If I would write a book on becoming a technical presenter, chapter 0 would be on deciding to actually do it. This is the biggest hurdle for folks, they seem to always come up with reasons why they shouldn’t. This is totally understandable! I was practically shaking when I gave my first presentation, but if I had never taken that first step, I would never be able to making training content for a living.

So in this blog post, I’m going to try to help people get past step 0. Some of the reasons are altruistic and some of them are more selfish, but I think there are plenty of reasons why you should do it.

1. Learners have a unique perspective

I think the biggest issue is folks feeling like they have to be experts, like they have to be perfect. That simply isn’t true. I do think it’s important to preface the beginning of a talk with your experience level, to set expectations. But beyond that, you are golden. Often times in my line of work, I have to learn a new piece of technology in two months and then make a course on it.

To emphasize the previous point a bit more, people who are just learning a technology or are new in a field have a unique perspective that is difficult to find. Good teaching involves an aggressive sense of empathy for your audience, for the learner. And the longer you have been working with a technology, the harder that becomes. Very quickly you forget how hard it is to get a development environment up and running. Very quickly you forget how unintuitive some of the technical terms are.

Learners are going to have a greater sense of empathy with their audience and can warn people about the roadblocks with getting started. This is a rare resource.

2. The community needs new speakers and fresh faces

I know when I was helping run the local Power BI user group, it was a challenge to find speakers. I gave probably a third of our presentations the first year we got started, jsut to try to fill the slots. I think the biggest challenge of running a user group is finding speakers, and user group leaders are always grateful when someone volunteers to speak, regardless of their skill level.

But beyond local groups, the broader community needs new and different speakers. Because of the amount of effort and resources speaking requires, and because of the bias towards “expertise”, you tend to have the same handful of speakers talking about a given subject.

These folks can often be opinionated or set in their ways. It can be value to have other folks who have a fresh perspective, who can help identify different ways of doing things. This is especially true in areas like business intelligence, where it is less about best practices and more about the context of the business you are working in.

3. Sharing content is the best way to learn

Ultimately, to learn well we need something that challenges our assumptions and identifies gaps in what we know. Reading blogs or watching videos usually doesn’t do this because there are two layers of bias going on.

First, it only includes what the author thought was important to include. This often doesn’t include gotchas, edge cases, or things the author assumes everyone knows already. Second, there’s your own bias. When we are doing just-in-time learning, we are often focused on solving a specific problem and will learn just enough to feel comfortable solving that problem. Rarely do we ask “Okay, what am I missing? What could go wrong?”.

But when you try to do something in your homelab, you often find all the setup tasks that weren’t mentioned in the tutorial. You find the things that could (and do) go wrong. When you give a presentation, you think through all the questions someone might ask and so you are forced to learn a subject more deeply.

And as you present multiple times, you run into different questions and develop and intuition for the kinds of things someone might ask you. Giving a presentation with demos is often the best of both worlds, because you have to test it and anticipate whatever questions people might have.

4. Becoming a good speaker takes time and practice

Becoming a good presenter takes time, there’s just no way around it. Even if you are naturally good speaker, there are a set of skills you can only get from practice. One of the biggest one is pacing. When I started speaking, I would either get nervous and speed through my content, or I would get too excited and go over on time.

Being able to stay focused, manage your time, and handle questions or interruptions are all things you have to learn through practice. If you wait until you are an expert speaker to start speaking, this will never happen. Depending on your experience, you might have to present a dozen times to really find your voice and pace.

5. Speaking is good for your career

Presenting is, in my opinion, great for your career. No one should feel obligated to speak as part of their career growth, but it provides a chance to practice a bunch of skills that may not come up normally in your day to day work. In my experience, if you can get comfortable speaking to 70 strangers, it become much easier to talk with 2 of your coworkers. By practicing refining your content, your communication in general become more clear and crisp. But anticipating questions in your presentations, you anticipate things that could go wrong in a project.

