John McCormack

In this session, I will show you how elevate your professional value in the workplace by becoming more effective, and how to ensure this is recognised. Come and learn how to take charge of your own career progression, and be in control when it comes to appraisals and promotion cycles. It doesn't need to be a black box. This is not a tips and tricks session, it is designed to give you real tools for achieving excellence in the workplace. It will help you learn how to genuinely add value to the organisations you work for, and for that to be acknowledged. As technologists, sometimes "selling yourself" doesn't come as easy to us as it does to people in other industries but its a skill like anything else, and can be learned. In this session, I will guide you through how to set challenging goals, document your wins and grow your skillset in a targeted way, that makes you ready for the next role. Here are some questions to consider before coming along. - What is the difference between a senior engineer and a lead in my organisation? - Do I know the difference between a junior DBA and a mid level one? - Am I considering a move into management? - What is the best way to document my progress and achievements, to ensure they are not overlooked? This session is aimed at ambitious individuals. The aim is to help people become more valuable in their marketplace and have more personal options as a result.

The best technicians and engineers do not necessarily make the best managers. Similarly, not all of the best managers were the best engineers. These are different skillsets and moving from one to the other is not the best choice for everyone. It may be that you don't enjoy the duties of managing people, or it may be that management is not best suited to your skillset or personality. No matter the reason, we will delve into how to keep your career moving forward, whilst staying on the path you choose. In this session, I will show you how elevate your professional value in the workplace by becoming more effective, and how to ensure this is recognised. I discuss specific things that I have done to help me in my own career. Whether you are looking for promotion, pay rise, job move or even just career stability, you will find practical advice on how to achieve that. This is not a tips and tricks session, it is designed to give you real tools and methods for achieving excellence in the workplace. It will help you learn how to genuinely add value to the organisations you work for, and for that to be acknowledged. This is also a fun session for managers who are responsible for career development and succession planning. It may help them understand the different perspectives of their team members.

In this session, I aim to show the different ways of running SQL Server on AWS. I will show the differences between running as a managed service (RDS) and running SQL Server on virtual machines (EC2). I will show the pros and con of both methods and I’ll also show AWS console. This purpose of this post is to show that you do have options when it comes to the cloud. Azure is great however If you are working for a company or client already heavily invested in AWS, it may make more sense to stay there. Even if not, AWS’s SQL Server offering is mature and RDS’s features are improving all the time.