The sessions I submitted are listed below. I was really hoping the one on PCI would be accepted. I’ve spent close to two years learning about enterprise security and compliance, and I think it’s a topic that needs for discussion. I was also hoping the half day workshop on professional development would be one picked. For the last few years I’ve taught a lot of people why they need a plan, now I’m working on the how. These sessions are ones that I’m interested in, knowledgeable about, passionate about – ones I want to present, not at all designed to be ones most likely to get picked.

The thing I know is that picking sessions is subjective. You can score them all you want, but in the end you do some juggling to get a diverse (people, topics, levels) yet balanced (people, topics,levels) schedule. It should be subjective,to a point. Use a system to get close, then a committee to fine tune.

Human nature – including me – is to ask “why didn’t I get picked”? It might be that the abstract had a typo, a title that was too cute or too blah, was too short or too long. Maybe it scored equally with someone with a track record of presenting the same topic, or with perceived better speaking experience. Maybe there are 18 people wanting to talk about indexes and we don’t need 18 index presentations. Giving personalized feedback on that in an official way is hard – there is enough work to do just evaluating them and picking the final schedule. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s more work with more complexities because now you’re telling people why they aren’t good enough, and being human, we’re probably going to disagree with the assessment!

Rather than feedback, I’d like to see PASS and the Program Committee do more to educate speakers up front. Do an updated webinar every year that reviews the process, talks about common mistakes and misconceptions, how to find and use peer reviews to increase your chance of being selected, and how to lay the ground work for being perceived as being ready for a national stage. I think that would dispel a lot of frustration. For example I had two sessions rejected as being repeats from a previous year. I didn’t know the focus was on new content (maybe I missed that) or I would have submitted something a bit different.

If you didn’t get selected, I feel your pain. Take a look at the final schedule, read the abstracts, try to be dispassionate while you consider if they had something that your submission didn’t. Reach out to a peer, or find someone that has spoken at the Summit and ask for their feedback. If you think there are changes you could make, go make them now so you’re ready for next year. If you don’t see changes and think it was just luck of the draw, start thinking about what you can do in the next year to increase your chances. Maybe you can present on the topic more often, maybe you can build a second or third presentation, maybe you can work on extending your network. There will be something you can do to increase your odds next time around.

I’ve been a proponent for years of forced rotation of speakers, something along the lines of making them sit out every third year (or something like that) to make sure we get new voices on the schedule. I sat out a year deliberately a couple years back and it was hard at first, but then it was pleasant. I had the freedom to just be an attendee, no practicing, no pressure. I remind myself that I’ll have that freedom again this year!

Congratulations to the 100 or so speakers that were selected. Thanks to all who submitted and weren’t selected this time. A special thanks to the volunteers on the Program Committee who sifted and sorted through a lot of abstracts to build the final schedule. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Charlotte in a few months, enjoying a great event in an East Coast city!

All very practical.

Maybe not a lot of fun if you’re the keeper of the lost items. Maybe not a lot of fun for you, if you see it as a distraction (and assuming you haven’t lost anything).

Me, I see it as a chance for some fun!

For example, recently someone left a ring in the break room. I go to Google images, find a picture of a toe ring on a toe with some nice polish, paste that into a reply with a note that I’m so glad they found it and hit send. I’m kind enough to not ‘reply all’, though some rainy day I’ll probably have to give that a try too.

Lots of ways to be over the top without crossing any HR lines. Be creative, it’s good for you!

This reminds me why software is so hard. I can’t tell you what I want, but I will probably know it when I see it!

With the July date fast approaching I needed to move somewhere, forcing me to decide something. Feedly imports from Reader, so as is often the case the lower friction made it the easiest thing to do. Thoughts so far:

• Annoyed it requires a Chrome extension
• Android client is very nice (but no offline support that I can see)
• Once a feed is added I don’t see a way to move it to a different folder, leaving remove/re-add as the option
• One week into it it feels good enough, not much in it frustrates me

At Level 2 you’re wise enough to not click send at the end of the writing. Writing is useful, it’s cathartic on its own, and sometimes the writing helps you realize that your frustration, though real, isn’t something that sending this particular email (or maybe any email) will fix. Saving it as a draft and coming back to it, even an hour later, gives you the chance to cool off just a little. Sometimes they get edited and then sent (better an edit than not), more often they just sit in the drafts folder,piling up as a silent record of the stresses and strains of work.

At Level 3 you don’t write the email. You’ve grown to the point where you manage your reaction to the stress and arrive at a decision that an email isn’t going to change your problem. You might just let it go,you might log it mentally for a follow up when the right opportunity arises.

Level 4, attained only by Yoda, is where you don’t get frustrated.

Level 2 is interesting. It’s an active response to a stressor and a fairly effective one too. Aiming for Level 3 is worthwhile, but if you never get there, that’s ok. It’s also worth remembering that even as an enlightened Level 3 under the right kind of stress (say lack of sleep + aggravating co-worker) you might revert to Level 2 or even Level 1.

I have to admit to laughing (cackling? howling?) at the idea of saving all of those drafts and when you finally leave, sending all of them. Take that you aggravating swine! Fun to imagine, horrific in the implementation I think. Write the draft if you will, but delete the draft soon after. 

Ah, the things I think about.

I tend to throw whatever I’m reading on my desk. It reminds me to stay at it (not all these books are page turners after all), but I’ve also found that it is a useful way of starting conversations. It’s also interesting to see people ask (or you see them thinking) “why would you read that?”.

