With everything that\u2019s been going on in the world recently and all events being cancelled or postponed you might mistakenly think that people\u2019s ability to learn and stay in touch would dissipate.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t be more wrong.<\/p>\n
I am the UK Regional Mentor for PASS which means that I\u2019m the go-to person for all things Community and User Group.\u00a0 If someone wants information on where user groups are or a User Group needs a speaker I\u2019m the person to call on and I try to help.\u00a0 I run a monthly meeting with the User Group Leaders and we realized that whilst all the User Groups had their own meetup sites there was no central place for anyone to see what was going on.\u00a0 There used to be a community site that User Group leaders could go to to enter their upcoming events but its use was a little sporadic and we still had to put our details on our own sites too.<\/p>\n
As User Group leaders we wanted to try to reduce the amount of work involved so Phil Grayson (@databoffin) very kindly created us a site which scrapes data from all the meetup sites that we know about, and adds them to a central location.\u00a0 This means that all we have to do is store the information on our own site and the rest of the work is done for us and anyone can go to one place and see what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 There is also a Virtual Meetup group for people to go to, to share news.\u00a0 Please use the site https:\/\/dpac.community<\/a> \u00a0, if you are a user group leader of a group doing anything with the data platform or cloud related and you\u2019d like to be kept up to date with news of other similar groups then please add your details here https:\/\/dpac.community\/join-us\/<\/a>. If you\u2019d like us to add your meet up site to the website please email me at Annette@sqlsouthwest.co.uk<\/a> we\u2019d really appreciate your thoughts on the site and what else we need to add to it.\u00a0 Many thanks to Phil for putting the site together and Simon Whiteley (@MrSiWhiteley) for doing all the wordy bits that Phil and I struggle with.<\/p>\n I became an MVP in September \u2013 and yes I\u2019m still recovering from shock \u2013 and was really looking forward to going to MVP Summit which was due to be held in March, but somehow the people from Microsoft managed to turn an in person event into an online event IN TWO WEEKS!!!\u00a0 This was an amazing feat and showed everyone else what could be done.\u00a0 I attended many sessions which I thoroughly enjoyed and learnt loads but I have to say, as good as it was, I did feel I missed out on the \u2018chatting with colleagues\u2019 part.<\/p>\n I was asked if I could record one of my sessions as part of the MVP Programme which I did, a 20 minute session \u2018The What, Why and how of Unit Testing\u2019 which was then used as part of the Azure Global bootcamp using a mix of recorded and live sessions which enabled them to put on a huge amount of content to meet the demands required by people from all over the world.\u00a0 Details of the event are here https:\/\/azureglobalbootcamp2020.azurewebsites.net\/<\/a><\/p>\n Then a bunch of geeks from all over Europe decided to put on DataWeekender which happened on Saturday 2nd<\/sup> May.\u00a0 This event was all live but online sessions, they had 5 tracks that started at 7.45am and went through til 5pm.\u00a0 I was really excited to be presenting a new session that shows how to build an Azure environment from powershell using data stored in a database.\u00a0 If anyone is interested all my code and slides are on my repo here https:\/\/github.com\/MrsFatherjack\/AzureBuildDemo<\/a><\/p>\n With the new website and all the events happening there is certainly no shortage of learning and community opportunities available and I look forward to seeing you at one soon.<\/p>\n Stay safe.<\/p>\n Annette<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With everything that\u2019s been going on in the world recently and all events being cancelled or postponed you might mistakenly think that people\u2019s ability to learn and stay in touch would dissipate.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t be more wrong. User Group Meetup Hub I am the UK Regional Mentor for PASS which means that I\u2019m the go-to……<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[5524],"coauthors":[57570],"class_list":["post-87101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-uncategorized","tag-community"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87103,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87101\/revisions\/87103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87101"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=87101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Azure Global Bootcamp<\/h2>\n
DataWeekender<\/h2>\n