Presentation Review, 2017

It’s been another busy year for me presenting. Over the course of 2017, I gave a total of 50 talks at 42 events.  It’s been a lot of fun getting to travel around the world, hitting places as far apart as Vienna, Austria and Sydney, Australia.  I’m hoping to keep up this pace for next year as well.

Now, to look at the goals I had set for the year.  As a quick reminder of my 2017 goals:

1. Speak at 20 SQL Saturdays and 10 user groups
2. Speak at 2 paid conferences
3. Give 6 webinars
4. Do a full-length, pictures-only talk

I wasn’t quite as successful this year as I was last year.  Let’s see how I did:

Speak at 20 SQL Saturdays and 10 user groups

I ended up speaking at 22 SQL Saturdays this year (and would have been 23, had I not gotten sick the day before SQL Saturday Pittsburgh), so I beat that part of the goal.  As far as user groups go, I barely eeked out speaking at 10 distinct user groups.  So a big green checkmark for this goal.

Speak at 2 paid conferences

Another goal I ended up hitting.  I spoke at NDC Sydney in August, as well as the Mid-Atlantic SQL Server Conference and IT/Dev Connections in October.

Give 6 webinars

Missed it by that much.  I ended up doing 5 webinars this year.  I was pushing for them earlier in the year but slacked off in the middle and that made all the difference.

Do a full-length, pictures-only talk

I haven’t gotten that far yet.  I did end up doing a 10-minute talk which was dominated with pictures, but that’s not quite good enough to count.

On the plus side, I’ve been focusing on more graphics-heavy talks, so at least I’m moving toward a better equilibrium on that front.

Overall Thoughts

I know I made my 2017 goals pretty ambitious, so I’m happy that I was able to do two of them.  Doing more webinars is high on my agenda, particularly now that I have a decent recording setup.  And that will also let me create more videos of my talks.

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