Marking the 2nd year of the pandemic, 2021 has brought a lot of changes to me, and the biggest of them in the professional space was joining the Azure SQL Managed Instance Product Group at Microsoft. While the stress with job change has caused a lot of anxiety and even caused more health issues, I was able to blog regularly and even returned to my presentation activities and as you will see in the statistics – very actively.
Conferences
I have attended more conferences then in the 2020, but not that much to be honest – DataPlatformSummit, DBCC International, 2 DataSaturdays, PASS Summit & both Ignites 2021. I have to admit that PASS Summit was the one that gave by far the most community feel. I am really looking towards the 2022 PASS Summit to see if Redgate will be able to build on the initial success of the online offering, and of course, if there might some slight chance for a safe an in-person event as well. I am not doing any prognostics on that and only time will tell what is about to happen in our world in this year.
Presentations
I have massively upped my presentations in 2021, given the facility of delivering online presentations – and while I still prefer in-person ones. I am happy I was able to share my knowledge and passion for the technology and I am looking to increase the number of presentations in 2022. As a matter of a fact, 2021 was the 3rd busiest year in presentations in 9 years that I am keeping the statistics. The majority of presentations took place in the last 3 months of 2021, which is also quite remarkable. I also do not count internal presentations, meaning that these are only the public ones.
By the way, if your User Group or conference is looking for a presentation on Azure SQL Managed Instance – please let me know.
The Blogging
I have had a good year on blogging, even though you might find just 30 posts on this site. The other 11 posts have been written & co-written on Microsoft Communities site, where my series SQL MI how-tos to be found as well. 2021 was not one of my strongest years, but overall I am happy with the result and the quality of the content I have produced. Especially on the SQL Managed Instance where I do have a lot of things to add, and with the time – a lot of cool stuff will become available.
2022
Bring it on!