January 2021 Update

Mourning Gareth Swanepoel

If you haven’t heard yet, longtime member of the Orlando data community Gareth Swanepoel passed away recently. We will be doing something to honor his time with us, but right now we’re still processing and haven’t decided on the best way to do so.

Meetups

• Our next meetup will be January 13th at noon via Google Meet. For this lunch meetup our topic will be “2021 Learning Resolutions” and we’ll be talking about what we all hope to learn (and why we want to learn it) this year and ideas on how you (we) can help someone else grow by paying it forward.
• We’re hoping to have a technical meetup this month as well, watch for the announcement via Meetup!

PASS Is Ceasing Operations on January 15, 2021

As noted on their blog, PASS will be ceasing operations on January 15 (this Friday). If you have access to any session recordings from a PASS Summit you can download them before Friday at https://www.pass.org/MYPASS/viewctl/MyRecordings. 

SQLOrlando will continue operations, but it will definitely be a year of adjustment, particularly with regards to SQLSaturday. We’re mildly hopeful that someone will be able to obtain the rights to SQLSaturday.com as well as the source code, but we don’t know yet. If that doesn’t happen we’ll still move forward with a fall event with a different name.

Look for a Survey Soon

Look for an email from us in the next week or so with a survey link to help us understand your focus in 2021.

Pay It Forward

You’ll hear us start to talk about this at every meetup, so much of the value of participating in a local group is paying it forward, in all kinds of ways. We’re going to start sharing stories about our members paying it forward, both to celebrate the effort and to share ideas on how to do it.