It’s also a chance to develop peer relationships that will help you throughout your career. When I go to events these days, the thing I cherish the most is sitting in the speaker’s room and just hearing people chat. I’ve been able to build connections and get my name out there, which has been tremendously helpful for my career. And as a result, when I need help with something, I’ve been able to reach out to those speakers for help and vice versa.

Summary

In summary, speaking can both provide a unique perspective for your audience, and help you grow both as a presenter and as a technical expert. Local user groups and virtual groups are often grateful to have new speakers and can provide a low-risk environment to work on your skills and grow. As time goes on, it can open up opportunities such as consulting that depend on having those communication skills.

There’s some valuable discussion going on regarding diversity and conferences. I wrote about it last year. I’d like to write more of my thoughts on the subject, but so far I’ve been overwhelmed with my day job and I have some older posts I owe people. That said, I figured this would be a quick way to add some context and something useful to the dialogue.

Below is a blog post I wrote in July 2019 in response to some frustration to the selection process that year. For each section, I’ve added a “What this really meant” section to add some background context. I hope this makes some of the conversations more fruitful.

A peek inside the program selection process

As one of the program managers for PASS Summit, I always wish that people knew more about all of the steps involved in selecting the community sessions each year. The difficulty of balancing all of the tradeoffs and constraints is an incredibly challenging and rewarding task. I personally like to think of it as a high stakes game of Sudoku, and in fact I will be using that analogy to help explain the process.

In this blog post, we will take a high-level look at the different stages of the PASS Summit selection process, as well as a few of the factors that we try to balance as a team.

What this really meant

Back in March of that same year, there was some particular controversy. I forget the exact details, but I recall writing a long Twitter thread about “hey we are human beings, not some shadowy cabal.” Given the regular lack of transparency about the the selection process in general, any conclusions people jumped to were entirely understandable. My hope was to help change that as much as I was able to.

Simply put, if you don’t communicate your process, people will assume the worst.

As a team, we had hoped that each one of us could write a blog post about the process and perhaps give some better insight and transparency. Unfortunately being a program manager was essentially a 50-75 hour per year commitment, where the only financial compensation was entry to conference and maybe some speaker swag. It was difficult to make the time for going beyond that task.

A year later, in the dying days of PASS, I wrote about the difficulties about improving transparency. I think the organization had gotten into a bit of a doom loop, but it’s questionable how much of a difference I could have made alone. Many of the issues stemmed from decisions outside of my control.

Overall Timeline

The very first step is when the PASS Board sets the overall strategic vision, which we, as the program team, then work within. This year, for example, we saw the introduction of the architecture, data management, and analytics streams. One top of that, the spotlight topics for 2019 are Security, AI, and Cloud – which means we need to make sure those topics are well-represented in each stream. So, before we even begin, we already have two constraints to consider in our game of Sudoku.

Next, call for speakers opens up. Without our speakers, we wouldn’t have a conference, full stop. I especially appreciate all of the new speakers who have submitted. I know, for me personally, it was an emotional rollercoaster when I submitted back in 2016 and 2017. I would worry, for a long time, about getting selected or not and then be a nervous wreck if I did get selected!

Once the call for speakers closes, the abstracts need to be reviewed. Each year, we select about 20 volunteers to join the program committee. This team does the bulk of the work, spending hundreds of hours reviewing hundreds of abstracts, over 6-8 weeks. We simply could not get through the hundreds of sessions each year without the help of all of these volunteers.

Once all the abstracts have been reviewed, the program management team drafts the initial community line-up. The program management team consists of 4 volunteers, myself included. We take all the feedback from the program committee and align it to the vision and direction from the PASS Board in order to draft the initial lineup. This combines the community sessions with any targeted sessions that have already been published. Oh, and did I forget to mention that while this process is happening, the PASS Board educational content group works with us and PASS HQ to target initial waves of content? This is based on industry trends, thought leader feedback, session evaluations, and so much more! Just one more set of constraints to add to the board

Next, we reach out to community thought leaders and the PASS Board for ongoing feedback and gap analysis. Thought leaders are a wide-range of people from the community and industry that we reach out to get their perspectives on key topics, trends, and gaps they see in educational offerings.  There are a lot of cooks in this kitchen to help make sure we don’t miss anything. The community program is then completed by the program management team with final approval from the PASS Board educational content working group. Overall, this portion takes just over a month, with the community lineup announced in early-mid July, and any final sessions announced in August. In the next section, we will go into detail regarding the selection process.

