Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up. Level 8’s 5 new achievements: Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it…
On a recent episode of Adam Savage’s Still Untitled podcast, he talked about what it was like to work at ILM: “Back when I was working at Industrial Light & Magic, I got in at the end of the wire at the end of an era and got to work…
I’m a huge fan of cruise vacations. They have a bad reputation for feeling like cattle crammed into a trailer, but that’s only true if you set your vacation up that way. I find it to be a really relaxing and quiet solo experience, and here’s how I do it….
Today, PASS announced the lineup for the 2016 Summit. I like sharing the sessions I submitted, and the feedback my abstracts got, because it gives you a view inside what it’s like to be a speaker. Before I share this, a word of thanks to the PASS Program Committee. Allen…
Yesterday, we announced that we open-sourced a bunch of our SQL Server tools. I say “yesterday,” but I’m writing this weeks in advance because a lot of thought and planning went into this. Here, I’m going to give you the behind-the-scenes story as a small business guy. sp-Blitz and friends were…
I’ve always wanted to go to Israel, and I never quite knew why. Earlier this year, I made it. I flew over to Vienna first for SQLSaturday Vienna and had an absolutely wonderful time. I’d heard Austria was charmingly beautiful, and it surpassed expectations. The museums are great, quality of life is clearly…
One of the things I looked forward to the most about my Jerusalem visit was seeing the Immovable Ladder in person. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is home to many things that are sacred to many different religions. This isn’t a church like you or I usually think of churches…
I presented a webcast this week for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter covering how to get into consulting or contracting. You can watch it now on YouTube: If you like that session, you’ll probably enjoy my past blog posts on consulting & contracting.
tl;dr – get a $20 Amazon IoT button, hook it up to this open source iot-button-ec2-controller Lambda action, and turn on/off groups of tagged EC2 VMs. What Is the Amazon Dash/IoT Button? I’m a fan of Amazon’s Dash buttons – little $5 buttons that stick around the house next to stuff…
There’s a lot of talk going around about what’s good for PASS Summit attendees. I don’t like to guess what they like – instead, I like looking at attendee feedback to see which sessions were voted highest. As an example, let’s look at the Best of Summit 2014 list. Should Speakers Be Able…