#ThankfulThursday

Wednesday March 13th 2024 I had the honor of speaking at the  Redgate Summit in Atlanta and got to meet a lot of new people and get to hang out with several good friends. I’ll be posting about that in a few days. A small group of us went out for dinner after the event and I got to have an awesome conversation with my good friend Stuart Ainsworth(LinkedIn). He and I have known each other for a very long time but don’t get to spend near enough time together. Stuart has had a very positive impact on my life from teaching me all about Kanban, mentoring others, managing others, and so much more. We were both also involved with Linchpin People back in the day.

During our conversation we started reminiscing about our past adventures and of course moments with our good friend Brian Moran came up. We lost Brian a few years ago. When the news broke across social media, a flood of post quickly filled up everyone’s twitter feeds and Facebook walls of how Brian impacted their life and career. I had mentioned to Stuart that I wished that we had something similar to the  T-SQL Tuesday series but instead we posted about someone who has had a positive influence on our life or career. I feel like we need a way of showing appreciation for others and telling them what they mean to us now. We came up with #ThankfulThursday as a hashtag to use.

There are so many that I need to recognize, but I’m going to start with a previous manager of mine that I had when I worked at the bank. 14 years ago I was selected to speak at my first SQL Saturday. SQL Saturday 62 in Tampa Florida. When I was selected to speak, I was super nervous and went to my boss Mac Horn to let him know. Mac was very supportive and shared some of his experiences with public speaking and putting together technical presentations. Mac encouraged and supported me with getting involved in the SQL Community and attending additional training. He trusted me with taking the lead on several big projects that ultimately lead to me leading the virtualization project for our SQL Server footprint. Mac didn’t view my participation in the SQL Community as a distraction, he saw the massive benefit of having an eager to learn DBA that would go out and learn about his trade and come back and share it with his team.

Without Mac’s initial support, I’m not sure how things would have turned out. I learned a lot from his management style and LOTS of crazy sayings that I still use today. Hey Mac, what is Seagull Management? HA

I’ve had so many people over the years tell me how something I shared either in a video, presentation, article, blog post, hallway conversation at an event, etc had an impact on them. I call it the butterfly effect. Looking back over my start in the SQL Community, I have countless names of people that had a direct impact on my journey. I’m looking forward to all the future #ThankfulThursday post to share those stories and recognize those who’ve invested their time in me.