What this really meant

What I wanted to communicate with all of this is that the process was complicated. We often would have high level scheduling constraints set by some combination of the board and C&C. This generally came in the form of high level themes or content goals, such as learning paths. There were a lot of constraints being added and sometimes we didn’t have as much time available as other years. When we had less time, we screwed things up and made mistakes.

A recurring theme as well was that we needed outside opinions to avoid screwing up. A lot of the balancing process was a series of spot checks, and it was easy to forget one. It was also easy to lose touch with the community and how they might respond. We knew our process, we knew the challenges we were facing, and we knew we had good motivations. It was very easy to lose touch with how others might interpret things. It was easy to forget what it was like to be a speaker, nervously hoping to get in.

Selection process

Whenever you play a game of Sudoku, there are very few numbers on the board, so almost any choice you make will fit within the existing constraints.

The same flexibility applies with choosing sessions. Some of the session slots are already filled with invited speakers, but generally we have a lot of flexibility at this stage. So, the first thing we do is take all of the sessions and sort them by their abstract review score. The idea is to start with the highest quality sessions and have the cream rise to the top.

Once we start filling in the slots, however, we then need to consider a number of factors. This is like being near the end of a game of Sudoku, it gets harder and harder to meet all of the constraints and this is where the game, and our job, gets really tricky.

Here are just a few specific examples of factors we review:

1. Strategic vision
2. Content areas
3. Topic depth/level
4. Sessions by audience
5. Speaker performance
6. Speaker diversity

The first thing we have to consider is how do our sessions balance in terms of content and level. Do we have 15 sessions on Power BI but nothing on SSIS? If we look at the line up by individual audiences are we serving everyone? Do we have any gaps? How much 400/500 level content do we have? Whenever we survey our members, they consistently request in-depth content, but for 2019, only 0.5% of the submitted sessions were at the 500 level. This can present challenges for us.

I could go on and on about all the factors we consider, but I hope that this gives you better insight into the selection process.

The sessions have now been announced, and it is a great feeling to see it all come together. I look forward to seeing all of you at PASS Summit in the fall.

What this really meant

What I really hoped to communicate was that we were juggling a large number of constraints, and the more that got added or the less time and resources we had, the more likely we would fail one of those constraints.

I also was happy to mention diversity as a consideration. I would have loved to have go into more detail at the time, but there was a worry that it was a sensitive subject and that being honest about it might cause controversy. So it was resigned to a bullet point at the end of the list.

Diversity for us was a regular spot check for us. While the main goal was to produce a schedule that would sell well and that people would like to attend, we knew very well that we had to work towards diversity. It would have been easy to just selected the most well known speakers or just selected the best sounding abstracts, but this would have created a schedule that wasn’t reflective our speaker pool and definitely not reflective of the average IT worker.

We knew for a fact that if we let an all male panel slip through, we would get roasted, and rightfully so. We knew that the televised sessions and precons put a spotlight on the speakers, and if we ended up with line up full of white guys like myself, that was a failure.

One final thing, I want to acknowledge that conferences today have a harder time than we did. It was easier when we have lots and lots of submissions both for precons and general sessions. I fully believe that post pandemic, conferences are likely starting with much less diverse of a speaker pool.

Being a program manager in 2022 is a difficult job. But just like how expectations for speaker compensation are rising, so are expectations for a diverse schedule. Ultimately more resources have to be allocated to the task as it gets more difficult.

Right now there is an election going for PASS Board, and an item that came up multiple times during the AMA was transparency, and the lack there of. In fact Jen Stirrup recently wrote a blog post about PASS special board minutes that are ominous, but too vague to be actionable. I think there is a really important quote from her post:

For transparency, you need to walk the talk. PASS should be more transparent, and all the candidates have it on their ticket.

