One last reminder – If you’re interested in learning more about troubleshooting and optimizing SQL Server performance, please consider coming to the full-day seminar I’ll be giving this Friday. Full details are here: http://sqlperftuning.eventbrite.com/. We’ll be working some exercises, so bring your laptop with an instance of SQL Server 2008 (or later) running on it. It’ll be fun!
I also encourage you to come on down to SQL Saturday 130 the following day – whether there’s an official registration for you or not. (But don’t tell ‘em I said that). :^)
Come by the booth for a visit. I’ll be hanging out most of the day and have some nice swag to give away.
First things first, Wayne Snyder is rolling off the board of directors for PASS this year. We’d worked together, shoulder to shoulder along with Joe Webb (blog | @joewebb) and other outstanding members of the SQL Server community, for many years of on the PASS board of directors and I’m certain that my tenure on the board and as president of the organization would’ve been nothing but trouble had Wayne not been there, covering my blind side(s), at every turn. Here’s my tribute to Wayne Snyder:
If you were to mention “Wayne Snyder” to me, I’d instantly start to grin and, probably, nod a little bit. Wayne is the kind of leader who always comes to mind with overpowering and emotional warmth. Sometimes when you visualize a memory of a person, you see them in your mind’s eye stooped over a console deep in thought or pontificating at a meeting somewhere deep in corporate America. But when I recall Wayne, I always see an image of Wayne smiling with his arms out wide as if he’s going to wrap you in the biggest, most comforting, Southern-fried, big brother hug you’ve had all year. And that image is loaded with all kinds of deep positive connotations: supportive, enthusiastic, sincere offer you thoughtful conversation, honest convictions, and straight answers.
To use an analogy, some leaders are only the “thermostat” of their organization – they set the temperature for everyone else. But Wayne was also the “thermometer” as well – he showed what temperature at which our organization was running. And that temperature is warm. As a PASS member, you knew within a heartbeat that it was ok to give a shout-out back to the speaker in a crowded auditorium, that there were no stupid questions, that it was ok to be the one who knew the least in the room because, in fact, he was the guy who knew the least in the room once and here he was to help you become the one who knew the most in the room! I honestly can’t count the number of people who Wayne recruited into the ranks of PASS simply by being Wayne.
Thank you, Wayne, for your many years of service to our community. And thank you most of all for acting as the wellspring of our communities exuberant, uplifting, and just plain fun attitude of embodied in our motto of “Learn. Grow. Share”. No one does it better than you.
Now, it goes without saying that Dr. Dewitt’s keynote is one of the singlemost anticipated sessions of the entire event. Why? As Dr. Dewitt mentions himself, the hallmark of his sessions are a semester of graduate school IT learning distilled into one hour of awesomeness. There are lots of great resources discussing NoSQL on the internet (and I’ve pointed out a lot of them in the past). But who wouldn’t rather leapfrog months of on-the-side research learning about NoSQL by enjoying Dr. Dewitt’s keynote? Watch the streaming video at this SQLPASS link.
And if you’re here at the PASS Summit on Day 3, I hope to see you in my two sessions this afternoon:
I’ve already had a few good days in Seattle/Redmond this week, meeting with the Microsoft SQL Server program teams and with other Microsoft SQL Server MVPs. I was as excited as a squeeling Justin Beiber fangirl waiting for his new video, wishing I could tell you all of the cool things I learned at Redmond about the future of SQL Server. But as you’d expect, all of that cool stuff is presently NDA. I’m sure there’ll be some cool announcements from Microsoft this week. So be on the lookout for the good word from Microsoft.
Keynote
Rushabh Mehta, the PASS president, spent a few moments extolling the value of community and the achievements of the professional association. And he’s got a lot to be proud of. PASS has come such a long way. One of the most telling facts about the significance of PASS, to me, is that important SQL Server announcements now happen at the PASS Summit. There was a time, and not very long ago too, in which Microsoft made important SQL Server announcements at other Microsoft events like PDC and TechEd. No longer! PASS is the nexus for Microsoft’s data management users. And it shows.
