2019 Year In Review, Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I covered my presentation goals. In today’s post, I’m going to hit on things which were outside of those goals.

Website Rebuild

The Catallaxy Services website was a bit old when I started it—it was a learning project in Django and I wanted to write all of the code by hand. This year, I went out and got a more professional design and rebuilt the Catallaxy Services website. I have more details on the process, but the quick reasoning was that searching my site on a phone—something I would not have done in 2012—was painful. This helps a lot. I’m still not happy with my hero image (which is the sunrise over Mt Haleakala), but it’ll do for now.

The Book

PolyBase Revealed was a labor of love. Or at least a lot of labor and something approximating an emotion. Now it’s time to sit back and cash those fat royalty checks. It turns out that if you make the royalty check itself twice as large, people don’t care as much that they’re only getting 37 cents in royalties.

DataCamp Course

I have a DataCamp course entitled Time Series Analysis in SQL Server. I go into great detail on how you can work with dates and times in SQL Server. The first module is free, and the rest of it is for pay.

TriPASS Incorporated

We’re wrapping up the final pieces of incorporating the Triangle Area SQL Server Users Group. We elected a board in February and are registered as a 501(c)(3) thanks to Tom Norman’s efforts.

TriPASS Twitch Streaming

Twitch streaming has gotten off to an okay start. If you’re interested in catching SQL Server user group meetings online, join our Twitch channel. If you want to see some of the mechanisms behind the stream, I wrote up a post.

For next year, I really want to improve my streaming skills; it takes too long to get things set up, too much is flaky, and I want to improve the intro and outro, as well as the quality of streams when we have remote presenters.

100 SQL Saturdays

SQL Saturday Orlando marked my 100th SQL Saturday. I’m still going to be on the SQL Saturday circuit and have several confirmed events so far on the schedule for 2020.

New Talks

This was a big year for new talks (and part of the impetus behind making a few others obsolete). In 2019, I created the following presentations:

• A Map to Success: Functional Programming for Database Developers
• Approaching Zero: Minimizing Downtime During Deployments
• Data Virtualization with PolyBase — Replaced an earlier talk on PolyBase
• Machine Learning with .NET
• Of Types and Measures
• Optimizing Backup Performance using Data Science Techniques
• SQL Server Machine Learning Services in Production

I had a few more “one-off” presentations for TriPASS, but I won’t count them because I don’t intend to present them again.

Conclusion

Looking back on this, I’m not sure when I actually slept during the year. It’s been a big year, and I’m looking forward to 2020 being a big year as well. I’ll talk about some of my goals in the next post.

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