So let’s try to walk the talk. I’m going to write about my experiences trying to improve transparency at PASS, why I think it’s been so difficult, and the problems any new board members are going to face.  I feel that most of the issues are structural and not the fault of any one person. Some of them are likely cultural and leads to vicious cycles.

Finally, I’m under NDA so I will be talking in generalities. This is probably some level of irony, like rain on your wedding day, but it is what it is. I think some level of NDA is necessary to do this job, but I’d love to see some loosening of NDAs, as well as written guidance on what’s okay to talk about.

We are all volunteers

The first impediment is that we are all volunteers here. The board are volunteers, the program managers are volunteers. As PMs we meet weekly for an hour, sometimes multiple times per week when we are working on the selections and schedule.

I think it would be reasonable to estimate that take 75-100 hours of time to do just the job of managing the program. That is all time that I could be billing or working on my courses. From speaking with a former board member, being on the board probably takes 10x that amount of time, which is huge.

So, just doing the job itself takes quite a bit of time, anything beyond that is extra time and effort. Improving transparency is extra time and effort. That is the reality of the situation. I would love to have a monthly blog post on our process, in practice I’ve barely written two.

I think it’s reasonable to feel that certain goals or values like this should be first-class citizens. It’s natural though, to get into the position and get focused on going the work, on meeting the deadlines, etc. We get distracted by the short term tasks.

I can only assume that it’s the same way for the board members. Anyone running for the first time is going to have the herculean task of trying to change organizational inertia, while dealing with an existential crisis.

People will be shitty on Twitter

First, let me say that people have good reason to be upset and frustrated with PASS and PASS HQ. It’s heartbreaking to read how Andy Mallon’s efforts to promote the LGBT community have been stymied again and again. I’ve seen decreasing support for SQL Saturday’s and UGs, and I’ve seen plenty of poor communication. All valid frustrations.

Second, let me say that how people communicate that frustration and anger is unrelated to how valid those feelings are. That’s a lesson I’ve been taking away from the discussion on race earlier this year. Someone can be snarky, sarcastic or downright mean and still be right.

As a quick aside, hat’s off to three people who I’ve seen communicate criticism without forgetting there are humans on the other side: Erin Stellato, Meagan Longoria, and Monica Rathbun. We should all be more like these folks.

That being said, people being shitty is going to mean it’s more work to be transparent. This isn’t blaming them, but just trying to acknowledge the fact that as human being, it’s easier to not say anything. It’s easier to not write this blog post and take the extra effort, than risk the hot takes and the sarcasm. I want people to like me.

Thankfully, I have not personally been the subjects of any attacks or direct criticism. When I first joined the team 3 years ago, I didn’t want to tell anyone that I was on the team, because I assumed all of the criticism would get directed at me. Mercifully this has not happened, and I’ve slowly been more confident in acknowledging the work I do.

Ill-will and poor transparency breed more of the same.

I definitely think there is a culture with PASS of closed by default instead of open by default. It seems like nearly everything needs an NDA. I can speculate how we got there, but that doesn’t really change the fact. And the bigger issue is that it’s inertial and self-reinforcing. Ill-will and poor transparency breed more of the same.

What do I mean by this? Well, at my last job we had a merger and there were tons of rumors and gossip flying around. When you don’t say anything, people assume the worst. People assume ulterior motives.

This is human nature. If you don’t communicate your selection process for precons, people will assume favoritism.  If you don’t communicate that diversity is a goal in the selection process, people will reasonably assume it’s not a goal at all.

This is frustrating because very often Hanlon’s law applies: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”. So many of the mistakes I’ve made as a program manager have been because of my own stupidity. Something I forgot to check, something I didn’t think would be an issue, etc.

This is exacerbated when you’ve burnt bridges in the community or made mis-steps in the past. Now malice is assumed more quickly, quite reasonably. Now it’s not enough to improve transparency, but you have to do more on top of that to slowly rebuild trust. I’ve heard it said that trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.

Poor transparency leads to ungrounded decisions

Another way this becomes self-enforcing is that we touch base with the community less, we sanity check our ideas less. Communication takes work and the default assumption is people will complain no matter what you do.  But this leads to catastrophic errors.

