Career

Every once in a while when I’m recording a Pluralsight course, I’ll take a photo of my desk to let people see the behind the scenes of the process. Well, my friend Steve Jones (@way0utwest) encouraged me to write a desk setup post…so here we go!

Desk

Autonomous SmartDesk 2 - Home Office

Most standup desks come at a much higher price point, and this one lands somewhere between $379-$500 depending on the features. While it’s pretty minimalist, it gets the job done. I have several presets for various heights depending on the current task I’m performing. One tip for those who record audio, I always stand when recording. It helps me with enunciation and also controls the tone of my voice better. A standing desk is a must if you’re going to be recording production quality audio. I think there are some health benefits too to standing desks. :)

Where I’ve Been

Since January 1, 2012 I’ve been the principal consultant at Centino Systems. Jokingly, I refer to myself as The Centino of Systems. I learned a lot of lessons running my own business. Such as how to be a consultant and also how to scale the business even as the only employee/consultant. There’s been ups and downs, successes and failures and I couldn’t be more happy with how things went. The first phase of Centino Systems I learned how to build a consulting practice. Then in the second phase I learned how to scale Centino Systems by focusing on training. I blogged a bunch, produced 21 courses at Pluralsight, co-authored three books (with one more on the way), and numerous corporate and conference sessions and workshops focusing on Linux, SQL Server and of course Kubernetes.

Today, I’m proud to announce that I have been renewed as an Microsoft MVP – Data Platform for the 2019-2020 award year, my third MVP award. This is an truly an honor and I’m humbled to be included in this group of exceptional data professionals. I really look forward to continuing to work with everyone in the MVP community and continuing to contribute to our unmatched Data Platform Community!

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Today, I’m proud to announce that I have been renewed as an Microsoft MVP – Data Platform for the 2018-2019 award year, my second MVP award. This is an truly an honor and I’m humbled to be included in this group of exceptional data professionals. I really look forward to continuing to work with everyone in the MVP community and continuing to contribute to our unmatched SQL Community!

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Today, I’m proud to announce that I have been named a Microsoft MVP – Data Platform.  This is an exceptional honor and I’m humbled to be included in this group of exceptional data professionals. I really look forward to working with everyone in the MVP community and continuing to contribute to our unmatched SQL Community!

What is an MVP?

Please join me at IT/Dev Connections on Oct. 12 at 8:00AM where I’ll be hosting a Birds of a Feather session “Moving to Independent Consulting” Bring your questions!*

Yes, an 8:00AM session in Las Vegas, but if you’re serious about going out on your own…you’ll already be up:)*

The most common questions I’m asked during networking sessions at technical conferences and events aren’t technical! People want to know what it’s like being an independent consultant. Things like how to get started and what to look out for are common themes.  So I wanted to share the some of the discussion points I bring up when I’m having these conversations. In this post I’m going to boil it down to the top 5 “must haves” before you start consulting, there’s certainly more…many books have been written about it!

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at IT/Dev Connections on October 11th 2016 in Las Vegas! I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be able to speak at this conference! I look forward to seeing you there!

Here’s the information on the talk!

Designing High Availability Database Systems using AlwaysOn Availability Groups

**Track: **Development Platform Tools and Devops

Abstract:

Are you looking for a high availability solution for your business critical application? You’re heard about AlwaysOn Availability Groups and they seem like a good solution, but you don’t know where to start. It all starts with a solid design. In this session we introduce the core concepts needed to design a Availability Group based system. Covering topics such as recovery objectives, replica placement, failover requirements, synchronization models, quorum, backup and recovery and monitoring. This session is modeled after real world client engagements conducted by Centino Systems that have lead to many successful Availability Groups based systems supporting tier 1 business critical applications.

What I’ve noticed this year is that there’s really not another group of people like the SQL Community.  Earlier this year Paul Randal ( b | t ), in the name of community, offered his services to mentor to a small group of people. Check it out here. Crazy as it may sound he went ahead and offered mentoring to everyone that submitted here and I was on that list. Here’s my blog post submission

Let’s just start with the last three years have been fantastic! This blog post is a slight deviation from the technical content on my blog. We’re going to focus on career and professional development for a minute.

In 2011 I was thrust into the world of consulting…accidentally. Accidentally you ask, how can that happen? Well, at the time I worked remotely for a large health care practice doing system design and software development on the Microsoft stack. Fun and innovative stuff, with great leadership in fun environment. Learned a lot! Well, they were acquired by a much larger organization and the new corporate policy didn’t allow for remote workers. So rather than terminate me they asked if I would like to be a consultant. Well, who wouldn’t right? I had dabbled in consulting for years in the off hours, and always wanted to make the jump. This was the push that I needed. That left me with one huge question…