A Look Back

The end of 2012 has arrived, despite the best efforts of the Mayan calendar.  It’s been quite a year for me, with a lot of ups and some downs, but overall pretty pleased with where I am regarding my career progress and community involvement.  For those of you who were around this time last year, I had laid out a series of goals for this year.  In order to keep myself honest, I thought it would be appropriate to hold myself to those goals.

Adjectives

My first goal was to get people to associate me with several adjectives.  For review, these adjectives are:

• Smart
• Creative
• Reliable
• Professional

Considering a lot of the comments I get from friends and colleagues, I’m pretty happy with my progress here.  I’ve had co-workers tell me that I’m looked to for creative approaches to solving problems, both using current and new aspects of SQL Server.  Many people, both in and out of my job, look to me for help and advice.

My biggest struggle, though, is still being “professional”.  I wear my emotions on my sleeve and sometimes that gets away from me, particularly when there’s friction between me and others I work with.  I need more focus in this area, but I also need to keep the other adjectives on my mind.  I’m on the right track here and need to keep moving forward.

Speaking

This is where I had my biggest accomplishments.  My goal was to speak at 4 SQL Saturdays and SQL Rally and, fortunately, I managed to do all that plus an additional SQL Saturday, several virtual chapter meetings, and a handful of user group presentations.  All of these went very well and I got plenty of great feedback.

What I’m most proud of was my SQL Rally presentation: Eating the Elephant – Understanding and Implementing SQL Server Partitioning.  I had a full room with 100+ people in attendance and got positive feedback from most of the audience (though I did get one guy saying he found a great place for a $3 Coke).  I was nervous right before I started, but once I was “on”, things went very smoothly.  I really want to thank folks out there in the community for their support, because without them I wouldn’t have gotten so far.  It can only go up from here.

Focus

I’ve only had moderate success with getting focused here.  Certainly, I have learned a lot more about automation and monitoring in SQL Server.  In reviewing my blog posts over the year, I’m definitely happy with what I’ve written on regarding this.  But I could have done more.  I think my biggest disappointment is how I didn’t blog nearly as much on this topic as I could have.  I have more ideas on my head and I need to be more disciplined about putting them to “paper”.

Summing it up

Self-evaluation is a huge part of personal growth.  We need to set measurable goals for ourselves and then periodically check where we are against those goals.  If I were to grade myself for 2012, I’d probably rate a B.  I should have blogged more, but made great progress with speaking and self-learning.  I have definitely have stretched myself professionally and feel positioned myself well to take things further.

This is an ongoing process, though.  Doing well in 2012 only means I need to stay on track and set goals for the next year.  There’s been a lot of thoughts floating around in my head over the past few weeks, trying to sort out what is both reasonable and measurable for 2013.  I should be ready to commit to those goals and share them with folks next week.