In this month’s Road to PASS series, I’m challenging you to submit an abstract for the PASS Summit. Week 1 challenged you to write a few pain points you’ve solved this year, week 2’s homework was to write the session’s recap slide, and week 3 had you writing the abstract’s technical details.
Now, I need to get feedback on my abstracts – so I posted them on GroupBy:
- Getting Better Query Plans by Improving SQL’s Estimates
- How Often Should You Run Backups and CHECKDB?
- What to Do When SQL Server is Unusually Slow
Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I tweaked the titles on a couple of ’em. I’ve noticed that if I walk away from an abstract for a week, do my (fake) day job and live my life, and then come back, I have an easier time with themes and titles. I wanna get the technical bones out first, make sure I’m totally happy with that, and I can always add in more catchy stuff later.
You’ll also notice that I don’t have much catchy or upbeat language in there yet. I’m still letting the technical parts of the material settle in. Did I hit the right points? Is there anything I’m missing that I should cover? Is there anything I can take out so that I can do better justice to less material?
I’ll tweet links to those posts a couple/few times through the week and stay on top of the comments that come in. It’s natural to feel like you need to defend the material – after all, it’s your newborn – but take comments seriously. It’s so much better to get constructive criticism BEFORE you submit to PASS rather than have someone explain to you later, “Here’s why it never could have made the cut.”
One of my favorite ways to get feedback from strangers is the #PresentingOrSpeaking channel of the SQL Server community Slack. In there, a bunch of us who present regularly can bounce ideas off each other. You can also email folks you know, but the problem there might be their own schedules – usually when you’re under the gun to get your sessions in, so are the folks you know. The Slack channel helps you grab ideas from whoever happens to be available at the moment.
