Introducing Our Latest Employee, Richie Rump (aka @Jorriss)

During our very first training class, we showed the students how we use SET STATISTICS IO ON to get the number of logical reads performed on each table in a query, and then sum ’em up to see the query’s overall impact. It’s kind of a painful, manual process.

Sitting in the back row of the class (because that’s how he rolls), Richie Rump saw that process and thought to himself, “I bet I could make that easier.”

The bad news is that he probably didn’t learn much the rest of that day in class, because he immediately started building StatisticsParser.com.

The good news is that you got StatisticsParser, hahaha.

That kind of mentality is what we’re all about. We look for SQL Server tasks that are complex, and figure out how to make them easier for free. Whether it’s our blog posts, our community presentations, or our tools, we’re always looking for new ways to make your job suck less.

So let’s talk to Richie and figure out what makes him tick.

Brent: I think of each person as a toolbox. Over time, as we experience situations and solve problems, they become tools in our toolbox. I think back to my time in hotels, my work in accounting, and even my love of cars as various tools in my toolbox that I can use to get things done. What are some of the tools in your toolbox that make up who you are?

Richie: This surprises some but I spent almost five years as a project manager. I even earned the dreaded Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. I also started my career as a Access database programmer (way back in Access 2.0). Most of my career I spent using Microsoft tooling like Visual Basic, ASP, C#, and the .NET framework. I also spent a fair amount of time as a software architect. After my time as a project manager I pivoted my career towards the data side and absorbed all of the SQL Sever knowledge that I could. I spent almost twelve years in the supply-chain management vertical and have spent time in the accounting, payment processing, and legal areas as well. After reading all of that I feel old.

Brent: Today, you’re a serial (or maybe parallel) community activist – starting dotNet Miami, helping put on the South Florida Code Camp, co-founded the Away From the Keyboard podcast, built StatisticsParser and sp_DataProfile, give community presentations, etc. Take me back to the first time you said to yourself, “I should create something that gives back.”

Richie: That probably would be starting dotNet Miami. For years I followed the SQL Server community and the WordPress communities. I was always impressed by their generosity in not only their sharing of technical knowledge but in the way they care for each other as human beings. I looked around the developer community in Miami and wondered “Why can’t we have a .NET community like that in Miami?” So I grabbed a few people and met at a sports bar and we talked about starting a group. Six months later dotNet Miami was born. We’re still going strong and are committed to being a place where we can grow as technologists and as people. My favorite description of dotNet Miami is “We are not competitors, we are comrades.”

Brent: For years, you’ve been making our classes and webcasts more fun by poking fun at us. Now, you’re going to be on the other side. How do we help raise the next generation of the peanut gallery?

Richie: It takes commitment that’s for sure. I think the whole peanut gallery thing came from getting to know the team personally. Twitter conversations, in-person conference discussions, and training classes all lead to not me to poke fun at the Brent Ozar Unlimited team, but have a friendly conversation with friends. So you want to join the peanut gallery? Get to know us better over Twitter, chat with us at a conference, or join us for in-person training. (See what I did there?)

Brent: One last thing everybody’s gonna ask: where’s @Jorriss come from?

Richie: Ha! Back in the early days of the Internet we had these things called “handles”. For a while I was going by richier but that never sat well with me. So one night in college, a bunch of us geeky types were creating personas that would live in the Star Wars universe (don’t judge). There was a character in Timothy Zhan’s Heir to the Empire trilogy called Joruus C’baoth that I dug so I changed it a bit and out came Jorriss Orroz. From there the handle just stuck. Bonus points if you can figure out where the Orroz comes from.