TSQL Tuesday 96: Folks Who Have Made a Difference

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us by Ewald Cress ( blog  |  twitter ) and is all about “folks who have made a difference” in our careers.

Thank you, Ewald! This is a great topic!

Here is my short list

Paulo Silva ( in )

He was my first boss in the IT world! I was his apprentice when I started my internship. He was going to move to a manager position and I  had to continue his work. He was responsible for the beginning of my career with SQL Server 2000 and VB6.

He was one of the main culprits for my growth not only in IT but also as a person!

Etienne Lopes ( t | b )

After 5 years working on IT I had the tremendous pleasure to meet Etienne. This guy is a professor! He has the gift of the word!

I have worked closely with him for about 2 years and were one of the best times of my career! I always consider myself as a sponge, and as long Etienne shared is knowledge I felt I was absorbing every single word!

Much of the bases I have with SQL Server I learned from him!

André Batista ( t | b )

These two guys are the responsible for my very first talk on a user group ( SQLPort ).

After that, I became more and more involved with the local community and today I speak for more user groups and I help with SQL Saturday / TugaIT events in Lisbon!

Rob Sewell ( t | b )

The one and only DBAWithABeard! My recent experiments were from blog posts/presentations that I read/saw from Rob. PowerBI & Pester are just two of them. He is super accessible and always willing to help.

Chrissy LeMaire ( t | b )

I met Chrissy less than 2 years ago at the TugaIT conference (May 2016) in Lisbon. At the time has passed like 1 month from the dbatools.io launch date and I had written a couple of PowerShell scripts that I thought would be nice to add to the initial tool.

We talked, exchange contacts and one month later, in June, I was submitting my first pull request to the dbatools GitHub repository.

From that time until now it has been a blast! I learned so much about PowerShell with her and she is also one of the responsible for my MVP not only because she nominated me for the very first time but also because all the visibility that the project brought to me.

She was also the first person delivering a presentation with me. :-)

People I know from the magazines or internet

People that helped me to understand SQL Server much better and from whom I have read a lot of articles:  Itzik Ben-Gan (I remember the times I read the SQL Magazine with great articles from him), Paul Randal , Kimberly L. Tripp , Adam Machanic ,  Paul White  and Kendra Little .

Wrap up

I could add more people to the list but, those are the ones that I want to highlight from different periods (the beginning, middle and nowadays) of my career.

Thank you all!