Abstract:
This session will cover the basics of choosing a topic, writing an abstract, building a slide deck, and finding an opportunity to deliver your presentation. This is a short introduction to beginning to speak about technical topics.
Length: 30 minutes
Slides: FirstSpeakingOpportunity.pptx
Sample Blank PPTX: BlankSample.PPTX
I’m taking a short break from my sabbatical to head to Louisville for SQL Saturday #286 to deliver a couple of sessions. I’ve been invited and accepted to Louisville twice before and had to cancel for family reasons. I’ve felt bad, especially as my sister-in-law lives in Louisville, so I decided I needed to just go this time.
I’m looking forward to this event, and with a number of other cities nearby, I expect a lot of you to come out for a free day of training. I’ll be delivering my Encryption talk and then my Branding talk, so come see me if you can get over to Louisville.
There’s also a pre-con from my colleague, Grant Fritchey, on Friday discussing performance tuning. Worth the investment in your career.
I hope to see you there.
There’s likely a call for speakers open somewhere near you. When I was early in my career, I’d see these calls at large conferences like Comdex, TechEd, even the PASS Summit, and I’d think I’d never get the chance to present, with the best of the best speakers being accepted and no chance that I would be chosen. Things have changed in the world with the growth of SQL Saturday, there are a dozen open calls right now, all around the world, with many opportunities for new people to give a presentation.
When Andy Warren came up with the idea for SQL Saturday, the idea was that we would mostly find local speakers to help present at the event. We thought it might be expensive, and hard, to get the same speakers that present at larger conferences. This event would give many of the talented DBAs in local areas the chance to speak to larger audiences than they get at many user groups. SQL Saturday has been so successful, and the growth is amazing. We’ve started to see more and more well known speakers traveling substantial distances to attend events. That’s great, but I do worry about the lack of local speakers at some events I’ve attended.
Most of you can speak at a SQL Saturday. If you are solving problems and getting new systems implemented at work, you can deliver a session explaining what you do. If you’ve built an SSIS package or developed a query for a report, then you can help other people working with SQL Server. If you’ve given a session at a user group, you certainly should submit to any of these events. All of these events could use more local speakers
and of course, #300 (WOW!), in Kansas City. There are quite a few more, and if you head over to the SQL Saturday site, you’ll find all the events listed. I would recommend you think about submitting a session if you’ve done any speaking at all. A brown bag session at work, a user group talk, or even helping a group of kids with computers. You’re qualified, and we’d like to hear what you have to say.
Steve Jones
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I just got my acceptance to the DevConnections, SQLConnections in September for two sessions:
I enjoy the Connections events, usually finding time to go check out an ASP.NET or developer session of some sort.
Now’s the time to register and save. There will be some great pre-cons as well, including one from a scary individual that I know well.
