In this episode, Gareth shares his passion for Ametuer Dramatics and talks about getting started in high school plays in South Africa. Richie and Gareth discuss history as Gareth gets into his pass time of reenacting the civil war. Cecil asks about the state of technology in South Africa. Cecil and Gareth get into a discussion about South African and Caribbean food. Sadly, our friend Richie is not a fan of the curry. Gareth discusses a few national delicacies, South African wine and also his special Chili. Richie gets educated on the mechanics of cricket. Our panel compares rugby with american football, and discuss the rise in USA soccer
Links
Tech Night at the Ballpark
Brian Lara
Bobotie Meat Pie
Boerewors Sausage
Cornmeal Porridge
Pinotage Grapes
Bio
Gareth Swanepoel is a sysadmin-turned-SQL Server DBA. He has been working in the IT industry doing support and administration for over 20 years. He enjoys solving the complex problems that his clients encounter when deploying SQL Server in a data warehouse environment. He is an accomplished author and speaker. Current projects include contributing content for the SQL 2014 Extended Events book. He also currently serves as one of the PASS Regional Mentors for the US SouthEast region.
Dmitry Lyalin has been building software for 16+ years and has worked in various industries including payroll, education, banking, media and more recently Microsoft Consulting & Premier Support. Currently Dmitry works as a Product Manager for Visual Studio team out of Redmond, where he moved to from NYC a few years back. In his spare time Dmitry loves building mobile apps, cloud services and is a very dedicated PC gamer.
Kendal is a database strategist, community advocate, public speaker, & blogger. A practiced IT professional with over 15 years of SQL Server experience, Kendal excels at disaster recovery, high availability planning/implementation, & debugging/troubleshooting mission critical SQL Server environments. Kendal is a Principal Consultant at UpSearch SQL (http://www.upsearch.com), a Microsoft MVP, & President of MagicPASS (http://magicpass.sqlpass.org), the Orlando, FL based chapter of PASS.
Paola Valiente was born and raised in Corozal, Puerto Rico. As an actress she’s worked in commercials for Minute Maid and Puerto Rican Lottery. She co-starred with Braulio Castillo, Jr. in a short film called Juan Night Stand (2013) which got to the Short Film Corner of the Cannes Film Festival in France. Her experience in modeling includes national campaigns, fashion editorials, and runways. Paola now lives in Miami where she has taken a new adventure, learning to code. You can find her on Twitter at