up a level. Pretty simple stuff. Here are a couple of good examples I saw of these Life Quests. [The original], [Brent Ozar], [Derik Hammer], [George Stocker], [Andrew Notarian].

Learning about Epic Life Quests (of Awesome) got me to thinking. Peanut butter is good. Chocolate is good. But, if you combine them, you get a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup — which is great! What would happen if you combined some of the ideas of a Professional Development Plan with some of the ideas of an Epic Life Quest? A Professional Development Plan brings goal setting to the table. Both the PDP and the Life Quest bring goal tracking (achievements) to the table. The Life Quest brings the game aspect or “leveling up” aspect. They seem to be pretty compatible ideas.

So, how to combine them? Well, that’s a good question. For now, I’m going to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup and I’ll leave the answer to a future post as I go to figure out that very thing. Stay tuned!

SQL Saturday Recap: #363 – Nashville, TN

January 19, 2015 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #363 – Nashville, TN

This past weekend, I made the trek to Nashville, TN to visit Lipscomb University for SQL Saturday #363: Nashville and it proved to be a fantastic event. It’d been a couple of years since I’d had a chance to visit Nashville for a SQL Saturday — my last was SQL Saturday #145 in 2012, so I was excited to return!

I arrived on Thursday evening to allow me time to attend a precon being presented by by Stacia Misner (B | T) and Joseph D’Antoni (B | T) — Finding Your Balance: BI in the Cloud, On Premises, or Both since the Cloud is already such a hot topic and most migration efforts typically begin with some form of hybrid effort. It doesn’t hurt that they wrote Microsoft’s official white paper on the topic, either.

The precon was given at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee which I thought was a pretty interesting venue. At first, when I saw that listed on the event page, I figured that had to be a mistake. But sure enough, that’s exactly where it was. While the Food Bank is a large warehouse full of food, they also have conference rooms on the second floor where events such as this can take place. All in all, it turned out to be a great venue — certainly better than the hotel meeting room venues I’ve been in.

Stacia Misner and Joseph D’Antoni presenting Finding Your Balance: BI in the Cloud, On Premises, or Both

Happy New Year 2015!

January 13, 2015 / jpries

Happy New Year 2015!

Well, technically, we’re about two weeks into the new year at this point, but it’s still January so this counts, right? 2014 was a great and productive year. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but I learned a ton of new skills, updated some others, attended a number of user groups, SQL Saturdays, and PASS Summit 2014, and made a lot of progress on the blog.

I’ve started my Professional Development Plan for 2015 — have you? I’m still working on filling out all of my goals for 2015, but a few of them include: attending 4 SQL Saturday events, attending PASS Summit 2015, updating my online presence (the blog revamp), and documenting a number of the development-oriented skills I started picking up near the end of 2014. I’ve definitely found the PDP a useful exercise in setting goals and tracking progress as the year progresses and highly recommend it if you haven’t started one yet.

Well, it’s time to get started…Here’s looking to another great year!

VMware Introduces Expirations to VCP Certifications

November 17, 2014 / jpries

VMware Introduces Expirations to VCP Certifications

Earlier this year, VMware put into effect an expiration / re-certification policy.

This means that effective March 10, 2014, most VMware exams now have an expiration date attached to them requiring re-certification every 2 years (previously certifications were similar to Microsoft in that they were good for the life of the product)

Re-certification is similar to how Cisco performs re-certification in that a credential holder must meet the requirements for and pass any current VCP or VCAP exam. This then resets the expiration date clock.

I’m not sure how I feel about this — I definitely see the value in pruning out individuals who don’t maintain their skills over the years, but at the same time, its yet another thing that requires maintenance. At some point, it just becomes too much expense and work and you let it drop off. Should VMware renewals be exam based? Or should they be CPE-credit based like the CISSP (in which you perform ongoing education on your own and document it within the portal)?

Fortunately, to ease the transition onto the renewal treadmill, VMware is offering a one-time delta exam to current VCP-DCV (data center virtualization) holders in the form of a “delta” exam. The delta exam is a shortened version of the VCP exam which only covers recent changes to the platform. In addition to being shorter, it can be taken online.

The window for the delta exam expires very soon — November 30, 2014. So, if you’re a current VMware VCP-DCV and want to renew via a shorter and cheaper exam online, act now! See here for more information on the delta exam and here for a FAQ from VMware regarding the new re-certification policy.

I’ll be working hard over the next few days to study to squeak my delta re-certification in before the deadline. Good luck!