Speaking at SQL Saturday Sofia

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I’ve just come back from Bulgaria after speaking at SQL Saturday Sofia. Because it a great experience, I wanted to write this post as soon as possible.

SQL Saturday Sofia is organised by Mihail Mateev and other volunteers. For those of you who don’t know who Mihail is, he’s a Microsoft Regional Director based in Bulgaria.

In fact, there’s a funny story about the reason I submitted to SQL Saturday Sofia.

Mihail and I were both at the VMWare massage area at last year’s PASS Summit. We had both been at SQL Saturday Denmark and started talking.

Basically, our conversation ended with me promising to submit to SQL Saturday Sofia. So, when the call for speakers came out, I kept my promise.

Anyway, back to talking about the event. I found it very well organised and structured. In addition, everybody was really friendly there.

A lot of people appeared to be pleased with my session and I had some very positive feedback straight afterwards.

In fact, one person told me afterwards their main concern is that the following sessions would not be as good as mine. Which made me happy because it means all the hard work paid off.

Accommodation

Now, I am going to do something I don’t usually do in my post. Because I am going to discuss my accommodation for a change.

I stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel in Sofia and I personally found it a great hotel. All the staff were really friendly, and the service was amazing.

In addition, they provided a free shuttle service to and from the airport which always helps. If you ever find yourself presenting at SQL Saturday Sofia I recommend staying there.

You can find out more about the hotel in detail here.

Statistics

In the last two weeks I’ve travelled roughly 6,750 kilometres to deliver at three separate events which were in three different countries.

Just for good measure, I also presented in two countries that began with the letter B in a one-week period.

Which includes two SQL Saturdays and of course the dataMinds Connect conference. You can read my last post about speaking at dataMinds Connect in detail here.

In addition, I have also been delivering work for a client.

Final word

I will admit it’s been a busy two weeks for myself. However, it has given me the opportunity to share with others and I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

In addition, it gave me the opportunity to meet both new and old acquaintances. For example, Gethyn Ellis who I had not seen for some time.

Now that these busy two weeks are over, I have other things to do, including more posts which I hope prove to be useful to others.