PASS 2020 Board of Director Endorsements

Posted on November 11, 2020 by way0utwest

The election for the next PASS Board of Directors starts today, with a slate of 7 for three spots. I asked them for their vision last week, I’ve read the few statements published, and I attended the AMA on Twitter yesterday (Tuesday).  I wanted to see what the candidates had to say and then decide.

Tl;dr Here are my endorsements, reasoning to follow.

  • Steph Locke
  • Joey D’Antoni
  • Hamish Watson

I wrote the rest of this first, thinking through things and then provided my result above.

Things that Matter

There are some things that matter to me, and I’m voting for someone that represents me. So, these are the important items I look at.

Communication

I am big on communication and transparency. We’ve often had to write and disclose plans ro how we are changing SQLServerCentral over the years. I need to provide justification, even if it’s hard or I get criticism. I also believe that explaining yourself doesn’t mean people agree, but they can understand your rationale.

I see too little of that from the PASS org. The communications are also careful and couched to avoid commitments, limitations, or disclosure in advance. Not enough debate and discussion in the public sphere for things that aren’t secret/financial/HR related.

I have had discussions with Steph Locke, and I’ve seen her publish, blog, and debate specifics for events and business. I have seen that from Joey this year as well, with his posts on PASS. Like them or not, agree or not, I think this sort of public thought is important.

In the last year, I counted up blog posts on the PASS blog from others. I found

  • Lori – 5
  • Hamish – 1
  • Roberto – 1

Jose’s site is down, but I didn’t see a statement or other item. So, for that, Lori leads for communication.

Diversity

I want diversity in a board, to present different views and help push others to make informed and thoughtful decisions. The current BoD is:

  • 4 women, 8 men
  • 6 US, 3 non-US
  • 4/11 non white

There is an open seat, but this is a fairly diverse group. However, I think more minorities help with different thoughts. I also think more variety of business experience matter, as well as different culture/geographies.

With that in mind, I like Lori as a women with a different perspective. I like Steph, Joey, Roberto, and Hamish as independent business owners. I like Roberto, Jose, and Hamish as non-US citizens.

Quite a toss up here for me. I lean towards non US people here. PASS needs to grow outside the US. Or, I think it should. Need is probably the wrong word.

Business Acumen

Pass is a not-for-profit business. Not a non-profit, but their aim isn’t money, or at least, not a lot. Here’s a definition I found

Not-for-profit organizations are types of organizations that do not earn profits for its owners. All of the money earned by or donated to a not-for-profit organization is used in pursuing the organization’s objectives and keeping it running. (emphasis mine)

I did see a definition that not-for-profits are run by volunteers, which would mean that PASS can’t hire someone. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that PASS tends to make money to keep PASS and the Summit going. Not a lot else.

Some other things, but really, it’s a bit of a treadmill. Is that the best use of money? Should 360Sales cost $400k to make $460 (round-ish numbers)? I don’t know, but I want more business savvy people, not corp employees thinking about this. There is a difference. I’ve worked for a lot of people and owned a business. You view things differently and it’s not an easy skill to acquire.

Steph is my top person here, though I also think Roberto, Hamish, and Joey are people I consider.

Conclusion

At the end, as I work through this, Steph and Joey check a lot of boxes for me. They were easy choices.

The last one is harder. Hamish is on the board, and has diversity of thought and business experience. However, I haven’t seen a lot from him this past year. Same for Roberto. I don’t know Jose, and honestly, am not sure Matt brings something different from Joey.

I like Lori, and I appreciate her comms. I also think a diversity of gender brings different thoughts.

In the end, Hamish has only had a partial term, and when I doubt, I tend to be a “vote them out” person. The diversity and passion he brings are outstanding. The communication and engagement less so, but he gets my vote and endorsement. I’m also going to be a thorn in his paw during the next year to engage more with the wider community.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , | Comments Off on PASS 2020 Board of Director Endorsements

Daily Coping 10 Nov 2020

Posted on November 10, 2020 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

Today’s tip is to sign up for a new course, activity, or online community.

I don’t need to sign up, but I’ve let some of the work I was doing on guitar fall away a bit. Not a good idea, as I a) paid for courses, and b) it’s a good break. Not that I’ve given up, but I stopped participating in some of the courseware.

I’m making it a point today to start another one of the courses I had paid for with Marty Music and Guitar Jamz. Looking over my list, I know I’d started the blues course, but I’m going to switch to the Legends of Classic Rock and do something different.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

T-SQL Tuesday #132 Pandemic Coping

Posted on November 10, 2020 by way0utwest

tsqltuesdayThis year, 2020, has been crazy. What started as a normal year for me, including a sabbatical, turned into a crazy, shutdown, lockdown, stuck at home pandemic around the world.

My world changed a lot, as I cancelled a trip at the beginning of March, and all subsequent ones. Coaching volleyball stopped, and most events were cancelled, big changes for me.

