There’s a kind of empathy you get after you’ve walked the cliche’d mile in someone’s shoes. After you work fast food, you know what it’s like. so you don’ make a huge mess on your tray, you throw away your trash, you don’t leave your straw wrapper on the counter. Once you work groceries, you tell someone if your kid makes a mess, and you put your cart back in the carrel, instead of leaving it at the intersection of four parking spaces.
A lot of us DBAs never work true full-cycle application development, and most certainly not all the end user positions of the specific show we’re servicing. I was a DBA for a pharmaceuticals company, but I was never a pharm sales rep, or nurse, or doctor. I was a DBA for a security company, but I was never a customer service rep, or an installer, or a alarm systems monitor.
The point is, we have to work at understanding what the users and devs need out of a database, because the position of DBA doesn’t come with that “other side” experinece built in. The next best thing is to get exposure to as many people as possible that your database services. Then maybe you’ll start putting the lid back down after you pee.
Our last Follow Friday blogwas two weeks ago, for missLori Edwards. For those of you not on Twitter, we tweety-folk have little rituals and understandings among ourselves. One age-old tradition dating back to the time of our forefathers (so, sometime in 2009) is Follow Friday, marked with the hashtag #FF. Just for funsies, I make our own #FF here in blogland, too. And this is officially my first #FF about a non-female of the species, so I’m going to say “dude” a lot, and high-five you. *smack*
One Hardworkin’ Dude…
Tim Mitchell was born on February 12, 1809, to Thomas Mitchell and Nancy Forks, two farmers, in a one-room log cabin on the 348-acre Sinking Spring Farm, in southeast Hardin County, Kentucky, making him the first SQL Server DBA born in the west. Nono, wait, that’s Lincoln. Let me start again.
Today Tim has earned my #FF, for being one hell of a cool, smart, and hardworking dude. I’ve been workin with him on SQL Saturday #35 Dallas for the last sixteen years or so (or was it six months?), and I was always impressed. But today he stood out in a longish, well-spoken email to the NTSSUG listserve, gently telling people to lay off the newbies. This caught my eye:
I’m a member of a lot of technical distribution groups. Some of these are general groups on Yahoo Groups, others are more specialized, and many are product agnostic (such as one named SQL Queries No Code). I also subscribe to a few other local lists similar to ours, but in other metro areas. Through these groups, I get to interact with a lot of different folks – some more different than others 🙂 What I’ve found is that the email discussions on local user group distribution lists tend to be far more responsible and polite than the larger nongeographic lists. Specific to this discussion, although I must confess some bias, I’ve never found a public email distribution group that is as well behaved or useful as the NTSSUG group.
Crapmonkeys! I know a bunch of other stuff Tim does, and he’s on all those groups too?? Tim’s a Dad, a SQL Server developer/architect/MVP, a BI guy (that’s right, he’s “Business Intelligence-curious”), a speaker, a PASS volunteer, a NTSSUG board member, SQL Saturday planner, and a couple dozen other things…he’s the Ryan Seacrest of the SQL community!*
Duuuude, Check it Out
Tim’s all over the place online (in addition to the distribution groups listed above):
I’m not the only one who’s noticed that Tim’s a cool dude: here’s Lee Everest’s blog congratulating Tim for his MVP. I’m sure I’ve missed a few things, so definitely fill in the blanks in the comments below.
Way to go, mister “I do everything and still have time for a beer with the guys”…we salute you.
He likes to drink it!
Happy Days,
Jen McCown
http://www.MidnightDBA.com
*My other option was “he’s got more irons in the fire than an overcaffinated blacksmith!”, but I like the Ryan Seacrest thing better.
I have blogged before about the feeling of accomplishment I get from completing an episode of the MidnightDBA blogcast, because it’s mine start to finish. Once the file is up and the XML feed is updated, I check the page to be sure it works properly, and I feel GOOD. I made something. I did something cool, and it’s out there for whoever wants it.
