What in the World, Kevlar??

I’ve been getting that question a lot lately.  When I left Microsoft 16 months ago, there was more than one betting pool on which cloud I would go to next, knowing my history and short attention span, but maybe I’m softening in my old age.  I surprised a few when I went to one of the partners that I’d worked with for almost four years while at Microsoft, Silk and over a period of a few months, became their Director of Data and AI.  It was a good opportunity for me, as they understood I needed a lot to keep me interested and busy, so we had negotiated an option for me to contract outside of my dedicated hours to the company.  If I was busy at Silk, great, if not, then I could focus elsewhere and keep boredom at bay, which is an essential requirement for most many folks with ADHD.

In the last year, I’ve contracted with numerous organizations and cloud vendors on short projects which were often fascinating.  It gave me the opportunity to learn new things and even bridge into AI, which I hadn’t expected.

The last four months, Redgate had come to me, who I’d done short work with previously and they asked if I would allocate all my extra hours to them.  I’ve worked with the Redgate folks all the way back to 2011, with Simple Talk articles going back to 2012.  I was thrilled to be working with them again and quickly dedicated my time to the engineering and product teams.

After a month of working, I was approached by the advocacy team.  They had been discussing in the community who might be a good candidate to join the team and my name kept coming up.  When an introduction had been requested, it came to light that I was already contracted to the company to work on the very products that they hoped I might be interested advocating for.  At the same time, Silk, as a startup, had gone through a significant growth spurt and it became apparent there were some specific skills of mine they really needed and surprisingly, much of what they originally hired me for was not it.  We had all discovered while I was there that my “Lego brain” is very good at architecting and building solutions.  They still needed me for this, but the rest of my workload I often found more tedious and it was mostly busy work in my view.

Now anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t understand that there are rules.  Rules state – you are employed by a company and they are your employer, but I’m probably the biggest challenger to “that’s the way we’ve always done it” rule.  I had already negotiated, with Silk’s blessing, a really great way to utilize me and keep my ADHD (or AuDHD for you neurodiversity geeks) brain highly successful, so I used my ability to see how things should be architected to build me a new success from the opportunity at hand.  I was interested in what Redgate had to offer and I was quite sure that the teams would keep me happy and engaged.  I also knew that Silk really did need me for a few hours a week for the few things that I offered that are very valuable.  I liked that I could take on opportunities outside of my main role and was pretty sure they’d done similarly for Grant Fritchey and Steve Jones at some point, but was just assuming.  They’d been there a long time and every discussion I had with them made me aware, they were happy at Redgate and the company was good to them.

Again, just me, not following rules and going for it, I worked with my new boss, Kirsty and we started to figure out what the role would look like.  I had already proven that I could do this and had done it in reverse with Silk as my primary and Redgate, (along with others) as my secondary.  We just needed to negotiate it the other direction.

So, to make a long story short-  I’m thrilled to be at Redgate as the newest Advocate, focused on multiplatform databases and AI, along with continuing my engineering work.  I’m still working a few hours a week with the Silk team as my secondary role, helping where best I’m needed.  I believe in Silk technology and will continue to help them where I am able.  I’m still writing at DZone, working with LinkedIn Learning and others.  I will continue to volunteer in the community and mentor.  It makes me happy to be busy – I have an active brain and like it this way.  I’m so pleased that Redgate feels the same way and each of these organizations are evolved to seeing how to get the most and best from neurodiverse employees like myself.

So I’ll be catching up, getting everything all switched over, as I came into Redgate with a full schedule, already working with teams and at the same time, winding down what I built at Silk.  If you have any doubt, In around the last month, I’ve been to Data Saturday Oslo to talk on AI Integration and the Technologist, Data Saturday Dallas and SQL Saturday Boston to present on Volume Snapshots with Microsoft Fabric and the trip to Boston this last weekend  was after hosting an entire Neurodiversity Day for the Data Platform DEI group on Thursday.  After being on the SQL Saturday Boston WIT panel, I did the initial kick-off for the Data Platform WIT yesterday, so be patient with me and I’ll start blogging here, at Simple Talk and such very soon!