Why I'm Inspired to Start Up Live Webcasts Again

on May 26, 2017

For a while now, I’ve been indulging in what feels like a huge guilty pleasure: an almost meeting-free existence. I’ve been living life scheduled on my own terms. I commit to appointments for workouts, volunteering, haircuts, and medical appointments, but not much else. I’ve been publishing pre-recorded videos and online courses which I can make whenever it feels right.

There’s been a couple of reasons for this. When it started, I wanted a major break from meetings. I wanted to see what it was like to have a more flexible schedule. It turns out I sometimes like working early, or late, and I like doing some writing on Sundays.

For the last four months, there have been some practical reasons around this, too. There’s a house renovation and building boom going on in Portland, and three construction crews have been madly at work directly outside my windows for months. Between the hours of 7 am and 5 pm, it’s been hard to predict when jackhammers, nail-guns, hollering, and other colorful noises might happen. (Bright sides to this: I’m getting a lot better at recording shorter segments. And I also took up meditation, which it turns out is great for me.)

But as those construction projects are wrapping up (and thankfully, they’re close to done), I find that I’m inspired to schedule some… meetings. Specifically, I’m going to start scheduling live webcasts.

I attended two webcasts in the last two weeks, and they were awesome

A while back, I found some really useful info on editing in Final Cut ProX on Larry Jordan’s website. I signed up for his newsletter, and I’ve attended some of his weekly webcasts recently, on the topics of using stills in FCPX, and multi-cam editing in FCPX.

And I fell in love with webcasts all over again.

There really is something about showing up for a live event and hearing a warm voice sometimes that’s pretty terrific. I haven’t lost my love of a-synchronicity, for sure, but Larry’s webcasts put me in the mood to change things up and get back to doing webcasts on my own.

There may be some days when there’s a little unplanned background noise, but I’m sure we’ll make it through!

I’m going to do a mix of “Dear SQL DBA” questions and other technical topics

My plan is to start scheduling a weekly webcast, all about SQL Server performance tuning and database administration:

  1. The Dear SQL DBA podcast and YouTube show will have a webcast every second week – and it’ll still go out as a podcast and a YouTube video, too!
  2. On alternate weeks, I’ll do a webcast on SQL Server topics that I’m working on for video training, conference sessions, or things I’m blogging about.
    • Some of these will end up on YouTube afterward, some of them will be live only, it’ll depend on the topic
    • Most of these will probably be demo-heavy and not very audio-only friendly, so they won’t be podcast episodes

You’ll be able to sign up for each of the events in advance and set up calendar reminders, of course. I’m considering doing the webcast at two different times per day after a while, but I’m going to get started with just a single time slot before I get too crazy.

I’ll be working on all the plumbing of setting things up in the next few days, so expect to see more info about webcast sign-ups next week.

Hooray!