In 2009, I had moved my whole family to take a job in Florida working in political advertising. In the odd years politics is a bit quieter and so I had a lot of free time and living in Jacksonville had discovered there was an active tech community, something Kentucky definitely did not have when I had left.
I started seeking out any tech group I could find and landed in two that were so important. The Ruby web devs group was so welcoming and even though I never wrote a single line of Ruby, they not only helped me as a programmer, they became friends to this day (thanks Tiger, Cayce)
The other group was the Jacksonville SQL User Group. I had become an “accidental DBA” as a network/IT admin and I sure could have used a group like that before. Now I was a full time data guy still working way too much in dBase and FoxPro, but knew SQL was my path forward.
Pragmatic Works, now a good size data/Azure consultancy is based in Jacksonville, and a lot of their employees were involved in the User Group. I had no idea what PASS was, had never heard of SQL Saturday, but those folks, including Devin Knight, were encouraging and always talking about the community and what could be learned. Believe it or not, that long ago Twitter was a tiny place and you struggled to find people to help and talk to even with the Internet being 15 years old.
Because of them I went to my first SQL Saturday, ironically after I moved back to Kentucky in Louisville. That user group introduced me to a whole new world of people. I have now been to 15 SQL Saturday’s in person (before this crazy virtual world we in). In 2020, I presented for the first time, in Baton Rouge. I say, not at all facetiously, that the Jacksonville SQL User Group changed my career, and by extension, my life. I can’t say thanks enough to the people I’ve encountered in the SQL Family. That’s why I wanted to start blogging, so I could do some small part to give back to the community that gave so much to me.