Ted Kummert, Microsoft’s top data executive, had a lot of exciting talking points about how the community has grown. PASS now has hundreds of chapters worldwide and nearly ninety thousand members. The event has over 4000 paying attendees this year, which means probably around 6000 total attendees including press, exhibitors, speakers, etc. That’s big! In fact, that’s just about the peak capacity for the Washington State Convention Center here in Seattle. No wonder PASS will be at other locations in the future.
It’s Officially called SQL Server 2012
SQL Server “Denali” is officially rolling out as SQL Server 2012. There are a lot of interesting new developments with SQL12 regarding the way the product is splitting into multiple types of appliances designed for specific workloads and customer needs. Need a massive processing appliance, check! That’s PDW. Need a hybrid solution for data housed both on premises and in the cloud? Check. Need processing power for BigData? Need processing for non-relational and unstructured data? Check.
Microsoft’s improving tools will culminate in a new release of development tools called “SQL Server Data Tools”, formerly known as Project Juneau, while the business intelligence side of the house will have a new set of tools in “Power View”, formerly known as Project Crescent. Hadoop figured large in the keynote, as Microsoft acknowledges that many BigData problems are best served by non-relational data stores. Denny Lee, of SQLCAT, proposed an in-house data marketplace during his demos. My face lit up like a kid at a surprise 10-yr birthday party. Really?!? FOR ME?!!? I laugh because I’d been doing that at jobs throughout my career, offering up what I used to call the “data feedstore” to managers within my team. +! for validation of your ideas.
First Session of the Day
From there I headed out to my first presentation of the conference, which I was delivering with my pal Buck Woody (blog | twitter) of Microsoft. Our session was all about Cloud 101 – when it’s appropriate to use the cloud and where you can learn more about the specific technologies like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Many IT pros don’t know the difference and are being subjected to the “implement it!” decrees of their bosses who simply read an article on an airplane saying that the cloud is the future. The best quote from the Twittersphere about our session? “Elastic is fantastic” I couldn’t have said it better!
Speaking of conference sessions, my buddy Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) pointed out this great mobile schedule planning resource:
Go to Guidebook and download the app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, or Blackberry. After launching it, you’ll be prompted to download a guide. Type in PASS Summit, and we’re near the bottom of the list.
Voila! Instant mobile schedule guidebook to the PASS Summit.
The Energy is Nuts!
After delivering my session, it was off to the Exhibit Hall, where I played the role of booth jockey for Quest Software for the rest of the proceedings that day. I noticed two things of significance. First, the crowds were thicker and more energetic than I’ve seen in years. Wow! I knew attendance was our highest ever, but the crowd was near to bursting out at the seems like a 14-year old kid wearing last season’s clothes. So either the Washington State Convention Center is no longer big enough or more planning is needed to make this venue work. When I was in leadership for PASS, planning and properly utilizing the venue was always a logistical nightmare. So I don’t envy the current leadership in figuring out how to make the PASS Summit scale to an even larger size. The second thing I noticed was how focused the crowd was. Usually, you get a lot of tire-kickers in the booth who, deep down inside, only want your vendor swag. Yes, we had some cute swag this year (a Toad beanie baby and some cool ribbons for your badge). But we also had huge crowds even after we ran out of swag. And, in case you didn’t detect the important part of the previous sentence, we ran out of swag! That’s right we gave out everything on day 1 of a 3 day event. I nearly freaked the freak out. What is going on here, folks? Haven’t you heard that there’s a recession going on?
The last quarter of the year is usually my busiest due to the fantastic PASS Summit and SQLBits events. The fall looks a little different … BECAUSE IT WILL BE EVEN BUSIER! Here’s a rundown of where I’ll be this fall through mid-October:
BASTA! SQLCON.NET
September 26 to 29; Mainz, Germany
This big developer and admin conference runs from September 26 to 29 in Mainz, Germany. I’ll be delivering at least one session and hobnobbing with Quest customers, friends, and in a very weird twist, my oldest daughter Emily, who will be in the Rhineland at the exact same time on a graduation present I’d been planning for her since graduation in June.