When you are the person selecting the schedule, it’s easy forget what it feels like to be a nervous speaker, begging for advice on how to get selected. You know how the sausage gets made, and you don’t empathize enough with how people might feel about speakers being announced in waves. And suddenly what you though was non-controversial blows up because you aren’t in touch with your community.

And by you, I mean me.

Summary

This is a long post and I could go for longer. The thing I want to convey is that fixing transparency isn’t some light switch, it’s swimming up-hill. It’s extra work on top of a voluntary position. I like some of the ideas proposed by board candidates, but I think it’s going to be a monumental effort no matter what.

To do it, you need a thick enough skin to ignore what everyone says, and you need enough heart and empathy to listen closely to what everyone says. I’ve found this to be a real struggle.

The year was 2017, and I was feeling a bit stagnant and frustrated. I had spoken at a handful of different SQL Saturdays, and I wanted to know how to get to the big conferences:

“There’s a joke about industries with no entry level jobs. How do those types of industries exist? How do they not just die out? But I don’t think entry level is the issue here. There are tons of opportunities to speak at user groups. SQL Saturdays are a clear stepping stone after that. The next step is…less clear. Do you blog? Do you speak at virtual user groups? Do you go to 20 SQL Saturdays a year?

No seriously, I don’t know. Can someone tell me? You wanna know why I started presenting at virtual user groups? Because I asked someone how to get to Summit, and they suggested that as a stepping stone. I think it’s important to give “new” speakers like me a path for reaching the top.”

Two months later, I was accepted to speak at the GroupBy conference about how to keep up with technology. It was a little nervewracking, but it went great and was truly a stepping stone in my career. It was my second virtual presentation and bigger than anything I had ever done. It helped me grow as a speaker, and later that year I was accepted to speak at PASS Summit.

I can’t ever know if that was what got me accepted to Summit. It might have been my abstracts, it might have been the fact that Summit was during Halloween, or that I had done some Pluralsight courses by then. But I truly believe it was part of the equation.

Now as someone on the other side of the selection process, I can definitely say that you will benefit from having an online record of your presentations. Having online presentations allows people to see that you can speak well and get a better idea of the type of material you cover.

Submissions are open for a few more days for the October session. I hope you’ll join me in sending in a few sessions, and I hope to see you there.

A couple of people were asking for the code to my demos, so here it is! I’m utterly exhausted, but it was such an honor presenting to so many people. My favorite part was getting to thank a hard-of-hearing gentleman in sign language for asking a question at the very end.

Eugene Meidinger – Execution Plans 101_11-01-2017

Recently, I’ve been going through a lot of the presentations for GroupBy.org. I’m trying to provide as much feedback as I can, because I think good feedback is hard work. A lot of the existing comments are along the lines of “This looks cool!”, which does not provide much direction. As a presenter myself, I’m a big fan of receiving actionable criticism. It’s the only way I will grow as a presenter.

This post is going to cover some general guidance for making a fantastic abstract. It’s targeted at the GroupBy.org site, but much of the advice is broadly applicable

You should write like you fight

When you edit your abstract, you should be relentless, you should be merciless. Every sentence should dance. Every sentence should sing. Every word owes you rent, and you are here to collect. You, my friend, have neither time nor patience for any freeloaders. If anything does not enhance your message, ditch it. This ain’t a charity, kids.

You should write like your life is on the line.

You should write like you fight. This is not a joke. This is not hyperbole. Because someday, your life, your ability to provide for your family, will depend on your ability to communicate clearly. Someday one of these things will happen to you:

1. Your company will get bought, and you will have to explain “what do you do around here?”
2. You will be out of a job and need to write an amazing cover letter
3. You will need to summarize what you’ve done this year and why you deserve that raise
4. Something will go horribly wrong at work, and it will be your job to write the retrospective
5. Your coworker will cross a line, and you will need to stand up for yourself in a polite, professional way.

