I’m a couple of days late in posting this, but I wanted to write this while it was still fresh in my mind.
This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of speaking at SQL Saturday NYC. This is one of my favorite events to attend; indeed, SQL Saturday in New York City was the first one I ever attended way back in 2010, and before I became a presenter, it was the only SQL Saturday that I attended. I try to submit to this event every time it comes up on the calendar, and even if I’m not selected to speak, I make it a point to go to this event as an attendee.
It was great to see #SQLFamily friends that I don’t often see, including Ed Pollack (well, he’s local to me, so I see him often, anyway), Deborah Melkin, Jean Joseph, Paresh Motiwala, John Miner, Slava Murygin, Sebastian Meine, Reid Havens, Thomas Grohser, Taiob Ali, Andy Yun, George Walters, and others whom I’ve probably forgotten to mention (apologies if I missed you).
I gave two presentations on Saturday. One was my presentation about speaking the language of technology to non-technologists. It was a decent audience — there were about seven or eight people in the room, not including myself — and they seemed to be pretty well engaged. I haven’t seen any of the session evaluations yet, but the feedback I got was positive.
I also gave my presentation about documentation in disaster recovery. I thought it was a good presentation (more on that in a moment), but only one person showed up for it. This breaks my previous record for my smallest audience for a presentation where people actually attended; the previous record was two. No matter; I still did my presentation (you still have to put on a good performance no matter how small your audience is), and she told me that she enjoyed it!
Both of these presentations were newer versions of ones that I’ve had for several years (in fact, the technology language presentation was the first one I ever did way back in 2015). I had made it a point to go through my presentation slides and revamp them. The disaster documents one had become someone stale, so I had to do a renovation project on that one, and I liked the end result. A lot has happened since 2001 (for those not in the know, I worked for a company that had an office in the World Trade Center on 9/11; this presentation is based on that fateful day), and a lot of technology that exists now didn’t exist when 9/11 happened. I made it a point to include sections on what has changed since 2001. Had these technologies been around back then, some of the documentation that I refer to in my presentation likely would not have existed (for example, there is no need for paper phone lists now that we all have contact lists on our phones). These updates changed some of the takeaways for my presentation, and in my opinion, I think it made for a better presentation. This had been one of my least favorite presentations; now I look forward to the next time I get to present it.
The after-party was held nearby at the Hunt & Fish Club, where we met for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Networking is a huge part of any SQL Saturday — it isn’t all about the presentations — so any opportunity to get together with old friends and make new ones is always welcome! The after-party — whenever they have one (not all SQL Saturdays do) — is also a good opportunity to let off some steam after a long and tiring — but fun — event!
There was a piano just outside the room, and of course, any time I see a piano, I have to try it out! So I spent some time playing and entertaining the attendees!
I had a couple of interesting conversations with two different young people that day. The first happened immediately after the end-of-day raffle drawings. One of the attendees whom I connected with earlier in the day introduced me to a young college student who proceeded to ask me questions, starting with “what technology do you think is trending and I should focus on?” I told her that this was nearly an impossible question to answer (for reasons that I won’t get into now — that’s another ‘blog article for another time). Long story short: unless you’re an expert prognosticator (which I am not), you can’t really predict what the next big thing is (for what it’s worth, I did mention ChatGPT). Several years ago, R was supposed to be the next big thing in data science, but I hardly ever hear it mentioned now. The conversation ended up getting pretty deep, and it could’ve gone for hours; the only reason it didn’t was that they were closing the building, and we were kicked out.
The second deep conversation did not happen at SQL Saturday; it happened when I returned to my AirBnB that evening. The host introduced me to one of the other guests. It turned out that he was visiting from the west coast and was considering moving to the NY Metro Area. We got into a similar deep conversation, and we spoke until well after midnight. It was a good talk, and we connected over LinkedIn so that we could continue the discussion.
Overall, it was another great event, as always! I look forward to the next SQL Saturday in NYC (or any SQL Saturday, for that matter; as of right now, the next one I attend will likely be Boston in October).
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