SQLBits – Query Across the Mercy
September 29 to October 1; Liverpool, United Kingdom
One of my favorite conferences of the year! The organizers are great. The speakers are great! The attendees are great!! The venues are great!!! The lunches are … um … adequate. I’m doing all an new session on SQL Injection attack, this time with LOTS of demos kindly written by an attendee at one of my sessions in Cologne. He like the session so much, he decided to build demos to go along with it. (Thanks again, Volker!)
And if you’ve attended before, you know how much fun our now traditional IT Horror Stories and IT Bingo Trivia sessions are. Make plans to attend these standing-room only sessions, before the fire marshal kicks us all out of the room for overfilling it.
The PASS Summit
Seriously. This is the one. If you can attend only one SQL Server training and community event in a given year, this is the one. Over 150 sessions and pre-conference seminars. Most everyone who is on the list of “who’s who” in the world of SQL Server and Microsoft-related data management and development will be in attendance. And a large number of the Microsoft R&D team that builds, documents, and supports SQL Server will also be there.
I read the PASS Officer Election announcement from June 15th with a bit of trepidation. There was something about the announcement which made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
As a bit of background, the PASS “officers” are also known as the Executive Committee (ExeCo), as described in the PASS Bylaws in section VIII.10. The ExeCo was added to the governance of PASS back in 2004-2005 as a check-and-balance against the extremely powerful office of president as described in the version of the bylaws PASS currently had in place at that time. Prior to the ExeCo, the president could do pretty much anything they wanted at that point – sign contracts, make binding pronouncements, etc. – while the overall duty of the board of directors was to manage specific portfolios and to set strategy. The ExeCo verbiage was added to PASS governance to ensure that there was a reasonable balance of power by requiring a 3 out of 4 vote to enact major initiatives before they were brought before the board of directors. (I should point out that my job as an employee of a major vendor was directly responsible for bringing the ExeCo into being. When I was first elected by the board of directors to serve as president, the PASS board also wanted to ensure that a president working for a vendor would not show his employer undue favor with perks like better spots on the exhibit hall floor, mentioning them by name in presidential communiques, and so forth. So the bylaws were changed to establish the ExeCo so that the president, any president, could not govern by decree). OK – so the ExeCo makes executive decisions, comprendo?
So in looking at the the slate put forward for the 2012 officers, I noticed that two members of said ExeCo will now be working for the same company and this is deeply troubling to me. (As an aside, those persons are Rushabh Mehta with Solid Quality Mentors India practice and Douglas McDowell with Solid Quality Mentors USA practice).
Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a personal attack in any way. I know both Rushabh and Douglas personally and consider them both friends. I have endorsed them for ExeCo leadership roles in the past, as individuals. However, I have a deep conviction that the Executive Committee should not have any two members from the same company, even when they represent different business units. Again, my feelings in this area transcend the current persons on the slate. I simply feel like it’s a dangerous precedent to set because we cannot know or control the character and ethics of future PASS leaders.
Consider that the ExeCo can govern with a 3 out of 4 vote. That means that two members of the ExeCo, with either an implicit or explicit alliance, could block any initiative each and every time it came up. Furthermore, they could pass any initiative they wanted by winning one other vote.
I also feel that the ExeCo and the wider board is responsible for securing the future of PASS, one of which includes reasonable checks and balances on executive leadership. We cannot know and should be somewhat skeptical that all future board members will be as ethical and upstanding as those currently on the board. By allowing a single company to hold multiple seats on the ExeCo, PASS would set a dangerous precedent for future boards.
The press release makes no mention of Rushabh’s future plans. It’s possible that he intends to resign at the end of this year and not assume the role of Immediate Past President, thereby avoiding the possibility of two ExeCo members from the same organization. There are probably some other ways to remedy this situation. But with only the information of the press release, I’m sorry to say that I cannot endorse the 2012 ExeCo slate.
