There’s a new conference in London next week, the InsideSQL conference on June 14th. It’s at the CodeNode venue, near Liverpool Stree and the Moorgate stations.
And I want to go.
I can’t. I’m a bit traveled out, my family is a bit tired of travel overall, and I need a few weeks off. However I’m sad I’ll miss this, a deep dive into lots of topics with some great speakers that write at SQLServerCentral. You can go listen to
Gail Shaw
Gianluca Sartori
Hugo Kornelis
and more.
We’ve even got Alex Yates from Redgate Software talking about the complex ins and outs of deployment, which we’ve been trying to make easier for years.
It’s a small event, but it looks like a good one. If you can convince the boss to give you a day off and get to London, you can use the code “Redgate” for a discount on admission. I think the discount is £70 off, so that’s a cheap day of training from some experts.
Go, and let me know how much you enjoyed the event.
I participate in a lot of events during the year. I had the SQL in the City event from Red Gate recently, with more of those coming to the US later this year. In 2013 I’ve also been a part of SQL Intersection, the online-only spring IT Connections event, various SQL Saturdays, and attended the MVP Summit from Microsoft. In the past I’ve also spoken or attendedTechEd, the PASS Summit, and various one, two, and three day events that didn’t necessarily focus on one specific technology. In that time, I haven’t seen a lot of difference between the various conferences organization and flow. some little things have been tried, and some I liked, but overall most events consist of:
a series of “tracks”, which are really rooms in a building.
a 60-90 minute presentation of varying quality from a speaker, built months in advance, with little input from the audience.
shuttling from one session to another quickly
There are other parts of the events, parties at night, sometimes networking, keynotes, lunch panels, etc, but for the most part organizers pick a location, choose to have x number of rooms, and choose speakers to present in those spaces, largely on the basis of their own biases or desire to learn about a specific topic. Even when attendees vote for content, they only affect a small portion of the agenda.
Could we do better? I don’t know. I saw this post on a better conference and it got me thinking. Perhaps there are other ways we could build conferences. Would it make sense to link sessions together, and build on knowledge across the day? What about getting a panel of speakers to respond to real scenarios and questions from the audience, possibly submitted a few days or hours before? That would raise the bar for speakers, and it might be more entertaining. I’m not sure the quality would be better, especially if demos are hastily thrown together.
However the post has an interesting point. Conferences and many sessions ought to be more about engagement and inspiration and less about training you to use a particular piece of technology. Perhaps we would like to find ways to interact more, discuss and debate ideas and approaches rather than broadcast information. Would you like more interactive content? Or do you prefer to sit back and listen to what the speaker thinks is important?
I enjoy Las Vegas and am glad to be heading back to present at the Spring SQL Server Connections conference in March. If you wear a number of hats at your job, and deal with a variety of platforms in the Microsoft technology stack, this is a great event to attend. There are nine conferences taking place at the same time, in the same place, and you get the chance to see sessions from Mark Minasi on Windows, Scott Hillier on Sharepoint, Miguel Castro on Visual Studio, and more along with your SQL Server sessions.
I know you can’t attend every session, and you can’t see all the content that week, but the sessions are recorded and attendees can get DVDs of the content. I love that, and it means I can pop in and out of sessions, checking out the content and topics, and mark those in a program that I want to watch later. It also means that I can focus on the important parts of the conference: meeting people.
When I’m looking to learn, I try to make time to talk to the people that can teach me something or answer a question I have. I can always email someone later, but the chance to have a meaningful conversation is worth the time spent at events.
I like going to Las Vegas, but not for the reasons that many people go. I don’t gamble, having bet exactly $0 on my last two trips. I don’t stay out too late, or attend the shows. I go because the weather is great, it’s close to home, and I get the chance to network and bond with people in this amazing SQL Server community.
Ask your boss for some training money, and come join me this March in Las Vegas.
The SQL Server Connections spring conference is coming up in a few weeks in Orlando, FL. This is a part of the DevConnections multi-technology conference and this event is the chance to get some great SQL knowledge and inspiration from experts in a fantastic location. Once again SQLServerCentral is sponsoring a track at the conference; Brad McGehee and myself will be down there, looking forward to meeting a few of you.
I think that conferences are a great way to take a break from work, recharge, and get some excitement back in your job. The speakers at these events teach me about SQL Server, and inspire me to come back and try some new feature or technique in my own environment. I might get the solution to a problem, and usually find that the work is just a little more fun when I return. To me, that’s an ROI that’s hard to argue against .
DevConnections puts on a great conference event, recognizing that while people want to come learn, they also want to do it in a nice location. This event is in Orlando, with great weather, at a place you can bring your family for a mini-vacation before or after the event. There’s no shortage of things to do in Florida, and it’s a relatively inexpensive place to visit. The conference hotel even offers complimentary transportation to many popular attractions. Who knows, we might even end up sitting by the pool and talking high availability or Resource Governor in the late afternoons. That’s more interesting to me than discussing things in a conference hallway.
So many people are hybrid IT workers, using more than one technology, and this conference reflects that. The last time I went to a DevConnections event, I attended mostly SQL Server sessions, but did manage to see an ASP.NET session and a couple Sharepoint presentations. Becoming more rounded in my IT knowledge has paid off for me in the past, and the DevConnection events give you the chance to grow skills in a variety of areas.
Hopefully I’ll meet a few of you at SQL Server Connections this spring and share a few drinks while we talk about SQL Server. I should be easy to find in the Hawaiian shirt and cowboy hat.
Steve Jones
Save $200 with the “DevCon1” code when you register.
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