Are you ready for that day? If you are writing half-hearted abstracts today, you are probably half-hearted emails and cover letters. If you aren’t writing like your life it on the line today, then you aren’t preparing for when it actually is. We practice when the stakes are low, so we are ready for the day that they aren’t.

What martial arts teaches us about good writing

I do martial arts every week. Not because I’m a particularly aggressive or athletic person. I do it because it helped me lose weight and because it keeps me healthy. I lost 70lbs in large part to martial arts, so I think I owe it some respect and deference. In a very real sense, it has changed my life forever.

In my school, everything we do is preparing us for a fight that hopefully never happens. The goal isn’t to get into these scenarios, but to be prepared should the worst ever happens. Learning how to give a solid punch doesn’t make me cocky and reckless, it makes me humble and cautious. This is because I know how quickly a fight can fall apart; I know how much a punch to the face hurts.

In martial arts, specifically, we practice moves hundreds and thousands of times. We refine and we focus until it’s reflex. Because trust me, when you are scared and under pressure, all of your form goes to crap. When I participated in my only tournament, I got hit really hard on the chin. Hard enough that my ears were ringing and they had to check if I was okay. It was because I was scared. It was because under pressure, I forgot all of my form. It was because good form wasn’t reflexive for me.

Good form should be reflexive

We practice things over and over, when the stakes are low, so we don’t have to think when the stakes are deadly. I can’t say this enough times. This is how lives are saved.

When you write an abstract, you are practicing for when it really matters. In martial arts, if you don’t practice keeping your fists up when there is no danger, you’ll get sucker punched when there is. Trust me, I know from experience.

Good form comes from intentional, relentless practice. Edit, edit, edit. Please, for your own sake.

How to write a great abstract

So what makes a good abstract? What makes good form? I think there are a number of fundamental things that people regularly miss.

Dear presenter, why do I care?

Your first sentence should tell me why I care. Why do I want to attend your presentation? Don’t assume that just because you think it’s important that I agree with you. You have to persuade me. You have to explicitly communicate how it benefits me.

Your whole abstract should hang on this premise. If a sentence does not in some way help answer this question, cut it. If it isn’t abundantly clear, rework it.

So how do I communicate this? There are a number of ways:

• Give them a headache. Tell them what problems they have.
• Give them a solution. Tell them how this talk will solve those problems.
• Tell them how they will grow. People want an immediate payoff. Explain how they will be better for watching your presentation.
• Don’t assume it’s important. Show me why your topic is important.

If you can answer why people should care, you will be a step ahead.

Figure out your audience. Narrow it.

Who is your audience? Who cares about your topic?

Did you figure it out? Great, now narrow it. Audience statements are often too broad to begin with. Ask yourself, “Who would be really excited to watch your presentation?”. Make them your target audience. Don’t feel that you have to cater to everyone.

Curiosity is almost a terrible audience goal. Find people who have a need and fill it.

Additionally, who isn’t your audience? There should be people who you don’t want to attend your presentation. This concept is often more helpful than knowing your target audience. Don’t be afraid to exclude people. A broader target leads to a muddled message.

In the agile world, there is idea of personas. Use them. Let’s say that Susan is a fictional person who really wants to watch your presentation.

1. Who is she?
2. Why is she super pumped about your presentation?
3. How do you communicate this to her, efficiently?
4. What things does she already know? What new things is she going to learn?
5. Who isn’t she?

If you can paint a vivid picture of this person, your abstract will be better for it. Even better, your presentation will improve too.

Get your level right

Relating to the item above, figure out what level your presentation is. Is it for total newbs? Then make sure you have a lot of introductory content. Be very clear about what you are assuming they already know. Write it out on a piece of paper. Don’t assume. Don’t assume.

Is this more of a 300-level practical presentation? Well then “curiosity” had better be nowhere in your target audience. Make sure you elaborate the detailed content that you will cover. Make it clear that they will take something practical away from this.

I’ve seen a number of abstracts that try to split the difference and just muddy the waters. Pick an audience and stick with it. Decisions aren’t decisions until you give something up. You have to make a choice. Who are you targeting? Be clear about this and your viewers will thank you for it.

