Author Archives: Niko Neugebauer

The hardest part

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The hardest part of the 2012 for me so far is the amount of work that needs to be done – daily work and SQLSaturday preparations. There are 1001 things and details which must be taken care of, and there absolutely no time to relax or to treat my own plans for this year. I wanted to lay out what I wanted to do in 2012, but we are already in the middle of the February and I have not managed to find some time to think overly through what I would like to do in 2012, besides what is already established — the SQLSaturday #115.

I was actually hoping to get more time for my own technical education and to spend more time with my family, but I starting to feel that the technical progress and my own education shall be left somewhere out of my reach for the 2012. It does not mean that I won’t be learning on the daily basis, because I do, but studying in order to get the MCM will be left for the next year, as I am definitely not going to decrease my time with my family.

The hardest part in life is making a choice, the right choice. We make choices every minute of our lifes, we make choices what to eat, what to wear, what and whom to listen and we make choices on bigger things like what to do, what to learn and where to work. We have to choose wisely, as most of the times there is no going back – because life advances fast and some of the possibilities are gone, so we always have to select the most essential. The most essential in life is easy – it is who we are, it is what identifies us as people.

We are always tempted by our influences and by our own aspirations, but in the end we just have to remember who we really are … and this is really the hardest part.

Starting 2012

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Besides my wildest hopes that I would have time for learning more of SQL Server, the reality is that I am deeply stuck somewhere in 2011 with my plans still not being finished. :) haha

This is all because of the SQLSaturday#115, which I hope will become a legendary event in Portugal. We are working our butts off to make it happen, and not just to create the biggest privately organized IT event in the Portuguese history, but we are working hard to enhance it with a deep social meaning. What does it actually mean – you might ask. Well, there are 2 unannounced parts of our event which are still under construction, but which I consider one of the most important things about our SQLSaturday.

What is about? Its all about community, the real community which surrounds all of us, living in Portugal. Our SQLPort community has to give something back to the people and its a perfect time to start. We will be announcing these 2 parts very soon.

Reviewing 2011

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Though the new 2012 year has started already almost a week ago, I am still trying to review what has happened in my life during the past year (2011).

In a professional sense, 2011 was dominated by the SQL Server, as it was in the past 3 years. I have had spent more then 200 hours on my SQL Server education, and by the end of the year I was lucky to change my daily work from a major part of a typical day dedicated to SQL Server to full-day SQL Server engagement. Right now I am doing a lot of SSIS works, which I am enjoying a lot.

I have presented much more times than I have originally thought and planned – 7 times instead of just 4, that I was expecting in the beginning of 2011. I had delivered a couple of small sessions and lighning talks at SQLPort, NetPonto and PASS. Comparing to the past years, this was definitely the biggest audience that I have reached within a same year.

I have had a period in September-October when I was looking for a new gig, but even after doing 9 interviews, the company I am working with (Novabase) has found a great new gig which I was more then happy to accept. This period of interviews has given my a better view of the current market situation, and the way that things are. I had applied to a couple of portuguese companies that I admire, and with one I have got even to the very last stage, but … when I was saying that I was ready to spend 1 week per month away from home at max, I was really meaning it. I am about to become a father for the second time, and at that time frame I was not going to reveal that it was one of the main reasons for not wanting to work in other countries.

Apart from daily work, there has been so much work with SQLPort, that I am really wondering how on earth I managed to pull it of. SQLPort – Portuguese SQL Server User Group is a baby which has enjoyed a very strong growth – in almost every aspect the group has grown around 100% – events attendance, signups, number of users, etc, etc.
Sure enough – we have had arranged great presentations by the Portuguese professionals and some international specialists like Brent Ozar, Alejandro Leguizamo (SolidQ), Scott Stauffer and Kalen Delaney.

We had organized the first official SQLSaturday outside of Northern America and let me tell you, that the amount of time that a person spends to organize such an event is genuinely ginormous. Do not be fooled, it gives such a big pleasure of helping your own community, that when looking back one feels an enormous satisfaction that we have had full-day event and delivered great content for over a 100 of SQL Server professionals.

Once again I went to the PASS Summit, and once again it was an absolutely marvelous experience. Besides just learning and communicating with other SQL Server professionals, I was given to deliver an opportunity to deliver a small presentation – a so called Lightning Talk. I have chosen to present in what I call “Niko On Steroids” style, which is a kind of very energetic presentation style. When I am speaking about a subject, I feel a genuine passion about it. I am alive, so I need to feel, and when a topic is close to me – then I am looking that every person in the room gets the message. Those who are present, are free to agree or disagree with the subject but if one thing is sure – when listening to me you will feel the highs and lows that I feel when thinking about the subject.

I am not the biggest fan of separating things based just on the calendar year, but if I am looking at the year 2011 – I feel satisfaction. It was a year of learning and surviving. I have faced some difficulties, like a potential unemployment, stress and depression, but I have passed them – hoping that I have become just a bit stronger and a bit happier.

2012 will be different … but I am looking forward to all that it is going to bring into my life.

Rethink, reload, relaunch

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This is a turning point for this site – I took my time and I am relaunching this blog.
I will be writing more about the stuff I am doing – like SQLPort (Portuguese SQL Server Community), SQLSaturday#115 – the biggest IT community event in Portugal ever, and so on. Good stuff in 2012 :)
I will be sharing some thoughts about the state of the community and the enterprises in my country (Portugal) and in general.
Stay tuned. :)

SQLPort

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In a couple of days i am going to launch SQLPort, a portuguese SQL Server User Group, which will be an official PASS chapter in Portugal. SQLPort will be a no profit community, which will do its best in helping SQL Server professionals improving their daily job, by showing good practices and exciting ways of the using the features of SQL Server.

This site is based on Drupal 6, but even by the launch time it should not be 100% ready for production – i have been working on it in my spare time during the last 2 weeks, which is way too few time for a serious project like that. I am hoping that by the early May the site is going to be stabilized in the terms of the design and functionality, and by that time we shall have enough professionals who will help us with a high quality content.

Firefox 3 is released

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Mozilla has released the final version of the most anticipated and celebrated browser : Firefox 3. This is the second “true” release from Mozilla, as the Firefox 2 was actually a kind of small update to Firefox 1, and at the time of the development Firefox 2 number was set on 1.5, but then basically to compete with the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, they decided to increase the version number.

This time there was no need in doing it, Firefox 3 is a brand new release with quite a number of new features and functionalities. Codenamed “Gran Paradiso” it has been under development for more then 1.5 years, and it uses the newest version of layout engine – Gecko 1.9, which has quite a number of difference in comparisson with a Firefox 2, which was Gecko 1.8.1 based. The most important features of the Firefox 3 are: Gecko 1.9 (it passes the ACID 2 test, opposite to the Firefox 2, which fails; it implements some of the HTML 5 upcomming features), APNG (animated PNG: besides Firefox, Opear 9.5 is also supporting it), completely reworked url address bar (which will truly search visited urls as you type the address to show you a list with urls to select), verified pages (the icon before the url bar, which allowes to consult the certificate, reworked bookmarks system : one-click addition bookmarks (a golden star, which allow you to add a page to your favourites with just one click on it) and tags for the bookmarks (the social part is getting even inside your browser), completely reworked add-ons system (a number of plugins even stopped working with the new version, but i believe that in a couple of weeks those problems should be addressed by the developers of the respective plugins).

Also there are some serious improvements in memory-management area, at least the first impression, is that Firefox 3 consumes much less memory then it predecessor. It appears to be more stable, especially when opening multiple google pages (gmail, analytics and docs for example), which is quite important since the Firefox 2 required a lot of attention while working with multiple tabs with google pages open.

A number of pages appears to have some serious bugs — the layout engine is quite different to the elder one of Firefox 2, and i currently see a lot of pages which rendering wrong, one of the most famous examples is Google Analytics, where the second date of the range “falls” down below the start date and breaks the interface. I have noticed, that various pages reendering in a very similar way as a Opera 9.x and opposite to Opera 9.5, i have one of such examples in a current project which should go online next month.

Another favourite feature of mine is a closing page controller, which will allow you to save and restore current tabs when closing Firefox. A part of this feature on Firefox 2 has already working when shutting the computer down, but without a message box to confirm if you want to save it. It is very usefull, when you wish to close Firefox while starting some memory-consuming applications as a graphical editors for instance. Opera 9.5 recently released has this feature as weel.

Firefox 3 has finally abandoned support for Windows 95 (yeah, a product which is 13 years old), Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows NT 4, and if you are still using one of those systems (insane thing because of the security problems and the fact that all of them are more then 2 years are not supported), then Firefox 2 is your best friend. You won’t miss anything groundbreaking on the web in the next couple of years, so if you stick with the elder “brother” you will still be quite safe. As for the Mac OS X version – the OS X 10.4 is required and its a typical situation for macintosh software – i don’t really thing that any real Mac user will be affected by this fact. The reason of using the OS X 10.4 was implementing Firefox natively, so it will have a native Cocoa widget interface, and such things as transparency when overlapping with Flash elements on the page, for example (it has bugged me for quite some time). It is also much faster as a native application, there is no doubt about it.

After 1.5 years of the development, 4 beta versions and 3 release candidates the final version has finally arrived. Take a look at it, and while some graphic bugs and incompatibilities are unavoidable, this is not a future browser – this is a browser of the moment.