I know it has been very long since our SQLSaturday, but my life was too busy for anything else, besides my family.
Right now, I found that this is the right moment to reflect on everything surrounded our SQLSaturday#115:
First of all, it was a success, a very big and gratifying one. I have heard from a lot of people I know, very nice things about the event and organization and so on, and actually remembering it all – I am really proud of what we have achieved:
- We have managed to pull a nice workshop before the SQLSaturday (my deep bow to Paulo Matos, who worked tirelessly to make it happened, and boy – how well he did it); :)
- We have organized one of the biggest technological non-profit event in Portugal, and we have given one of the best education possible to almost 200 people, having a lot of locally and internationally renown speakers;
- Overall session quality was definitely the best that we could get – I have a deep gratitude to all speakers for their knowledge sharing and I have no regrets of the missing content;
- We have proved the point, that even in a country, where the common thought says that no event on Saturday can be successful, we have made an important change;
- We have managed to join enough local and international sponsors to arrange everything that we needed to make our event a big success. I am absolutely and very deeply grateful to each and every of our sponsors, for their support. Here they are once again: Microsoft, UAL, ActualTraining, who were our golden sponsors: SQLPass, BI4ALL, Rumos & Idera were our principal sponsors, while a lot of swag was provided by the likes of Sapien, O’Reilly, Pluralsight, Morgan Kaufmann, FCA & Wrox
- We have taken care of our speakers with a good success: we have picked them up at the airport, we have organized a speaker dinner before the event and a nice after-party, we have organized and payed the lunch for everyone involved in the organization process. We have taken around and show a bit of Lisbon to those speakers who were staying in Portugal on Sunday, and we have even brought them to the airport;
There were enough moments when we have failed and I hope that we shall learn from those mistakes well, not repeating them in the future:
- We have failed a bit on the registration process, since it was too long and some of the originally planned things, like swag tickets distribution has failed – next time we shall allocate more resources and give more thoughtful planning to this task;
- The food choice for the speakers might have been better – and we will do some seriously different stuff next time;
- Swag distribution was probably one of our biggest failures – since it took almost an hour to give away all the prizes. The root of this problem was the swag ticket distribution in the beginning of the event- we have had almost 100 winners who were not present at the event at all.
All in all we did quite well, and I promise you that the next time, we shall take the SQLSaturday experience to a whole new level, so stay tuned :)