I’ve had enough time off from traveling after my surgery to finally travel again. First on the circuit , set for August 27th, is Omaha, Nebraska and SQL Saturday #91. As a former Crimson Tide alum, I was stoked about going to the University of Nebraska, our once and future rivals on the Grid Iron. But after a moment’s confusion, I remembered that the Huskers are over in Lincoln, not Omaha. (May Bear have mercy on my soul.)
Almost all of the speakers are friends. Many are Microsoft MVPs. So it’ll be great to catch up with these fine folks and, I hope, get a chance to meet many attendees. I’ll be doing three of my favorite presentations: SQL Server Internals & Architecture, End-to-End Troubleshooting for Microsoft SQL Server, and Top Ten Most Crucial DBA Mistakes. As I write this, I realize that I’ve got to get busy and post those other slide decks in the slides section of my website!
I’ll also be visiting a few customers for the two days before hand, signing a few books, and otherwise trying to be productive. In the parlance of my employer, that means helping with sales.
Next month, on September 17th, I’ll be speaking at the Atlanta SQL Saturday #89. I’m presenting just one session at the event itself, though I’ll be hanging out at the Quest booth much of the time. If possible, I’m also going to spend as much time as I can in Bob Ward’s sessions.
In addition, I’ll be presenting a full day pre-conference seminar on Friday, September 16th covering all sorts of SQL Server performance tuning and optimization content. There are only a few seats left, so if you’re so inclined REGISTER HERE ASAP. All attendees will be getting a big goodie bag with posters, a signed copy of one of my books, and a T-Shirt.
Atlanta is an easy 4-hour drive from Nashville. And the weather is usually great in September. So this should be a fun event in every way!
I’ve always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy’s latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.
Learn from My Mistakes
Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you’re at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here’s a quick run-down of the topics we’ll cover in my pre-con:
Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
Promoting communication within the team and with management
Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
Dealing with difficult team members
Practicing good team time management techniques
Read all about the goals of the session here. If you’re coming to my session, I’d love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you’re facing!
Personal Experience, Personnel Experience
Also, just a word about my bona fides. I’ve had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable.
On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor’s degree in the school of management back in the 1980′s. I’ve also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership‘s leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin’s not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990′s. In the late 1990′s, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000′s, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.
A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8
The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn’t very flattering, but here’s a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft:
The 2011 PASS SQLRally is just about one month away and it’s high time I highlighted some of the important things you’ll be hearing about in my precon seminar Leadership and Team Management Skills for the IT Professional. Just to set the context, many of us IT people got to our lofty career positions because of our keen use of technology. It takes a lot of smarts to get where we’ve gotten, but they are a very specific set of smarts that can’t always be used in every business setting. And, since so many of us have topped out in our potential salary as long as we stay in the trenches and the only do technology work, a lot of us are starting to eye those middle manager positions so that we can continue to see our career grow. The only problem is that all of those skills that enabled us to become top tier technologists don’t transfer into the management arena.
I’ll be teaching a wide variety of soft skills and specific management checklists to help you survive those early transitional days. And if you’re not a manager? You’ll still want to attend because the wide variety of communication skills we’ll cover will help you stay on top of many other real life situations, from leading the local Girl Scout troop to taking a role on the local PTA organization.
You can read the full and pedantic session description at the link I provided up above. But here’s a list of Five Funny Things You’ll Hear in the Precon:
“Here’s where we get out the whips and chains…”
“In this section, we’re going to learn how to manage our managers…”
“And then I was, like, OMG. And she was, like, LOL. And her cousin was, like, ROFL. But then I was, like, meh…”
“Darth Vader would be proud…”
“The beatings will continue until morale improves!”
And one bonus:
“That’s what she said…”
Did I put these in context, heck no! But it’s a fun session, with some practice labs and LOTS of content to help you make that transition from full time technologist to part- or even full-time leader!
