Recap of Speaking at SQLSaturday Cincinnati

1 minute read

On March 30, 2019, I had the privilege to speak at my first SQLSaturday event in Cincinnati. The topic I had chosen, I felt pretty good about. I had presented it a handful of times to local groups and the feedback, for the most part, was always positive. So I began the prep work needed to get ready. I built out multiple redundancies within my plan. Two laptops fully provisioned with the software needed to present the session, multiple sets of adapters in case something went wrong or I showed up and the type input was different than I expected, and finally I uploaded everything to GitHub in case of major failure. What I wasn’t prepared for, was that when I entered into presentation mode from within PowerPoint, that it would fry the input on the project system. Not once, but twice within two separate rooms.

I thought, surely the attendees and event organizers were going to run me out of town with pitchforks and torches. But everyone involved was amazing, they helped try to troubleshoot the cause and ultimately I ended up having to just speak through my session without any display. The attendees remained seated throughout all of this, highly-attentive, and provided great Q&A throughout the remainder of the session. I say all of this just to say, I couldn’t have asked for a better experience for my first event. Akhil and the other volunteers put on an amazing and welcoming event for everyone within the community. My only hope is that next year I have the opportunity again to speak and this time, make sure not to mess anything up :).

Updated: