Yesterday I presented a session for the virtual conference SQLDay, organized by our friends from the Polish SQL Server User Group (PLSSUG). An amazing conference that has chosen to use an interesting platform to try to recreate the in-person conference feeling while still being Covid-safe from behind your screen.

However, an experimental new platform does come with challenges. During my presentation, my shared screen froze. After spending a few minutes trying to fix the issue I finally had to leave the application completely, then restart it. After that, the rest of the session delivery went fine. But the interruptions and the lost time made me feel that this delivery was not up to my regular standard. So I made the attendees a promise: I’ll present it again, without audience, just for my webcam; and I will upload that version so they can re-watch the session and see how I intended to deliver it.

I have now done that. I was already toying with the idea to try to collect recordings of my conference session; this event was the final nudge I needed to get started. At this time it’s only a single session. But in the future, I hope to add more recorded conference sessions to the YouTube playlist that I set up for this.

So, if you always wanted to attend my session Debugging without debugger: Investigating SQL Server’s internal structures but never were at a conference when I presented it, you can now do so at your own pace. Just click this link!

Do note that this video was recorded in a single take, and not edited in any way. This video does not reflect how I record my normal training videos. It is meant to mimic a typical live delivery at a conference. There are uhms. There are coughs. There are embarrassing mistakes, like me saying “segment column” when I meant to say “Segment operator” – multiple times!

I will admit that I cheated a bit here and there with the captions. YouTube’s AI algorithm generated captions based on the audio; cool feature, but not perfect. I went over these to correct the errors introduced by the AI, but at the same time I also took the liberty to put in what I meant to say instead of what I really said for a few of the most embarrassing errors. If you watch the video and the captions don’t match the audio, trust the captions!!

I would appreciate some feedback. Would you like me to upload more recordings of conference sessions? Will you watch them? Or am I better off spending my time on other projects?