The last few weeks we’ve watched the drama unfold in regards to the PASS BOD elections. We’ve seen people attack criticize the NomCom, the board, PASS itself, the process and the decision of feeding of Gremlins after midnight. Thankfully the fireworks have died down and we can take a look at everything that has happened and make strides to move forward in a positive (and more importantly) constructive manner. Given that, I’ve been asked by my good friend Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter) to respond to the following:
Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken. Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning? Please explain your thoughts?
I’m not going to recap the entire reality series-type drama that unfolded regarding the final slate of candidates but you’re more than welcome to read it yourself here. While I could rail on about how I believe Steve was slighted, unfortunately there’s nothing more to be done about it now so let’s look forward, shall we? The issue here is that the NomCom chose (and rightly so from my perspective) to follow the processes set in place for them and acted accordingly. Okay, fair enough. What we need to ask ourselves now is: “Is this process still appropriate for our organization?”
All together now…IT DEPENDS! Just kidding. Seriously though, up until now the entire (or at least much of) the process involved in electing someone to the board was hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Thankfully after last year’s elections issues the folks at PASS (and yes this includes both the board AND headquarters) worked extremely hard to change things for the better. This year we now have the PASS Elections Portal which offers much more transparency into the whole process than we ever had before. I think this move was a huge step in the right direction however much like Uncle Ben warned young Peter Parker, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Now that we have this transparency it introduces a new issue that wasn’t prevalent before: accountability. Prior to this year’s elections we, the community at large, didn’t have easy access to things such as the NomCom scores, process documentation, direct/easy/clear communication lines to those involved. That being the case this year you’re seeing the results of a very PASSionate community demanding answers to outcomes that quite simply don’t make sense to the masses. I think the one of the best posts/discussions to show this fact was Stuart Ainsworth’s (Blog | Twitter) post addressing issues raised directly. As a small aside, HUGE kudos to Stu for meeting the community head-on and not being afraid to answer questions. I think we all owe him a big ‘thank you’ along with the other NomCom folks who openly communicated and helped clear up what they could.
While Stu’s post somewhat answered lingering questions the problem remains that there were things with those scores that simply “didn’t add up” when viewed publicly. This is where the danger in transparency comes in. People are going to question your methods and motives. Now that I’ve rambled on for a couple of paragraphs though we need to come back to the question of the process. The official process can be found from the elections site (pdf) so you can read the wording yourself. Ok finished reading it? Good, we’re all on the same page now. So far we’ve heard NomCom folks state that they had a very specific procedure to follow. Ok…well I’m looking at the procedure wording and it still doesn’t explain what happened this year. Unfortunately this is where the arguments start breaking down due to the only answer starts becoming “can’t talk about it due to privacy”. Again the veil impedes the view. So how can we improve “the process”?
The process currently states that the NomCom is as such:
Finally, the NomCom meets to pick the interviewees on the list they think should be the candidates. This is the slate. The NomCom must always strive to put a minimum of (n+1) candidates on the slate, where “n” = the number of available slots – that means the slate should contain at least 4 (3+1) candidates. However, if the NomCom is in strong agreement that n or <n (“n” or “less than n”) candidates are of sufficient quality to go on the slate, it has the right to present n or <n candidates to the Board of Directors. (e.g. If the NomCom has good reason to believe that only 2 candidates are good enough to serve as Directors – where 2 is clearly less than 3 – it has the right to put only 2 candidates on the slate.) The responsibility for this decision falls on the Chair of the NomCom. This situation is less than ideal and the NomCom will strive to avoid at all costs.
Ok well what I’m reading here is that the NomCom still has the power to submit more or less people to the slate than is needed/asked. That being the case this reads more like Pirate Code from Pirates of the Caribbean wherein Captain Barbossa explains, “the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner .” Maybe we should follow Captain Barbossa’s sage advice and realize that some of the wording we try to stick to are more guidelines. Perhaps we need to just really re-word the official documentation rather than the process as the process itself makes sense in the grand scheme (for the most part). Are there tweaks we can make? Absolutely!
