About a month ago when I announced my plans to build GroupBy.org, I wrote: And I bet I can do this whole thing for free, without charging attendees or speakers. Although I’m not betting too much – I’m a huge believer in the Lean Methodology, which means you risk as…
Richie and I are at the AWS re:Invent conference because: A good number of our customers run SQL Server on Amazon Web Services We use AWS ourselves (our first project, PasteThePlan, was built on AWS because we wanted to keep costs low) Clients and friends kept telling me how awesome the conference was We’re recruiting clients (this…
Last month I announced my next crazy idea, a free online conference, and then I asked for your help picking the logo. Now it’s time to take the wrapping off. The first GroupBy Conference is now open for session submissions! November 20-Dec 15 – Open call for abstracts, and readers can…
After conference attendee feedback comes in, I like to blog about it to talk about what worked and what didn’t. This year, I think things worked fantastically overall. Intro to Internals: How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine Abstract: When you pass in a query, how does SQL Server…
This year at the PASS Summit, I submitted one of my favorite abstracts, How to Think Like the Engine. It’s an introduction to SQL Server internals. I was really excited when the session was accepted – I love this presentation, and I figured the attendees would love it too. When the…
Every presentation has three parts: The topic you want to cover The material you write to cover the topic The way you deliver the material After picking your topic, that’s where writer’s block comes in. You stare at the blank presentation deck going, “How on earth should I tell this…
The free online database conference I wrote about two weeks ago now has a name: Group By. Now, we need a logo. I ran a 99designs contest, and I’ve narrowed it down to 5 choices. Don’t worry about the font or the color – we can swap those out pretty…
Last week at the PASS Summit, I presented a half-day session: The 500-Level Guide to Career Internals. I used a cool new trick to accept private/silent questions live via the web, but…due to a technical difficulty <cough>I’m an idiot</cough>, I didn’t see the questions on my iPad. So here they are,…
I wanna build something awesome where: Speakers submit session abstracts publicly online Vendors can be speakers, too (anybody can submit a talk on anything – your own open source project, paid project, Microsoft can apply, hardware vendors, etc) Readers can leave comments on the abstracts to help the author clarify and improve them Everybody…
Alex Yates wrote a very interesting post called 5 bold changes to support the scale problem of SQL Saturdays (and other data platform conferences.) The short story: Cut costs (and no free lunches) Attract new sponsors Attract new attendees Get more diversified attendees Attendees have a duty to talk to sponsors…