PASS Summit 2018- Times up!

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for almost four months now investing my brain in new technology, reinvesting fully in performing technical work and prioritizing it all to ensure that I’ll be successful.  I stepped back from many speaking events to make sure my private and professional life would succeed in this transition, but that doesn’t mean I would skip PASS Summit.  What I didn’t expect was the event would arrive so quickly and I’d feel like I’m always short of time preparing for it technically or personally!

Well, its 4am on Sunday morning before and I’m up, so I might as well make use of the time and blog.  

This year is no different than most and as is common for most Microsoft events, some of my Oracle peeps wanted to know if I had time to meet for lunch while in Seattle.  I started looking for my two, main calendars and I realized, although I thought I’d make it easier on me professionally by only attending Summit the 6-9, those four days have packed a slew of sessions, presentations, meetings and social events.  Maybe I’m just getting old, but how the hell do we do this for a full week, let along less than four days???

First off, the awesome Diversity and Inclusion book in the Let Them Finish series has come out on Amazon!  “Let Them Finish, Stories from the Trenches” is available and we’ll have a panel to discuss the book and answer questions from those that attend.  It’s going to be a great panel, with Melody Zacharias, Angela Tidwell, Tracy Boggiano, John Moorehouse, Randolph West and myself.  The panel will be in Skagit4 on Wednesday, Nov. 7th, so don’t miss out on the book or the authors who put themselves out there to tackle this difficult and fascinating subject.

I’ll be presenting in two technical sessions and one panel this year.  Both technical sessions will be on Friday, so don’t run off before learning how to automate appropriately for the right DevOps use case in “DevOps and Decoys-  How to Build a Successful Microsoft DevOps Solution” in room 618 at 9:30am on Nov. 9th.  Just a short while later, at 11:15, I’ll be discussing the future of GDPR, along with how companies need to think about the data landscape in room 6c, in “GDPR – The Buck Stops Here”.  

Now three sessions in four days doesn’t sound like *that* much, but then you have the bloggers tables.  I’ll be live blogging during both keynotes and the WIT luncheon.  I will be attending and blogging the executive sessions, (another three sessions.). I am the president of the Denver SQL Server User Group, so I’ll be attending the leadership session and trying to connect with other leaders in the community at the Community space.  

Then, then… we have the social events.  Yes, I want to karaoke.  I have been fearful of attending this event, not because I can’t sing, but because noise and the distraction make it difficult to concentrate hard enough to sing.  Luckily, no one cares if you can sing at these events, so I’m cool. 🙂

I have great parties, at least two a night, every night for the time I’m there.  I have happy hours, planned meetings with people I’m mentoring, peers I can’t wait to see and it all just seems too packed into the four days.  

This is PASS Summit-  a wonderful, crazy, chaotic event of learning, networking, socializing and getting our geek on.  See you on Tuesday, folks.