A guest blog from @Mrs_Fatherjack

Well to repeat Mr Fritchey – WOW, what an event.

They went. . . They saw . . . They conquered – (Red Gate that is)

What more can I say!!

Well, quite a bit I think.

I was fortunate enough to present alongside a colleague Dave Green (@d_a_green), we got there Thursday afternoon to help set up, although I’d been packing books, labelling bottles and various other odds and ends all that day in the Red Gate offices. By the time Annabel and her team had finished setting up as much as possible the place looked amazing.

The next morning, I’d misread our instructions and have to confess to being a little late getting down to help out. By the time we (@Fatherjack and I) got to the reception, everything was ready and people were starting to arrive.

We instantly got stuck in with helping at registration, something I’m fairly accustomed to as I help out at SQL Bits too. I think just over 330 people attending the Friday with 250 on the Saturday. The event had 3 streams, DBA, Developer and Red Gate. One of the things that I found most interesting, certainly in the Developer stream was that many of the sessions seemed to link up, we had Grant Fritchey (@GrantFritchey) presenting on the Sandbox Development Process, we had Red Gaters David Atkinson and David Simner presenting on Top 10 Tips for Database Continuous Integration using the SQ Developer Bundle , Dave Ballantyne (@DaveBally) on Deployment Horrors and How To Avoid Them, Sebastian Maine (@Sqlity) and Dennis Lloyd Junior (@dennislloydjr) presenting on Thwarting Database Defects and Dave Green and Me presenting Case Study – How we learned to stop worrying and love Continuous Integration. All these linked really well together and I think that the delegates really benefited from the joined-up thinking. I had many delegates mention to me that they had attended our session as they’d got the idea from a different session and wanted to see how to set up Continuous Integration.

I also learned that when things go wrong the presenter should just carry on. I had a bit of a shock in my session as my co-presenter had upgraded a version of the demo software without my knowledge and at one point the screen was absolutely not looking like I would expect, after initial confusion, we got through it and carried on. Earlier that day I had seen Noemi Moreno (@nomopix) have to deal with her laptop hanging and things not going the way they should and she just got through it and it did not detract from the session and the message she and Tom Austin were putting across. When my session seemed to fall apart, I thought of Noemi and tried to replicate her, thanks Noemi I don’t think you know how much you helped me!!

We haven’t had the official feedback on our session yet but the feedback that I have had in person has all been very positive. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the conference, from presenting, to chatting to delegates and learning so much from the other presenters and the Red Gaters.

I’m now really looking forward to next years conference and will definitely be there in whatever capacity the Red Gate team see fit!!