Month: March 2024

Blogging My Bits Sessions: Safe Landings (4/4)

Blogging My Bits Sessions: Safe Landings (4/4)

Welcome back to the final blog in my SQLBits 2024 blog series! I am incredibly fortunate to be involved in presenting four different sessions this year at this year’s Bits and this week’s post brings us to my last session of the event: “Safe Landings: Self-case In A High Intensity Technological World”. It will be presented in Gate 7 from 16:50 to 17:40 on Friday, 22 March.

Regular readers of this blog series may remember that I announced it as four blogs, one on each of the four Wednesdays leading up to SQLBits. They might also remember that last week’s post about Mental Health Monologues was published on Thursday. This week’s is being published on Friday. As I’m presenting two mental health-related sessions next Friday at Bits, this seems like an excellent time to point out that not stressing too much about self-imposed deadlines can be an excellent step towards looking after yourself. 🙂

I’m excited to present this session as it allows me to discuss a lot of the lessons I’ve learned from on-call jobs, high-intensity environments, high-intensity bosses, and my own times where I’ve been in leadership roles. It is so easy to get caught up in the cool technology we get to work on, and the demanding customers and users who consume what we produce and sustain, that those of us in this field tend to lose sight of ourselves in the service of others. My hope is that you will walk away from this session with some actionable tips to take care of yourself as work and the world spin madly on around you.

I’ll be on Farnborough from Tuesday afternoon through the end of the event on Saturday and I look forward to connecting with many of you before and after my sessions on Wednesday and Friday. Safe travels to all and apologies that I never managed to a procure a costume for this year’s fancy dress Friday party. See you at Bits!

Blogging My Bits Sessions: MHMs (3/4)

Blogging My Bits Sessions: MHMs (3/4)

Welcome to the third blog in my four-blog series about the sessions I am presenting or co-presenting at SQLBits 2024. If you’ve been following along with the series, you may be thinking “Matt, aren’t these supposed to come out on Wednesdays?” – and you would be right! March is packed with massive data events – DataTune, Microsoft MVP Summit, SQLBits, and Fabric Community Conference – and the combination of my Centric Consulting client work and preparation for these events means I’m writing this blog on a Thursday. Pay no mind to the day of the week, and let’s get into the meat of my third session of SQLBits week.

On Friday, March 22, from 9:00-9:50 in Gate 4 I will be one of the presenters for Mental Health Monologues. Hopefully that solves the mystery for you on what MHMs meant in the title! These monologues will be short talks from a few members of the data community about the struggles we’ve had, the struggles we may continue to have, and ways that we deal with these issues and, hopefully, progress. We will have a mental health professional present during the session (SQLBits is amazing and make counselors available throughout the event as well), but I do want to alert potential attendees to the possibility of some of this content being triggering. Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, etc. are likely to be discussed and we all want to make sure that we are upfront about that.

To be honest, the prospect of speaking for a few minutes directly about topics this personal is terrifying. Sure, I have blogged here very honestly about struggles I’ve had but there is a big jump between hitting publish on a blog post and speaking live to an audience about topics like this. That said, I know how much sessions similar to this have helped me in the past and I’m hoping to be a small part of helping session attendees make progress with their issues or, at minimum, understand that others in our community deal with these issues. Speaking from experience, that knowledge in and of itself can bring a measure of relief. I hope you’ll join us for this 50-minute session and, if you do, I’m happy to chat afterwards if you think it will help in any way.

Stay tuned next week for the final blog in this SQLBits series, but until then, bye for now.