Put the bottom line up front

Get to the point right away. Explain your general thesis in the first couple of sentences. Explain why the reader cares in the first few sentences. You can include all the detail later on. This is a matter of being respectful to your reader, who is a busy person. Don’t waste their time.

In journalism, this is called inverted pyramid style. The professionals use this method. You should too.

To summarize, If you can’t sell me in a tweet, you’ve lost me as a reader. Keep it tight. You can add the details later.

Make your prose scannable

People don’t read the internet like a book. People scan. They’ve done eyetracking studies where they literally watch people’s eye movement. Keep your prose tight and short. Use technical writing techniques.

1. Keep your sentences short. Break up run-on sentences. Avoid sentences more than 15 words, like the plague.
2. Use bullet lists, where possible. These are GREAT for scanning text.
3. Use multiple paragraphs. You have the space, use multiple paragraphs for multiple purposes.
4. Have a structure. I personally like the 3 paragraph structure of
   1. “Why do I care?”
   2. “What will we cover?”
   3. “What will I take away from this?”
5. Use action verbs. Avoid is, was, became, etc.
6. Use a little formatting. Unlike most events, you have full control of your formatting. Use it.

If you can’t see the flow of your text from 10 feet away, reconsider how your have structured your text. Blobs don’t scan well.

I got sucker-punched via email this week, but I was ready

So at the beginning of this week, I got thrown under the bus. In large part, it was my own fault. I had, in fact, missed deadlines that delayed a colleague’s work. That part was true.

The part that was the sucker punch was that he contradicted with an earlier conversation. When the author and I spoke, it sounded like his deliverables were being blocked by time constraints as well. I was late, but I offered to rush Friday morning so he could get his weekend part done on time. He indicated that there were other factors holding things up, that there was no point in rushing.

So now I’m in a situation where I thought everything was fine, but instead my boss is getting a surprise email, Monday morning. An email indicating that the project is being delayed a week, solely because of me. One hour before the manager’s meeting. Ugh.

So my boss sends me a one sentence email. “Did we know about this?”

The advantage of being ready

So now I have half an hour to lay out a timeline of events, and give my side of things. And because I practice my writing, I was able to write this:

Even with a heavy blur and shrink you can see the structure. It’s got the bottom line up front. Everything you really need to know is in the first 4 sentences.

Again, I want to be clear. It was my fault for missing deadlines. It was my fault for not communicating that to my boss. I’m not some victim here.

But I did receive a surprise, and I was ready for it. Because I practice my form daily. And you should too. Write good abstracts. Write good emails. Practice, practice, practice.

Keep your fists up folks, it’ll guard your chin. Otherwise it’ll hurt like hell, and your ears will be ringing. I know from personal experience.

 Summary

Write your abstracts like your life depends on communicating clearly and efficiently. Determine a targeted audience and tell them why they should care. Keep it tight, keep it scannable. Edit, edit, edit. Practice, practice, practice.

Good luck!

So, PASS Summit is making changes to how the curriculum is managed. There’s been some conversation about these changes and whether they are good are not. I thought I would enter the conversation and add my thoughts.

Before that though, I want to thank the board for the work that they do and working on these changes. I think that being on the board is difficult work. It seems to me that no matter what changes they make, there will be criticism. Often, the criticism is the loudest of all the commentary. Sure, I agree there is more they could do to involve community feedback; however, the fact that they have a survey and community townhall is evidence that they are listening and value our opinion.

So, I’m going to try to focus on the positives I see, instead of criticizing. Overall, I think these changes are a good move. I wrote last PASS that I think the data platform is broadening. And while I think that the idea of a data profession presents challenges, I think it’s reflective of trends going on:

1. The devops-ification of the data platform
2. A broadening of the surface area of  “data platform”
3. Virtualization, Moore’s law and Cloud

These are all forces that are causing more technologies to fall under a broader and broader grouping. They are also causing a blurring what used to be more distinct roles. And as a result, PASS Summit is responding to that change.