At the same time, my daughter came home from college and spent the rest of the semester with us and my oldest switched from teaching in person to being at home and finding a place he could virtually teach.

This month, Taiob Ali asks us how we are dealing with these changes.

Coping

At first, I was coping fine with things fine. I live on a large ranch, my wife works from home, and I’ve been doing so for nearly 20 years. I have an office and am used to working here regularly. We are healthy and financially secure, and mostly it was a pain dealing with the changes in the world.

As part of the Redgate Community Circleww, we started to think about how to help others, and came up with different ideas. One of mine was to publish some coping tips. At first, I was trying to help others, but over time, I found these to be invaluable to me.

I get these from Action for Happiness for the most part, though I add some myself. I work through these in my life, often a few days in advance, and then write about them. I was thinking to stop these after June, but many people responded they liked them, and I’ve continued ever since then, which seems like a long time.

I’ve also found these help me. During August, I struggled with the length of the changes, and the fact that looking forward another 6 months, I couldn’t see an end to the pandemic. The weight of the length of this weighs on me.

Physical Health

I’m in my 50s and exercise regularly, usually doing yoga or going to the gym 20+ days a month. My diet is OK, probably better than average America, but not great. Still, while my routine was interrupted in March, with less stuff than I’d like:

2020-11-09 13_34_53-MapMyRun

I got better in April and was in a good routine through June.

2020-11-09 13_35_13-MapMyRun

Mostly life was good until the end of October.

I had a trip planned to visit family, but cancelled. My wife got sick, then I did, then my daughter. A week later one of my sons got sick. We had been diagnosed with COVID, and it was both scary and hard. The symptoms weren’t that bad, but all of my energy was sapped. I spent most of two weeks in bed or with very light chores around the house.

2020-11-09 13_37_35-MapMyRun

Since then, I feel better, but there are still some gaps in my health. I have no worry of dying, but I am worried about long term physical ability.

Wear a mask, try not to get it, and if you don’t believe in masks or the disease, you’re a moron. Don’t leave me a comment on what you believe as a non-epidemiologist or non medical professional. Pardon my language, but fuck off.

Mental Health

I’ve struggled. Despite working at home for a couple decades, I’m used to changing my environment, going to see others, traveling, and more. Seeing my children depressed from school changes, not seeing the kids I coach, not getting to the gym, not going to restaurants and movies, it got to me.

The longing for a change of environment, and not seeing the same four walls of my office weigh on me. The struggles I see on the news, especially from so many people losing jobs, businesses, and more are hard. I have a lot of empathy and realize I am incredibly blessed.

I’ve made an effort to chat with others. To reach out at times, and ask for support from my wife and a few close friends.

My mental health as suffered, even as I try to cope. I continue to work on this regularly, talking more, and trying to find the good things in my life as much as I can.

Professional Growth

I had hoped to do more learning, expecting that this pandemic would be less than six months. On one hand, I greatly underestimated the struggles of being at home all the time. On the other, I got some things done.

I’ve had different goals this year, and I have spent some time learning more about Power BI, DAX, and visualization. I’ve read more business/non-fiction books this year than in the past. I’m making progress on goals. Not as much as I’d like, but some.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

PowerShell Arrays and Hash Tables–#SQLNewblogger

Posted on November 9, 2020 by way0utwest

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I was watching the GroupBy talk the other day and noticed that Cláudio Silva was using arrays, or what appeared to be arrays, in his talk. That was an interesting technique, one that I haven’t used very much.

A day later, I ran into an explanation on dbatools.io, that showed this code:

PS C:\> $columns = @{
>> Text = 'FirstName'
>> Number = 'PhoneNumber' 
>> }

That didn’t quite seem like what I wanted, so I decided to investigate more.

I looked up PowerShell Arrays, and that wasn’t what I wanted. These are a list of values, as in

$a = 1, 2,3

Which gives me this:

>>$a
 
1 
2 
3

Useful, but not for my purposes. I need to map things together, which means a hash table.

Hash Tables

It turns out I need a hash table. This is a key value pair that lets me pick a name and value and store them together. The way I construct these are with the @{} structure. Inside here, I set semi-colon separated pairs, with the name=value syntax.

Here’s an example I used:

$ColList = @{Date="EventDate"; Event="Event"}

In here I map two keys (Date and Event) to two values (EventDate and Event). For the cmdlet I am using, this allows me to map these two columns together. When I need a value, I can use the $variable.key to get the value back.

2020-10-28 13_37_45-C__Users_Steve

I assume this is what the SqlBulkCopy cmdlet uses, which is what dbatools wraps. I ended up passing this $ColList hash table in for the –ColumnMap parameter.

SQLNewBlogger

A quick writeup that I used to solve a problem. I had some issues figuring this out, and some searching and experimenting got me a little better understanding of what was happening.

After about 30 minutes of some work, I took 10 minutes to type this up and explain it to myself. A good example of what you could add to your blog, showing how you use this in your work.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 3 Comments