I just came back from my latest trip last night and I’ve been thinking about how to summarize the latest events I’ve been to. It all began with the NIC conference in Oslo in February. There I presented two sessions (Azure SQL Server - the cloud awakens and boring is stable, stable is good - best practices in practice) to some 100 people in total. As is most often the case, It was a great event with great speakers and very good sessions. The conference itself was very well run and I was very happy to have been given the opportunity to share my knowledge with the community so close to home.

After a month of peace and quiet I embarked on the first of three trips in a short time - I went to SQL Saturday Iceland. I’ve never been to Reykjavik and was completely blown away with the beauty of Iceland. I spent the whole ride from the airport in stunned silence as the craggy landscape rolled by. I had managed to find a rather … special place to live - turns out there is a surprisingly big difference between “hotel” and “hostel” - to my defense the hotel-turned-hostel was not very clear, but I got a room the size of a postage stamp an a shared bathroom down the hall. I’ll chalk it up as “authentic” and “an adventure”. Oh, and don’t get me started about the yellow buses in Iceland. Top tip: regardless of situation, they have the right of way. Period. I had the last slot of the day in tough competition with Rob Sewell / Chrissy LeMaire and Dejan Sarka. Despite this I had some 35 attendees joining me for a wonderful discussion about best practices (boring is stable, stable is good - best practices in practice). Lots of great questions, insightful comments and laughs from the attendees. I jumped on the bus to the airport at 0400 so I was a tad tired when I finally got back home.

After a quick recharge and change of underwear, I then went to Antwerp to speak at a completely new conference called ITProud. It is the brainchild of Peter de Tender, Adnan Hendricks and Christophe Lams. They’ve had some issues with marketing so the total turnout were some 80-ish attendees. The speaker lineup was solid and I had the distinct pleasure of spending quite some time with Fredrik Nilsson of Dell/EMC. I had a great time presenting Azure SQL Server - the cloud awakens to six eager attendees. The day after the conference Fredrik and me did Brussels, and after having spent several hours at the Royal museum of the armed forces and the comic strip museum we went back home.

By now the travel schedule was starting to take its toll (considering I *am* turning 40 in a week) but I had one stop to go. This week I went to Helsinki to speak at TechDays Finland. Again I had the last slot of the last day so I was very happily surprised to welcome some 40 attendees for my session SQL Server hates you(?) - what the DBAs never told the developers. It was a fast-paced and fun session, and I was told that I had surprised several of the attendees who immediately would go home and look over their environments. Despite the fact that devs and DBAs are two sides of the same coin, we still commit the very basic mistake of thinking that everyone knows what we do. When it comes default settings of SQL Server or to programming patterns that seem like a good idea, we can all benefit from much more conversations with our counterparts.

Now, after having been home for several hours and starting to digest this tour (and slowly starting to prepare for the UPCOMING trips) I again realize how lucky I am to be where I’m at. I get to speak about what I love, to people who are eager to learn and at the same time I get to spend time with and learn from all the other amazing speakers. Some days it feels that I’m the only non-MVP speaking on these topics but it is simply amazing how much talent is out there and how many opportunities there are for learning. I’m very much looking forward to some peace and quiet a few weeks, during I will work on the Global Azure Bootcamp conference me, Simon Binder and Johan Dahlbom will be organizing in Linköping, Sweden. At the time of this writing we’ve confirmed five(!) MVPs speaking, several great sessions AND a bit IoT workshop. We’re already at 70 attendees and we haven’t even started marketing the event yet. This will be amazing. Come join us!