Its been a busy holiday for me. Tim and I spent the days traveling since the weekend after Christmas until January 2nd moving the RV from California to Texas. I’m not the biggest fan of the Southwest- I just like green and water too much… 🙂 Crushing IT Bias Book The evenings and nights were spent finishing up my book on Women in Technology, called “Crushing the IT Gender Bias” with Apress. I’ve been working on it for over six months in my spare time and it’s surprising just how much it takes to get a book out the door.…
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When I arrived at Microsoft, I knew I would hopefully get to use my Linux skills for more than teaching SQL Server DBAs about Linux and was pleasantly surprised as I began working in Azure to find that, of course, it’s ALL LINUX. After almost six months at the company and coming into the Christmas week, I’m thankful for all the technology I’m working with and what many assume that Microsoft won’t be about- the command line. Azure All the Time As much as I feel GUIs are necessary, I’m happiest at the command line and recommend to all those…
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I have a t-shirt that says, “Underestimate me, that’ll be fun” on the front of it. This statement pretty much sums up my life and I continue to both impress and annoy people, which means I’m living up to it. The session evaluations came out for PASS Summit and I was surprised by some of the reviews I received. The opportunity to under estimate you is kind of expected. I’m pretty comfortable with my skills as a presenter, but it is still new to me to not be as well known in the speaking community as I was in the…
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The first of three books that I’ve been working on this year is out! From Melody Zacharias’ “Let Them Finish” series, this is the Stories from the Trenches, a collection of stories about diversity in tech and how to survive and overcome the challenges. The book can be picked up via hardcopy from Amazon and a Kindle version is around the corner, if like me, paper is against your religion. 🙂 I want to thank Rie Irish for recommending me, Melody Zacharias for allowing me, an Oracle girl, to contribute to this book, and Tracy Boggiano, Angela Tidwell, Brian Carrig,…
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My blog was hacked last week, deliberately and maliciously. I was hacked because my lacking knowledge in the area of website management and saved by my control issues as a Database Administrator. It was a valuable lesson to learn in regards to being a woman in technology and new technical skills. If you ask most women, they’ll most likely say that they haven’t had too many difficulties with men harassing them, especially if they’re over 40. In truth, its not that they haven’t, we often become so immune to it, until other women recall their own stories, then suddenly recall…
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Time Flies when you’re having fun or when you’re crazy busy-  I’m unsure which is more true. I just completed my first review as an employee at Microsoft and good news!  They’re going to keep me. 🙂 I still get a number of questions surrounding my job at Microsoft.  Since I worked for Oracle for 2 1/2 years, much of it speaking between customer engagements, many didn’t realize that I started out, and have always been, multi-platform.  My first database was a monstrous SQL Server, version 7 and small Oracle and Sybase databases.  I have always loved technology.  I found…
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I get a lot of questions about what it’s like to work remote while living in our 5th wheel. I’ll link this post to danceswithwinnebagos.com, too, so for those asking the same question from that site, it’s a two for one… 🙂 I don’t just break any ol’ rule, I break rules that don’t makes sense and working from an office was one of them. The amount of time lost in a daily commute was something I wasn’t able to accept. I hated open work spaces, which more offices are going to, (my ADHD does NOT thank you for the…
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The next nine days, I’m traveling to three cities for four events. We’ll just call this the 9-3-4 gauntlet of speaker life. I booked this travel as four, one-way flights to get the itinerary I needed to make the most of my schedule and will have breaks between each event to make sure I don’t kill myself my last two weeks at Delphix. GLOC Today I’m heading to the Great Lakes Oracle Conference, (https://gloc.neooug.org/) where I get to present on DevOps and hang out with all my Oracle peeps. GLOC is the second largest regional Oracle user group event and…
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The only thing that stays the same is change…. As the time flies by and the world turns, I often am jarred back to reality when I discover how the little things we do can have a larger impact on the world around us. Flying back from Interop ITX and StarEast conferences last week, I was reminded of this. While reading the latest copy of Wired , I came across a story on D-Tech High School. This is the school that resides on the Oracle headquarters campus, in its own building(s). The story was interviewing different students to discuss how…