Having a broader, more nuanced set of topics requires more control. If  you look at companies like Pluralsight or Lynda, they have people whose job is to manage a curriculum. And part of that job is aggressively targeting specific topics to avoid gaps.  It also means doing market analysis to see what education people want and need, not just what people want to present on. These goals makes sense for Summit too.

Part of targeting specific topics, is acknowledging that there are top-level experts in those content areas. If you want something on DAX, reach out to Marco Russo. If you want something on U-SQL, reach out to Michael Rys. Dealing with the changes in the platform require a different approach. In some ways, it would be a shame to to not try to get access to the top leaders of specific topic areas.

I admit that it’s reasonable to worry about Summit becoming some sort of elite club of presenters. Part of the solution is transparency, transparency, transparency. The other part of the solution is answering the question “How do I present at Summit?”

There’s a joke about industries with no entry level jobs. How do those types of industries exist? How do they not just die out? But I don’t think entry level is the issue here. There are tons of opportunities to speak at user groups. SQL Saturdays are a clear stepping stone after that. The next step is…less clear. Do you blog? Do you speak at virtual user groups? Do you go to 20 SQL Saturdays a year?

No seriously, I don’t know. Can someone tell me? You wanna know why I started presenting at virtual user groups? Because I asked someone how to get to Summit, and they suggested that as a stepping stone. I think it’s important to give “new” speakers like me a path for reaching the top.

It’s straightforward to get your white belt in speaking, even your green belt. But it’s a lot less clear how to get your brown or black belt. That’s an area I’d love to see more people talk about. A good example is Brent Ozar’s Career Internals.

That being said, I’m happy with the minimum bar of experience for applying. The current minimum is 3 presentations. I honestly think it could be 5 and it’d be fine. This is a good balance between requiring a base level, while not discouraging new speakers. Three is so low, you could trip over it. That’s two user groups and a SQL Saturday. I can promise you that when I had given only 3 presentations, I was in no way qualified to present to PASS.

One final thing I’m really happy about is that they are going to give guidance on the content they want, and they are going to ask people to specify a general content area they are focusing. I think this is a smart move. The current system just wasn’t sustainable.

The old system seemed to encourage just throwing as much stuff against the wall as you could and see if anything stuck. I don’t think we want to incentivize people submitting more than 3-4 sessions. It puts an undue burden on the people reviewing the submissions. I honestly think it’d be fine to have an explicit limit on submissions, but I expect that would make some waves.

Overall, I think they are making moves in the right direction and I like it.

Phew! That was nerve wracking and exciting. Here are the slides from my presentation, the excel file is at the end. I’ll update the blog post with more detail when I get a chance.

EDIT: It looks like I didn’t properly attach the Excel to the PowerPoint. This has been fixed.

Introduction to DAX – 2017-01-12

Last week I was at PASS Summit and it was an incredible time. I went in feeling deflated about my career and came out excited and energized. It was wonderful seeing the potential of the Microsoft Data Platform and where things are going. It was also great to meet a lot of people and hang out with my SQL Saturday friends.

Overall, there was one theme I saw over and over again. You could call it technological diversity. You could call it fragmentation. You could call it accelerating growth. What it really comes down to is more technologies, more platforms and more things to learn.

You could see it in the keynotes multiple times. SQL Server is now on Linux. Polybase connects to Mongo. NoSQL support is available via DocumentDB. PASS is rebranding and focusing on the Microsoft Data Platform, not just SQL Server. Clearly the surface area of a data professional is expanding.

I like that term a lot, Data Professional. At first, it sounds meaningless and generic. But it’s one of the few things that aptly describes what I do. Because being able to be just a DBA or a database developer is going to get rarer. Now you need to know a bit about Azure. Now you need to know a bit about Excel and PowerPivot. Now you need know the difference between Pokemon and Big Data.

All of this has inspired me to work on my first professional development session; Drinking From the Firehose: a Guide to Keeping Up With Technology. I’ve submitted it to SQL Saturday Cleveland. I also might get to present it for the Professional Development VC. I’m hoping if I can put some of these concepts into words, I can get a better handle on them myself.