Big Thinkers – Andy Warren

I’m devoting this week to “Big Thinkers”. I want to highlight individuals who challenge my thought processes and cause me to think about my profession, my methodologies, and force me to reflect on my skills. Some of these individuals I have the privilege of knowing personally, others I have only known via Podcasts or Twitter. I’m hoping that by highlighting these Big Thinkers you too will be challenged to grow and evolve in your craft. Last week was focused on individuals in the development community, this week will focus on the SQL Server realm.

Rather than “Big Thinker”, I think the label “Big Do-er” may be more accurate when it comes to today’s selection. Andy Warren maintains a blog at SQL Server Central (and was also one of its founders), and runs End to End Training out of Orlando FL. He also had a vision for training videos that were short in duration (roughly five minutes) and very focused on a single subject, hence he created JumpstartTV.

His biggest contribution to the community perhaps centers around SQL Saturday. Andy saw the success around code camps, events where developers could congregate on a Saturday and take free community based training. At the same time he recognized some of the difficulties around them. They tended to be hard to find, without a standard look and feel to their websites. There was also a hurdle for people wanting to put on a code camp for the first time. Andy decided to act.

He created SQL Saturday.com, a centralized website where anyone wishing to put on a SQL Saturday could advertise their event, handle registrations, schedules, and speakers. He created a guide for event planners, to give them a checklist for their event. Speaking from personal experience, I know we followed the guide closely and found it very valuable when our group held SQL Saturday 7 recently. Finally Andy throws himself into the event as well, appearing personally at as many SQL Saturdays as humanly possible.

Truly Andy is the shining example of “one man can make a difference” and I can but hope my own contributions will come anywhere close to Andy’s.