A Freaky Small Place

If you are still on twitter you are probably like the rest of us and just enjoying the thrill of riding on empty to see how far we can get before the servers run out of RPCs. (Trust me that is a sick burn on a certain billionaire that just bought a large social media platform.) I am not certain that this is the end of Twitter, but it doesn’t look good. Along with all of the gleeful watching-as-Rome-burns that is going on many people are sharing stories about the connections they have made or how twitter has lead to the job they have or in some cases the person they are married to. We went out to dinner last night with an old friend. Something that probably would not have happened if not for Twitter.

Ten years ago most of the time I have spent on twitter was because it was where the SQL People were. It is still true to a lesser degree, but back then it was a career booster, networking tool, sql tech help desk, and a non-stop nerdy party. If I had a question about SQL Server I could tag it with #sqlhelp and get a response within in seconds usually from someone else in the community. And the hashtag I have probably used more than any other is #sqlfamily. This group of database geeks is the group I never knew I was looking for, but when I found them I knew I belonged.

At the end of April in 2013 I was in Fargo, ND with a bunch of other SQL People. There was an event called, SQL Saturday #175 and I spent a lot of time that weekend talking about databases and SQL. (SQL Saturdays are one day conferences with volunteer speakers and organizers to share knowledge about Microsoft SQL Server.) Most of the people speaking at the event were on twitter and it wasn’t uncommon to tweet out our geeky jokes or share information about the topics we presented. If I had to guess this tweet on May 1st was something I found looking over my notes from the past weekend. I got a response I was expecting.

Andre, Kira and I all graduated from the same high school in Tokyo – ASIJ. He left the year before I started, but we have many friends in common and crossed paths maybe once or twice because he was friends with Kira. Several years before 2013 Kira had lost touch with him (maybe something to do with the three kids keeping us busy). This random chance encounter on Twitter led to Andre and I meeting up at the PASS Summit in 2014. We arranged to connect using Twitter of course. And we even teamed up to host the first PASS Summit Game Night. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. We had a great dinner last night and only bored Kira with a little bit of tech talk about SQL.

Chance Encounters are what keep us going.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore