A few weeks ago, I was at the Small Data SF 2025 Conference in San Francisco. I attended the inaugural event last year and decided to go back again. It’s a great chance to hear people thinking about data and its impact on the world in a different way, recognizing that building lager and larger systems isn’t always possible. Or a good idea. We might find that smaller systems fit well, especially smaller datasets, which can both serve our purposes and create agility. The manifesto of the conference says that “We champion the power of Small Data and smart AI, believing that less is truly more.” There’s a bit more, but that’s the idea.
The format for the conference is a little different, with 3-5 talks in a row, all on one stage, each about 25 minutes long. These are talks with or without slides, but no live demos, just speaking and expressing a point of view. What I found fun was that each person picked their own music to play as they walked onto stage (or ran/danced in the case of Glauber from Turso). It was a bit of fun, with the DJ letting the music play as the person made their way to the front and were welcomed by the audience. I heard rock, metal, hip hop, and more.
It’s Friday during the week of the PASS Data Community Summit, and I had the chance to deliver part of the keynote on Wednesday. I’ve done this before, and no one has every asked me if I wanted a pick a piece of music, but it got me thinking. What would I pick?
For a fun Friday during the holiday season, think about if you were going to give a presentation. Maybe to your team, maybe other groups in the company, or (for some of you) on a conference stage. What music would you choose to accompany your walk into the bright lights? Imagine you get between 10 and 30 seconds.
Have some fun, and remember this is a professional setting. My first thought was something from the Notorious BIG, but I realized I’d have to walk fast as most of his lyrics wouldn’t be appropriate. I’m not sure, but I lean towards one of these: one, two, three, or four.
Steve Jones
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Steve – Not gonna lie, your bein a Notorious BIG fan is something I DID NOT SEE coming! Your post eads to me like as if you had a great;/fun time as this event. Personally I feel round table discussions are the best method for discussing current issues. I know their valuable and work b/c the software vendor who’s Property Mgt software we currently use, dripped their round table discussions from their annual user conference and I know why. I use to work for this software vendor so I have been on both sides of this; the customer and the vendor. I have taught award winning cases/sessions for this companies annual user conference and created multi-day custom report training classes so I have some experience with this on both sides. The problem with round tables is that the vendor doesn’t have control over the discussion and so clients will bring up the worst of the worst, those things the vendor wants clients to just forget about or at least not discuss.Round Table discussion empower the users/customer and so they end up being wiped away . Its not always every where but it does seem to be a favored method for getting annoying clients to shut up at these vents. This software vendor is nothing like you guys at Red Gate which I would LOVE if they were. They grew to big to fast and so small problems have now become exponentially more problematic.
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Love Biggie.
I have come to enjoy round tables, at events or with customers. Happy to hear complaints. To me these are opportunities if you want to be a good partner with your customer
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Its just my speculation but since I have worked both sides of this (as a former employee and not a customer) I have a little more knowledge about this than the avg customer and I believe they dropped the round tables to limit negative comments about the product or any of its features. They replaced these round tables with traditional speech sessions; we’re an expert speaks on the topic and usually shows some slides and may take Q’s at the end. And when the end comes and the Q’s start they end up being able to speak to only a couple of customers before their out of time and must move on to the next session their instructing. I was able to get called on first when the Q’s art began and the response to my questions was “how about we take this offline”. They did that because they did not want to answer the question in front of other customers.
The vendor recently switched frameworks, from using .net to working with Agular and there’s ben a not insignificant number of challenges b/c Angular is not capable (or at least they don;t know how to do it) of doing a lot of what could be done with the aspx based version of the software. As a customer we’ve have to accept a lot of set backs and less effective features while they go thru X number of major revisions before they can get the thing right. This exact same thing happened about 18 years ago when they switched for a desktop 32 bit (.net ) version of the product to a web based one running on asp and then later aspx. It took close to 5 years form the first public release to a version that was fully functional and I fear that is repeating but worse. This supposedly new and improved version of the product is a number of steps backwards from the old one and I believe they are doing anything they can to suppress negative customer responses like dropping the round table sessions for the annual user conference.
What they did was switch to a platform they really did not fully understand, convert the existing product into Angular and only after did they realize how many hurdles and setbacks there would be but instead of taking more time to fine tune it they went ahead and pushed it out. In my opinion its not that different from “early Access” games on STEAM expect that this is a business mission critical accounting application and not a game.
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