I believe Andy “The SQL Godfather” Warren (Blog | Twitter) wrote in a recent PASS update post about his view and how things could change for the better. In there he states that the NomCom followed procedure and anything less than that would open things up to a new world of trouble and I agree with him. So again, is it the process or the WAY the process is worded that is causing issues here? There are things that could definitely stand to be reworded for clarification. For instance, in the ranking for interview we’ve got Steve Jones being ranked in the average of 2 for Leadership. Really? Okay, I’ll bite. We need a CLEAR definition of what exactly they mean by “leadership experience candidate has demonstrated”. In my eyes being the community leader for the largest SQL Server community website on the planet tends to hold weight. I’d like to know what it is about this category that would cause members to vote so low (or so high in other cases). To be fair and balanced let’s look at another category and candidate. Under education Douglas McDowell comes in at perfect 4.0. What exactly are they looking for in terms of “education”? Does Douglas hold a PhD and everyone else is lower? Does this relate strictly to academia or other areas?
Earlier I mentioned this process isn’t broken and works for the most part and I feel I need to explain that a bit further. As of now the process is that we have a NomCom that sifts through all of the potential candidates and weeds out the weaker applications and comes up with a batch of candidates they feel (again based on given criteria worded in existing process documentation) are strong enough to move forward with. From there they take that batch and interview them with another ranking formula. After the interviews the applicants are ranked, sorted and based on those rankings another smaller batch emerges as those up for candidacy. Now this is where breakdowns occur, in my opinion. Here the NomCom is able to modify the batch of candidates to be either more or less than is stated in documentation (again we should defer to the Pirate Code on this). Here is where NomCom could say “numbers don’t add up, let’s talk” and fix this. Where this year’s rancor is coming from is that we seem to be missing the piece of the puzzle where (or if) this occured. Now we have a final slate presented to the board. Again, here, the board can look at the slate and say “good, good…errr this doesn’t seem right, you sure?”. Once more we haven’t seen anything from the black box of the board on this, all we know is that they approved the submitted slate. This final slate is what will be presented to the community and from there a general election will be held.
Now the process itself makes sense and potentials are vetted multiple times before we finally get our final candidates but something kind of seems “off”. Maybe it’s me but maybe there needs to be a more balanced check system. As it stands you only have two bodies that ping-pong a decision back and forth. Would adding a third body like our government system be a better way to check this? Perhaps that third body can get results scrubbed of personal data (e.g. name, employer, location) and only be presented with answers and they do rankings based on those. This blind ranking system can then be matched up with what NomCom finds and the board can make decisions based on aggregation of those results? This third branch could be made up of purely community folks so there is no percieved bias of board influence. Barring that we COULD have a board member on in that group but with no voting rights and their role is simply to moderate. Again, just bouncing ideas. Would this be too much to deal with? Do we really need to go to these lengths to please the masses? Only time will tell.
Outside of the election process itself I’d also like to take this time on my digital soapbox to encourage the board members as well as HQ to please PLEASE don’t be afraid of communicating with the community. Blog, Tweet, interpretive dance. Take a note from Andy Warren and see that it’s OKAY to publicly state your thoughts and opinions. Even if you feel your ideas may be “less than popular” at least you’re doing something more than the percieved nothing. In this age of transparency and numerous communication avenues (blogs, twitter, forums, mailers) there really is no excuse for not reaching out.
After all of this ranting and word vomitting, I’d like to 1) commend you if you’ve actually gotten this far and 2) Invite you to voice your own thoughts. If you’d like comment here on this blog or take the talk to the elections portal forum. It’s a new day in PASS and with the right people in place and the support of this amazing community I think we could transform this organization into something truly wonderous (as if it’s not already awesome enough). Thanks for your time, I’m going to go ice my fingers down now from writing this mess…
