2018 has been an amazing year for me. I never imagined when I started this blog in February that I would be going into 2019 even more excited to give back to the community. Public speaking is not something that comes easy to me, and in fact I find it pretty terrifying, which is why I’m amazed at how much I enjoyed presenting this past year.  The SQL Server community is definitely a special group of professionals, so thank you to any and all of you who have made this year one of my best yet.
Now I’m all about goals and targets so in May I wrote a T-SQL Tuesday post about giving back to the community and I set several goals to complete in 2018, let’s review.
10 blog posts on JessPomfret.com (3 technical)
This year end summary makes 12 posts for the year, and 7 were technical posts. My most popular post was ‘Checking backups with dbachecks’. I also contributed a guest post on the dbatools blog covering migrating application databases.
50 PR’s to dbatools/dbachecks
This goal was to encourage contributions to open source projects.  My involvement with dbatools and dbachecks is what got me started down this path of blogging and speaking so I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose sight of that.
So far in 2018 I have 40 pull requests to dbatools and 12 to dbachecks, so I have met my goal here with a few days to spare. I also contributed to a few other open source projects this year, I had 3 PRs accepted to the Microsoft Sql-Docs repository, and I have 2 open PRs to the SqlServerDsc module.
1 user group & 1 ‘other’ presentation
This goal I surprised myself with, I thought this would be the hardest one to meet and it ended up being the most rewarding. I presented my first ever session to the Ohio North SQL Server User Group in June, it went ok. My topic was data compression and I found myself sweating, rushing and a little short on content.  With some amazing feedback and support I added some content and delivered it again at SQL Saturday Columbus and it went much better. I then presented it for a third time to the DBA Fundamentals Virtual chapter, which was good although a little strange not being able to see your audience.
I also presented a PSPowerHour lightening talk on apply data compression with dbatools, I’d say I well exceeded this goal.
Looking forward to 2019
My main goal for 2019 is to improve my blog, regular content is going to be the most important part of increasing my traffic so I’m going to aim for 26 blog posts in 2019. I’m also excited to already have two speaking engagements on the calendar as I aim for 5 presentations this year. My data compression session has been accepted to SQL Saturday Cleveland, and a new session I’m working on ‘Installing SQL Server with PowerShell DSC’ was selected for DataGrillen.
I hope everyone has a great last few days of 2018 and starts 2019 strong.
Cheers!