Just before the contest deadline, I want to share The Best Thing I Learned at a PASS Summit:
The PASS Community Summit 2008 was the first conference that I’ve had the pleasure of attending. I was so determined to go that I paid my own way (with a nice discount for volunteering on the board of an official PASS chapter). It was well worth the investment!
My biggest takeaway was: don’t underestimate your own expertise and don’t overestimate the depth of a session. I selected sessions to attend before the Summit began, choosing topics most relevant to my (new) role at Terremark. I was disappointed after the first day… I really hadn’t learned anything new. I decided to attend sessions that were: advanced (400 and 500 level), covering topics new to me, or from speakers whose work (blogs, books, forum posts, podcasts/webcasts, etc.) had helped me in the past. This made all the difference. My favorite session was about Extended Events, a topic I had originally ruled out because the feature is limited to SQL Server 2008 (which hadn’t been deployed by any of our customers yet).
Remember, sessions are only 75 to 90 minutes long, including question-and-answer time. One can’t delve very deeply into a topic in that short amount of time, especially for novice and intermediate level sessions. If you have a good amount of experience with a given product feature or skill set, you’ll probably learn more in a session on a different topic.