I wish I saw other people do this more. It feels like a lot of people are successful in the short term with no learning, or just in time learning. It’s a practical (or cynical) strategy, but it’s short sighted, there is no investment in “later”. Then again, maybe I just don’t seem them making that investment.

Interesting to think about, isn’t it?

I’ve never been just a DBA. Or maybe just anything. Heck, maybe no one is. I know that I look at people that seem to be just something with a bit of envy, it’s nice to have that focus and consistency. That seems like what serious people should do. I think about my grandfather who was a policeman for 26 years, retired, then worked another 17 years in the court system. I think about a line in a Spenser novel by Martin Quirk (the police captain), commenting that he has been a cop for 30 years and if he wasn’t serious about it,he’d be doing something else.

Somehow that’s never been my path. Or at least not so far. I think about job decisions and career choices,but it’s driven by some internal compass that is hard to express as a rule. I’ve said no less often than yes to interesting jobs, but I have said no at times, and left perfectly good jobs because it was time to go. Money matters, sort of. If I’m going work I’d like to get paid what I’m worth, but the work has to interest me (or at least I’d really like it to be that way). Framing a job as a challenge certainly gets my attention, but even then it’s some mix I look for – I turned down two very nice long term positions in the past year because that mix wasn’t there.

I’ve had a sense of wanting to acquire skills that I’ll need, for something, where something is not well defined, but I suspect is both that next business I build and the non-profit I’ll surely create at some point. It’s hard to make decisions about which fork in the road is the right one (or as Yogi said, take it) when you don’t have that clear destination in mind.

I don’t think I’ll figure all of it out in 5 weeks. My friend Steve Jones tells me I need to work on writing and I think he’s right. Serious writing is a whole different thing from writing blog posts that certainly can and do ramble at times. I want to do more on understanding and teaching professional development, but I’m not at all sure it’s what I want to do full time, yet anyway. I miss being a SQL guy, I miss the doing part of technology. I like the people side of the business. I like working alone and I like working with a team, how to reconcile that? I’m quite sure I couldn’t describe my dream job today, but maybe soon.

As much as anything for the past couple years I’ve been troubleshooter, taking on a tough project that had to be delivered, and I find I like doing that. Much like figuring out a performance problem, getting something moving that is complex, broken, or both is a fun challenge, especially when it involves people and technology. I don’t know that I want to make a career of it, but I don’t know that I don’t either. At heart I’m a problem solver – that’s what I do.

Maybe now is the time to return to the hedge. I have a client that has an interesting project. It’s been going on for a while and has a ways to go. It was unclear how or where I might fit into that and due to timing and other stuff it didn’t look like it would work out, as much as it might have been a good fit. Normally with an assignment ending I’d be lining up more work well in advance, but this time I was inclined to take a chance and just wait a bit. Waiting isn’t easy, for me and especially for my wife who likes at least the appearnace of job stability, so the compromise was to plan on the break that ended with the family vacation in June, and if nothing had materialized by then I’d have a good start on what I wanted to do next and could get busy trying to make that happen.

Waiting worked out, I think. I’m moving on to that project now, with only a light understanding of what the final role will be. Interestingly I’m not too worried about the lack of definition. I’m betting it will clarify over a few weeks and work out, and if it doesn”t, I’ll deal with it then. That does mean, sadly, that I don’t get my 5 week break, and that hurts more than I expected. I’m willing to postpone it for a while, but I want that time. Even planning for that break has been useful, and I have some things I can work on while I’m getting there.

Right decision? Hard to know.

At the time a year seemed like a lot, but not out of the realm of reason, and in a lot of ways I looked at it and treated it as a working sabbatical. Then came the decision to make that break closer to two years. That wasn’t quite as worrisome, but it was still cause for thought. How long can you leave a field/technology before it becomes untenable to return, or at least difficult to return at the same level/salary?

I made a deliberate decision to not be finding reasons to use SQL Server during the day – that would have been going back to the comfort zone. It did force me to use Access from time to time to crunch some data to help me make some decisions (and that only reinforced my love/hate relationship with Access). I also made the deliberate decision to stay engaged, though at reduced levels, with my network. I went to some events,went to the Summit,talked to people in the SQL world.

Today I’d say I’m rusty, but not lost. I’ve spent little time with SQL 2012 so I’m behind on using new features, but I think when it’s time to return it will be a few weeks to grind off the rust. It reminds me that SQL Server, even though it has changed a lot, has in a lot of ways changed incrementally. The visual change from Enterprise Manager to SSMS was jarring, but a DBA today using SQL 2000 (and plenty are) could easily make the leap forward. Of course, that assumes doing data to day DBA/data work, which I’m not. That still leaves me wondering what is the longest you can go before you cannot return? Or is that true? Or how long can you maintain dual skill sets, dual networks, etc?

That fear of falling behind certainly bothered me, and I took some time to think on it before deciding. Today I think that kind of change bothers me less – a result of experience no doubt.

The lessons here are not simple. It’s not as easy as saying never fear change, or don’t worry about falling behind. Changing jobs, taking risks, there is no right answer, no formula, or it wouldn’t be a risk. I guess I would tell you, though, that if you get a chance to step away for a year take it. Grow and see what happens. Maybe you’ll return rusty and eager, maybe you’ll take a different path – just have to see. If you think of it as a working sabbatical (oxymoron?) it makes a lot more sense.

Not sure I explained that well, but I’m going to post as is – writing about fear isn’t the easiest thing for me.