The Next Adventure

Since my last post a lot of things have changed! I was honored by the number of folks out in the community to reached out to me when I said I was looking for a job to give me leads, pass my name along or simply gave advice. Thanks to everyone! I’ve seen it work for other people in the past, and having gone through it now myself I can honestly say that building strong relationships in the community helps your career, period.

As of July 20th I am a Product Manager for SQL Sentry, LLC. I’ve been working there for close to a month now so this post is long overdue; however, during that month my wife has also gotten a new job as an independent contractor in mathematics education. To say things in our world have changed quite a bit would be an understatement.

When I posted that I was hunting for a new job I listed five things that I was looking for and SQL Sentry met all of them. I’m working from home the majority of the time and directly control the vast majority of my travel requirements. I’m working for a company that promotes continuous learning and in my first one-on-one with my new manager (Jason Hall) we talked about training opportunities I might be interested in. As a Product Manger a major portion of my role will be to interact with users to learn where their pain points are, but at the same time I’ll be researching new technologies in order to find possibilities for where the talented development team can truly generate some innovative solutions. Finally, SQL Sentry definitely backs the community. They are sponsors at many SQL Saturday events, conferences and user groups.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “wait… isn’t that another database company?” Why, yes, it is. Where Red Gate is renowned for their developer tools, SQL Sentry is known for the deep insights it gives to DBAs into the health, operations and performance of their SQL Servers and Windows Machines. Those of you who have worked with me in the past, or know me well, are now thinking, “they aren’t letting you near the database stuff are they?” Well, yes and no. I’m coming on board to help with Azure related projects, but I’m also learning more about their products (and through that SQL Server – I think I can hear Mike Levy screaming in the distance…).

Something I look at in a company is vision. SQL Sentry’s vision is straight forward and on the first page of their employee manual: “At SQL Sentry, we pledge to create innovative software to optimize computing performance.” SQL Sentry digs very deep to understand the platform and then pull out best information to display to users so that they can truly understand the performance of their systems.

The crew at SQL Sentry is growing fast, aided by the boost in investment from their partner MainSail. I wasn’t the newest member of the team for very long at all. In fact, just last week we also picked up two Sales Engineers in the UK. It looks like I will still be able to get a regular dose of British sayings!

I’ll still be speaking on Azure related topics, but I’ll be scaling back from what I was doing as an Evangelist before. In fact, my next conference will be CloudDevelop in October, but I’ll also be speaking at next month’s Cincinnati Azure User Group.

Again, thanks to everyone in the community who helped me over the last few months, even if it was just retweeting my blog post. All of it helped immensely.