In December, when days are getting shorter, I always like to take the time to review the year. Last year, I took you on my journey of 2023. This year will be more of the same with new experiences.
Don’t worry, this post won’t be very elaborate even though I had a very busy and challenging year.
Speaking
In 2024, I had a year packed with speaking engagements, 17 to be precise (regular sessions). In the end, I need to be honest and say I, unfortunately, was required to cancel 5 of them due to illness (SQLBits (3), a User Group session for Oxford Data Platform, and Birmingham). As you can read 2024 has been a tough year for me concerning my health. To improve my health, a couple of things happened (read surgery) and now it seems that my health is improving so I’m looking forward to the future.
Next to the regular sessions, I had the absolute pleasure of delivering my very first precon this year at PASS Summit last November together with Tonie Huizer (Tonie Huizer | LinkedIn).
Blogging
Next to speaking, I wrote 8 blog posts or data recipes (as I like to call them nowadays). Why? I rebranded my blog into a cooking-themed blog for data. Because I focused a lot on my health in the past year and on preparing for my first precon, I didn’t write a lot of blogs, unfortunately. This will be something I need to consider for 2025.
On the other hand, I made my first contribution to the Microsoft Fabric Community which felt like a big achievement. Next to that, I contributed to mssqltips.com as well.
Community
Last year, I started to mentor new speakers and this year, I guided 2 new speakers, Thomas Kronawitter ( Thomas Kronawitter | LinkedIn ) for DataGrillen and Esa Denaux ( Esa Denaux | LinkedIn ) for dataMinds Connect. Both delivered a great first presentation and I couldn’t be happier with both sessions.
In September I volunteered as a community member for Fabric Conference Europe in Stockholm. So I have assisted in the community zone and I had the opportunity to help at the Ask the Expert booths as an Expert in Data Modeling.
At the PASS Data Community Summit, next to the delivered precon, I also was available as a volunteer for the Ask the Expert zone where I tried to help others with my “expertise” in Database DevOps.
dataMinds
With dataMinds, we’ve had a challenging year as well, at the beginning of the year, we had a wild idea to bring dataMinds Saturday back to life. With 150 attendees, I couldn’t be happier about our decision.
Throughout the year, we still had our dataMinds evening sessions, 1 in-person & 1 virtual per month, which is a heavy pace considering the amount of available virtual sessions and in-person sessions organized by other user groups. With 17 sessions, 8 virtual and 9 in-person, we tried to support our data community throughout the year.
Finally, we had our annual dataMinds Connect conference in October, which yet again sold out in no time. We’re very grateful to be in this position. Also being also to sell all the partner packages in 1 hour is fenomenal. What I’m most proud of is the fact that we grew dataMinds Connect to a 3-day event for the very first time. 1 precon day and 2 conference days. This was only possible because of all the effort and dedication the team put into the preparations.
What else…
Last year, I was happy to announce that I got awarded the Microsoft MVP award in 2 categories: Data Platform and Developer Technologies.
This year, I can look back happily on being re-awarded with the Microsoft MVP award in the Data Platform category.
To close off, I’m grateful to be part of this amazing community. Last year I met a lot of great like-minded people and I had the chance to meet a lot of people I know and became friends as well. (not going to name specific people, I don’t want to miss anyone ;))
Bye Bye 2024, I’m looking forward to 2025!
See you soon!
Enjoy the holidays.