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I spent this week speaking at two conferences that may not be familiar to my usual crowd: • Techwell StarEast Testing Conference in Orlando, FL • Interop ITX Data Conference in Las Vegas, NV StarEast Testing Conference Techwell’s event is attended by testers and had over 2000 attendees at the Hyatt Regency Orlando’s Convention Center. This is a huge convention center and I won’t lie- I did try to first register at the Mazda event and then the KPMG event. One of the attendees in my session admitted she was crashing my talk from the KPMG conference and I was pretty…
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I’m recovering after a very successful RMOUG Training Days 2018 and now looking towards the next year. The board elections come up in two months and I’m happy to say, that the goals that I hoped to achieve in my year as president, the board was able to achieve even as I worked on the conference and started as the president for the SQL Server User Group here in Denver, all in parallel. The primary leadership for the user group was becoming aware of what most Oracle user groups are facing- our user groups are getting older, (2018 was the…
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So I survived the first day of RMOUG Training Day’s workshops, sessions and the VIP Reception ran a little later last night than we originally planned. I had to present in the first session of the day at 8:30am, so I was a little worse for wear when I checked into my room for DevOps for the DBA. I really appreciate all the attendees that came to the session, the great questions and feedback I received. Its not easy to pay attention to a speaker that early in the morning! Penny Avril gave us an excellent keynote, describing where Oracle…
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So its the first day of RMOUG Training Days 2018 in Westminster, CO, (just NW of Denver, between Denver and Boulder) and we’re enjoying the winter weather after spring temperatures on Sunday, which dropped almost 50F degrees in a single day. The change in temperatures was accompanied by about 8 inches of snow for Denver and most of those in summer gear were faced with only one choice…. Actually they were left with two- They *could* go for a swim in the snow or they could register for the workshops at RMOUG Training Days, braving the roads, (which due to…
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So I went on a business trip to visit my company headquarters this last week and I took my dog with me. Yes, you heard that right, my dog. My 10lb Chihuahua/Basenji mix dog, Esme, is actually a service dog, which means she can go almost anywhere with me. She’s gone through a good amount of training to do so and honestly, she travels better than most adults. Although she’s had all the training, the fact can’t be ignored that she was a severely abused puppy and still suffers some residual effects of this. The task she performs is at…
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Just over a year ago, an alarm of emails, posts and projects arose in Europe surrounding the General Data Protection Regulation, also known with the acronym, GDPR. It was as if someone had poked the sleeping bear of IT and woke it and boy, was it grumpy. Suddenly EU technologists were learning all about advanced system security, how to encrypt and mask data, multi-tier authentication, along with creating procedures when a user requested to be forgotten. Projects and money were being allocated to take on this demand that considering its initiative was passed back in 2014, you’d think would have…
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My brain has a tendency to wake up way before everything else in the house, so I try to keep it occupied best I’m able without disturbing anyone.  This may explain why so many if my plans are well flushed out, as I have a tendency to hash them out in the early morning hours as a way of letting the rest of the household sleep.  This morning, on the eve of Christmas, I may have let my brain offer a Database Administrator twist to an old Christmas favorite… Yes, to the tune of “the 12 Days of Christmas “…
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So where did 2017 go?!?!? I really, really would like to know… Needless to say, it’s time to do a year in review already and I actually have time to do it this year! DBAKevlar Blog I wrote over 100 blog posts this year between DBAKevlar, Delphix and partner sites, but I’ve enjoyed sharing with the different communities. There’s significant changes going on in the IT world regarding the future of the Database Administrator. This deafening message came through when pulling together my top blog posts for 2017, with Death of the DBA, Long Live the DBA presenting itself as…
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Its been a couple years since I presented at UKOUG. After taking last year off to prioritize some projects with Delphix, I’m back to speaking and the event committee was gracious enough to offer a goth girl a couple spots on the schedule this year. The event is in Birmingham, and although I’ve never been there, I’m told by reports, it’s rather rainy and cold this time of year, so I better prepare, (nothing like people selling you on a location…:)) I have two sessions this year, the first one is on Super Sunday: Sunday, Dec. 3rd at 4pm in the…