Saturday, May 22, I felt that I-made-it feeling, but it was x100, because WE MADE IT, and it was big. We made a SQL Saturday, and it was full of nothing but smooth, rich #awesomesauce.
The Planners
Pre-SQLSat35 NTSSUG Meeting: David Stein, Tim Mitchell, Brad McGehee, Sean McCown, Sri Sridharan
Each one of us covered a critical role – some more than just one role – and each one played their part well. Side note: I was honestly shocked to look back and see how little conflict we had within the group – planning by committee always gets ugly at some point, but we seemed to have none of that.
The Planning
We took all the advice we could get, starting with the officialSQLSaturday.comguidelines, and including any lessons learned and wrapup blogs from other SQL Saturdays. One early article that was very helpful was Patrick LeBlanc’sTop 10 SQL Saturday Coordination Tips.
Early considerations included date (avoiding conflicts with other nearby events, holidays, and the Superbowl) and venue. Once we had the venue nailed down, we jumped on the sponsor plan. My main job was the sponsorship doc and getting sponsors. I modeled our sponsor plan off of a couple of other SQL Saturdays’, and then I started seeking out sponsors. We had a good combination of sponsors from established lists (like PASS), local companies, referrals from group members and community folk, and out-of-the-b0x companies. Paciugo gelato was a sponsor because of the great discount! You ask for it, you got it…
After we set the event date in stone, we opened the call for speakers. And talked to hotels and party venues. And looked into event flyers and signage and websites and catering and sponsor swag and bags and attendee registration and attendee gifts and speaker shirts and sessions and agenda planning and how to handle checkin and evaluations and how to conduct the raffle and and and and….how did we get this all done, again? Oh yeah, with a LOT of time, several dozen calls and several hundred emails, and the help and goodwill of a LOT of people who asked for nothing in return.
We made this.
The Day Of
Vendor area during the morning checkin
The week before SQL Saturday 35 was insane for me and Sean. We closed on a house, moved, worked, took care of kids, took care of final event prep, prepared our own sessions, prepared for the webcast, all while working. And my Mom, my #1 babysitter was out of town. And my backup babysitter had a family tragedy on Friday afternoon. THIS is what I call a “center of the universe” week, where every single thing comes together in one tiny singularity and sucks everything into itself. It still managed to be a pretty good week.
The morning of SQL Saturday, I arrived with children in tow, and found that Sri’s wife had HER children in tow. This was awesome, as they got to play together as I watched and monitored the first hour of the event. Through the kindness of loved ones, my little’uns had places to go, and I checked in on operations and then got ready for my session. It was an 11am Code Sins session that was well attended, and overall went very well. I got some really good feedback from attendees, gave away some swag, and a good time was had by all.
DBAs@Midnight lunch webshow - Thanks @SQLAJ for pic!
Immediately after was lunch. Each of the big vendors was conducting a lunch presentation in a room, and there was a nice room left over for our big event-within-an-event: Sean and I filmed an episode of our DBAs at Midnight webshow at SQL Saturday 35! Thepreview’s up on youtube, and the show itself will be onwww.MidnightDBA.comnext week. We had a LOT of fun during this, our very first ever live webshow, and we got a lot of good feedback, again.
Second only to that SQL Saturday feeling of We Made This, is the feeling we got throughout the day at the event as people talked to us, commented on the webshow, talked about the videos, and said how much we helped them. One guy actually told Sean, referring to a recent how-to video, “Man, you saved my LIFE.”
You guys are reading, and telling us what you like and what you don’t. We put ourselves out there, we put a lot of work into the site, and it’s helping people. That’s why we do all this, all joking aside. We want to help, and so many people said thank you. We’ve got the major warm fuzzies because of it, so THANK YOU to everyone who came up to say hi, who talked to us like we’re lifelong friends (because you know us through the show), who gave us stories about how we’ve helped, who said you enjoy the web show.
To Be Continued…
This is already long, and I’ve got to get back to work, so I’ll make this a two parter. In the next episode, lunch, gelato, sessions, feedback, after party, and HUMONGUS WARM FUZZIES ALL ROUND!
