As we all know, there will be no in-person conferences anytime soon, but at least with the technology today, we can have virtual conferences and meetups.
In the past few months I was supposed to speak at 3 conferences (UTOUG Training Days in Utah, NEOOUG GLOC in Ohio, and ODTUG KScope in Boston) and organize our BCOUG Tech Day here in Vancouver. None of this happened of course, and I also got a message from UTOUG that after postponing the conference to August, it is now cancelled. However, quite a few opportunities came up because everything went virtual:
First, ODTUG organized a “home series” (sort of instead of KScope) so I presented there.
Second, I was contacted by the Dallas OUG and presented a session at one of their meetups.
Then I submitted papers for the Groundbreaker tours in India (OGYatra by AIOUG) and South America (OG LATAM). I didn’t get any sessions accepted for the South America tour, but did have 2 sessions accepted for the one in India. This is so great as I had heard a lot about this conference, but India is on the other side of the world and would have been quite difficult for me to travel there had the conference been in-person and not virtual.
Yesterday I presented the first session for OGYatra and enjoyed it a lot. This was a new session (about DB schema design, you can find the presentation in my presentations page) and I think it went really well. I got some great feedback and really good questions. Can’t wait for my next one about SQL Tuning on July 15.
And last, I will be presenting a webinar for ODTUG on July 28. This is a new session as well and the first time I’ll be presenting a non-tech one. This is something I’m really excited about as I’ve been thinking about this topic for a LONG time. The session is called “Finding the Right Fit: Interviewing and Being Interviewed in the DB World” and I’ll talk about my experience when interviewing people and being interviewed. I wrote a post about this a long time ago, and finally turned it into a session. The session got accepted for KScope20 in Boston, but since the conference was cancelled I contacted ODTUG and we scheduled it as a webinar. It’s going to be a light and fun session with lots of stories, and it’s free. You can register here.
I really hope we will be able to have in-person conferences again, as I love them so much and miss the entire community. But as long as this pandemic is going on, let’s take advantage of the technology and meet virtually, learn, and have fun.
