This post might come a bit late but this is in response to Bob Pusateri‘s T-SQL Tuesday topic about presenting. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging event, with a different community host each month.
So, how did I come to present and loving it?
“a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
After getting my graduate degree I stayed as an Assistant Professor at Politechnica University of Timisoara, my Alma Mater, teaching seminars and labs on Programming 101 (Turbo Pascal … oh my!) and Relational databases labs while being the resident Oracle DBA at the Software Engineering department. 3 years later, I switched to a full time job as Oracle DBA and later moved to a different continent with a different language and being an ESL speaker I did not think I would be speaking at public events… until 2 years ago at SQL Skills Immersion Events in Chicago (with Bob Pusateri!! our blog host). On the fourth day of the IE 1 class I volunteered to present a slide deck on SSD technology . I was extremely embarrassed as I felt like I was not in the same league as the rest of the presenters, but everything went so well that it made me reconsider my thoughts. As a matter of fact it made me submit a couple sessions for SQL Saturday #82 in Indianapolis and this was the beginning of my public speaking adventure. Later that year I actually presented 2 sessions in a day at SQL Saturday #96 in Washington, DC and the feedback was excellent.
Starting on a journey as a speaker that has been incredibly rewarding and even though most of the time I paid for it out of my own pocket, the knowledge and the friends that I made on this journey were worth every effort. Last year two of my goals came true: attending PASS Summit for the first time and presenting my session titled “Optimizing SQL Server I/O with Solid State Drives ” at PASS Summit 2012. To put things in perspective, 2012 has proved to be truly amazing: Being mentored by Joe Sack blog|@josephsack from SQLskills, attending my third SQLskills Immersion Event – IE3, speaking at 6 SQLSaturday events in Madison WI, Chicago IL, Indianapolis IN, Iowa City IA, Kalamazoo MI and Minneapolis MN. I was extremely honored to be selected to speak a PASS Summit 2012, the greatest SQL Server conference of the year where I was joined by more than 150 of the industry’s leading speakers while having the unique chance to meet over 5000 database professionals.
My friend Paul Timmerman mentioned in his post that last year I inspired him to start presenting. I am deeply honored to grow the community and inspire others to start speaking at community events the same way as I was inspired by Brent Ozar, Jes Borland, Paul Randal, Joe Sack and many other folks that are now part of my #SQLfamily
…and it all started 2 years ago with a session that was not supposed to last more than 15 minutes.
This week I will be attending my 4th SQL Saturday in Chicago, second time as a speaker, hope you can make it to my session or just come by and say hi.
One Reply to “T-SQL Tuesday #41 – A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”