In january I had the honour of speaking at data TGIF (T | M). This is a monthly, online event by Kay Sauter ( T | L). His event is unique in that it has a 30 minutes talk and 30 minutes networking setup. This means you’re not only listening to a speaker but are invited to broaden your network as well.When Kay invited me, we set a date and time. Sometimes agendas change and life happens, but in this case the date was set and done. I got gentle reminders in the form of a Teams meeting about 6 weeks ahead of the date. After that, in regular intervals, questions came. It all felt very planned and controlled. And because I’m human, I forgot to answer questions. The reminders were friendly. In the last week I got the marketing materials to promote the session. Kay created a nice gif to promote both his event and the session.
On to the talk! I prepared a 30 minute session on monitoring (Azure) SQL Databases with Zabbix. The only way can give a talk and expect some result is by practising. And on every practice run, I found issues. Missing slides, a part of the talk that was incoherent or messing up the main storyline. The usual things you find during preparation of a talk.
Because Kay had to go to his university (he’s doing some awesome stuff there besides working and hosting this meetuo), Deepthi Goguri stepped in and hosted my session. This was a nice surprise as Deepthi started her speaking career at New stars of Data as well. I enjoyed the pre-talk chat. Even though we were competing against data minutes, people showed up and, hopefully, learned something new.
Kay followed up later to check how things went and if there were things that could be improved. He’s not just offering a podium for speakers to share knowledge and attendees to broaden their network, but he’s keen on continuous improvement as well.
It was a joy and honour to speak at this event and I can only encourage you to speak there.
Thanks for reading!
Reitse's blog 