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Thursday 5 February 2015

2014 Blog Review

Yup, it's February. Early adopter 3 for APEX5 has just become available, and I've just logged of an APEX 3.2 instance.

I've had this sitting my drafts for some time (it has company), thought it best I finally finish it off an move on.

Considering I fathered an awesome girl in January with my bare hands, surrounded by kangaroos with warm pouches waiting (some facts may have been distorted in this story), I think I did pretty well on the nerd front.

Blogging

Last year I aimed for a post per week and I think I honoured that fairly well, with a few peaks and troughes. I'll have nothing on Mr 100 Day Dimitri.

My March series on APEX 5 drew the biggest crowd, and my non-event webinar was the other blip thanks to some really ordinary internet speeds. Certainly no good for streaming anything either, so nothing from me netflix australia, though I hear I won't miss much.

This year I'm going to need to cut right down due to some other projects afoot. That being said I have a heap to process that have been drafted, from tech posts to observations (that will be dated) & other ramblings. And I'll certainly mention a thing or two if/when I get to play on APEX5 EA3. Luckily the community is right on top it, 1180 workspaces and counting.

For some reason my older posts still get the most hits though, I guess I need to post some new corkers.

I'm 99% certain I want to ditch Google+ comments and go back to one that accepts a wide range of identities. One that also notifies me of comments so I can interact in a timely manner with visitors so kind to leave some thoughts. Just a matter sitting down one day. Only trouble is I think I'll lose some history in the process.

APEX 5

Congratulations to the APEX development team on the amazing release that is APEX5 (EA3). I suspect this release will be darn close to the final product, though I'm sure they'll receive some very useful feedback.

I look forward to getting some time to update our training course notes and finding the usual unexpected goodies. Hopefully I'll be writing client software on it without too much adieu, and I'll never want to go back to 4.x, let along 3!

Even after a few days play the 4.x blue seems dated.

ACE

I originally had a great segue, but I redrafted. Anyway, at least two fine humans gave the honour of ACE nomination in 2014. I've drafted some thoughts on the topic that I'll post separately one day.

Career

We had a fantastic APEX deployment to iPads that continues to make most of the team keen to use the tool. Resultant data is coming through now and they're liking the shapes it can make! More exploratory work with a variety of web components continues to demonstrate how flexible APEX can be as a framework to the database.

A colleague and I were recently reviewing the Kscope presentations that we would attend (there are so many!)
So many brilliant open source frameworks and technologies being talked about at Oracle conference that simply weren't around 3-4 years ago.

What must it be like for a software developer coming out of university these days? Spoilt for choice or overwhelmed with options? It's hard enough to keep up with 15 odd years under the belt. I'm starting to feel like the COBOL programmers I met in my first developer job, well, maybe not that bad.

“The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.” - Alan Kay


Book

Yep, I'm halfway through... ok, maybe a third.. writing a book involving APEX. This shares top priority at the moment and I'm very excited about it. More detail in future and writing with Apress is such a different experience to developing a video series with Packt.  A future presentation, I sense.

And so much easy to refer to a 'book'. 'Video series' just doesn't have the same ring to it, or 'screen casts on APEX techniques'. Even producers of podcasts can summarise it in one word.

Anyway, I don't think it will be ready by Kscope15, maybe Oracle Open World. I think I'm ahead, but I've also got a presentation to finish/write.

Kscope15

Holy smokes I can't believe I'm finally heading to a conference like Kscope. I must say many thanks to Sage Computing Services for getting me there and supporting my growth over the past 7 years, I have the most wonderful boss. That being said, it will be the biggest dragon of time over the next 5 months!

ODTUG have been generous to me since I've got to swim so far to get to Florida, so they've given me two presentation slots. There was word on a third, not the bird, just the word. (Late night joke referencing this)

For some reason I decide that it's this year I'm inspired to write my first 'best practices' type presentation, but I'm excited about the theme I'm using, just working on the content. I'm jealous of Peter Raganitsch's survey idea and look forward to hearing his results. I'm still in mind to still do a super short one with some targeted questions, just to test the waters with certain topics.

I'm also running the jQuery deep dive, though I'll have to shrink it a little and make some upgrades to suit the flavour of Kscope. Rest assured this one is to help the masses take hold of such a ubiquitous toolset.

There will be some smart cookies at this conference but hopefully I can offer some fresh perspective. If anything you'll perhaps walk away knowing about a few more amazing scientists - the real heroes. I'm turning up the geek to eleven in my 'Evidence Based APEX' session ;p

My wife and (by then) 18 month old will be journeying with me. We'll hopefully be rampaging through New York, probably Niagra, Washington DC, Florida, Disney, Las Vegas, and San Fran for 4th July. And I welcome any suggestions, including what to do about the falling aussie dollar!

Youtube

Failed on that on this year. I was kinda waiting on APEX 5, I had a theme in mind. Maybe some this year. Maybe.

Ubuntu

Still running new laptop on it, skimming the surface. Still have Windows 7 laptop on side as backup for certain things. Ubuntu's not bad but not bug free. I think I'm liking it better than Windows, but there's a lot of catching up to do.

12c

Looks good, I like some of the new features a lot but still not sure I'll encounter it in 2015. I have friends on the same street however that have even done some pattern matching awesomeness.

Science

I wanna see this close up
There is so much groundbreaking stuff going on, hard not to read about it. This year during Kscope, a probe will be well within range for photos of Pluto with better resolution than Hubble, and zooms by in mid July. The plutoid hasn't even made one orbit since discovery, and has more known moons now than when the probe with a twitter handle (many do, it's @newhorizons2015) launched.

The LHC will be back online, who knows what widgets of mass and energy they'll learn about. Dark matter and dark energy are just waiting to be understood. All this done with a tool churning seriously big data.

Not bigger than the SKA, however, another amazing entity itching to look into the dark. Technology drives other technology. If you don't think this image makes you realise how insignificant we are, wait until this produces data. More data than society can currently handle, in fact.

Meditation

More of this required. We're encouraging it's return amongst our development teams. I find there is so much value in become more self aware. Put the smartphone down for a little while, allow yourself to get bored occasionally. It's healthy [citation needed]

2015

No predictions this year, it's going to be big enough as it is. Book, Kscope, APEX5 - no need to add to that!

Just remember, if it's 2015 and I bump into you, if you know there is a pool table nearby and I'll gladly play a game over a tasty beer.

Ramble over.

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