Pass-Summit

This is long overdue but life and distractions happened. It’s been a little over two months since I returned home from PASS Summit 2025.

Thank you for attending my PASS Summit 2025 session Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation! I will have a more comprehensive post in the coming days. Slides and demo code are now available in Github as well as through the PASS Summit website. Github will always have the most recent version of the code. There have been additions and bug fixes!

• Github repository
• PASS Data Community Summit session info

In less than one month, I will be speaking not once but twice at PASS Data Community Summit 2025.

Thursday, November 20th at 1 PM I will be in the Community Zone to share my experience as a mentor for FIRST Robotics Team 3003, TANX. Hobby Huddles were a new addition to Summit last year. These lightning talk-sized presentation about something the speaker does outside their day job are a lot of fun to check out. But how do I take something I can talk about all afternoon and compress it down to only 10 minutes?

In the blink of an eye, summer has passed. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for things to get back to “normal” after 10 weeks of events and travel, personal and professional, starting with high school graduation and finishing with college move-in.

Amidst all that, I had three speaking engagements as mentioned in an earlier post. Three different talks, delivered in very different places - putting it all together was more work than I’d anticipated.

It’s been a minute since I’ve gotten out to speak at events, but the second half of 2025 is going to be packed.

As PASS Summit approaches this week, I’m re-reviewing my evaluations from SQL Saturday Boston and I’d like to give feedback about feedback.

Why Feedback?

Both speakers and event organizers depend upon getting feedback about every session delivered at SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, PASS Summit, or any of the user groups (in-person or virtual). This feedback is valuable to speakers and event organizers alike.

• For speakers, it helps us understand if we’re doing OK when we’re in front of the room, but more importantly we want to know what we can do better.
• For event organizers, it’s helpful in understanding what content attendees want to see. As a former event organizer and user group leader, I’ve even used that feedback to say “hey, we should invite this person to speak at a future meeting.”

Ratings on a scale of 1-5 are okay, but when you’re looking at product reviews on Amazon you aren’t just look at the stars, are you? The written reviews are what matter most when you’re making a decision about garden hoses or cheese graters. This is your opportunity to tell the speaker what works in their presentation and what doesn’t. This is information that can’t be conveyed via 4 stars or an emoji. We need actionable feedback.

All week, my phone has been reminding me (via photo memories) of the amazing experience I had at PASS Summit 2017. This can mean only one thing - PASS Summit 2023 is less than two weeks away!

I’ve written a lot about Summit in the past and many of the posts I’ve written about getting ready are still applicable today, so go check those out too.

Content and Scheduling

As always PASS Summit is delivering a ton of amazing content - an embarrassment of riches! And the topics are getting more and more diverse every year. Which is excellent because in the coming year(s) I, like many data professionals, will be asked to work across a variety of tools and platforms and not just the handful we’ve been using for a decade or more.

As I write this, it’s the weekend before PASS Data Community Summit 2022 and depending upon when I finish, it’ll post either shortly before SQL Saturday Oregon, or in time for folks to read it on SQLTrain en route to Seattle. Summit has snuck up on me this year and far more than any other year, I’m feeling woefully unprepared.

If you’d asked me 5 years ago if I would ever speak at Summit, I’d have said “no way, not possible.” I didn’t even think I was able to produce the kind of material that’s expected at an event on such a large scale. Not to mention having that many eyes on me.

But times change. Experience, skills, and knowledge change. People change. And sometimes, people get talked into doing things things by their friends.

A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!