First of all thanks to Riley Major (b|t) for hosting this months T-SQL Tuesday. This is a great topic for me as I have mentioned before my goal this year is to work on getting my blog going and starting to give back to this amazing community. I am always impressed by the content people produce and share, whether it be blog posts, presentations or just snippets on Twitter and I have learnt so much in my career so far from these sources. Honestly I often feel like I don’t have anything worth sharing and that what I know is obvious and everyone would know it. Then I think back to that first Ohio North SQL Server User Group presentation I went to where Allen White (b|t) gave his now famous introduction, everyone has something to teach, so here goes.
I am all about goals and since we’re already almost six months into 2018 I’m going to set some goals down on paper that will force me out of my comfort zone. I have been working towards these haphazardly so far, so I hope that writing these out will hold me accountable.
Blog Posts
I started this blog back in February of this year and so far have managed four posts, including this one and one guest post on the dbatools blog. My goal for the year is to have 10 posts on this blog, so I have 6 left to write. My aim is to also write some more technical posts. I have been leaning on the T-SQL Tuesday topics so far, so I’ll aim for 3 of the 6 to be more technical in nature.
Github
So far this year I’ve had 22 pull requests (PRs) merged into the dbatools module, and 8 PRs merged into the dbachecks module. Contributing to these modules has been so much fun and has really improved both my PowerShell and Pester skills. I’ll aim to get this up to 50 PR’s by the end of 2018, so 20 to go here.
Presenting
Now this third section is the one that produces the most anxiety. I have thought about this for a while now and it’s time. My goal here is to deliver one presentation to my local user group (it’s actually scheduled for June 5th, 28 days away but who’s counting…), and one to another audience. I imagine it’ll be the same presentation, I’ve been working hard on one for the user group on data compression, but I would love to deliver this to a SQL Saturday or some other local conference. I was hoping I could present to the user group and then submit to a local SQL Saturday but my best chance of accomplishing this by the end of 2018 is to submit to SQL Saturday Columbus which I need to do before May 29th.
Goals
What’s better than a checklist? I hope 2018 is the start of many years of giving back and perhaps my 10th (or more) post of the year will be an update on my progress- watch this space.
- 10 blog posts on jesspomfret.com
- 3 technical posts
- 50 PR’s to dbatools/dbachecks
- 1 user group presentation
- 1 ‘other’ presentation