This isn't my usual post, but I wanted to tell people about a few cool projects I have been involved with recently that might interest some people.

We Speak Linux

I am super excited to be one of the people involved in this project early on. We Speak Linux is a place for Windows Administrators and SQL Server DBAs to learn more about the Linux operating system. There are plenty of good sources for information about Linux on the internet, but with WSL we wanted to build a community of people with a common goal: Transitioning their skills with the Windows operating system over to Linux. This group has really been driven by Tracy Boggiano (T|B). She has been relentless in getting a Linux webinar-based training project off the ground, and has already scheduled a great starting line-up. Head over to our website to learn more: https://wespeaklinux.com/.

Speaking Mentors

Another great project I am honored to be a part of is http://speakingmentors.com. I found out about this project from Alex Yates(T|B) on the SQL Community Slack and signed up to be a mentor right away. The concept is simple, but powerful. Speakers of any level of experience can come, choose a mentor from a list of seasoned presenters, and get help with anything they need. Need help working on your first talk? Need help honing your slide deck skills? Getting ready for your 200th talk? Whatever your needs are you can find help at SpeakingMentors.

Telegraf

With the reality of SQL on Linux soon approaching a workplace near me, I was trying to find a good metric collector that could run on both Windows and Linux to replace the Windows-only agent we were using. After some searching I found telegraf. Telegraf is an open-source cross-platform metric collection agent with a simple plugin framework that makes it very extensible. A SQL Server plugin existed but I didn't really agree with how, or how much, data was collected.

Being open-source I set to work rewritting the TSQL used by the plugin, and making a few small tweaks to the plugin itself. I am proud to say that my re-write has been accepted and my pull request was merged with the main project. From this point forward my revamped SQL Server plugin can be found in the nightly builds and will eventually be in the upcoming 1.6 release. Check the project out here, and specifically the SQL Server plugin here. Be sure to keep an eye on Tracy Boggiano's blog as she will be writing a little about our monitoring setup using Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana.