Tim Hall’s recent blog post on his decade of experience as an Oracle ACE Director (and now as a Developer Champion) prompted me to think over my own experiences as an ACE Director since 2014. My perspectives are a bit different because of my different roles since I was awarded that status to my surprise in March of that year, but I’ve got a lot of similar experiences to share.
The Grind
For example, I recently took part in the far southern leg of the 2018 Latin America Oracle Developer Champion (LAODC) tour:
- I flew from Chicago to Sao Paolo, Brazil and then to Asuncion, Paraguay – an 11-hour journey – in standard coach seats, with a lengthy, unexpected delay that delayed my arrival until late that evening.
- I presented the next day, met with the user groups there, and then jumped on a plane with my colleagues to Santiago, Chile the next morning … except that meant flying east to Buenos Aires at 3 AM to fly back west to Santiago.
- The rest of the trip – 11 days, five cities, nine presentations – left very little time to really get more than a taste of these marvelous countries and cities. I’m not complaining – I’m just explaining these aren’t vacations, they’re deeply serious exchanges with our colleagues to help explain some of the finer points of Oracle application and database technology, and a chance to mentor our younger colleagues as they traverse their careers as IT professionals.
- Yes, we do celebrate a bit at our speakers’ dinners, and there’s a lot of camaraderie and shared stories, but after 11 days I was glad to take an afternoon off, take a break from talking about anything related to technology, and just catch up on a bit more sleep.
And that’s just one extended conference I attended this year. I just added up my scheduled events for 2018 and by mid-December, I will have presented at four major regional conferences in the USA (COLLABORATE, KSCOPE, GLOC, and ECO), two in Europe (DOAG and UKOUG), and close to a dozen smaller regional Oracle user groups and conferences.
- As Tim mentioned, ACE Directors do receive some limited compensation for these events, but trust me, we’re not traveling in business class unless we pay for it ourselves or use accumulated miles. I’ve only done that when I need to arrive in fighting shape and ready to present the next day. Think more RyanAir and Southwest than Emirates or British Airways, and you’ll get the picture.
- Before I was an ACE Director, I funded almost all of my conference attendance and travel on my own dime; a major conference can cost as much as $2000 once airfare, hotel, and other travel expenses are accounted for – but that doesn’t include the lost billing time if you are working as an independent contractor, or have to take vacation time to attend.
- Full disclosure: As the Oracle SME for ViON Corporation, based out of Herndon, VA, my employer has sponsored my participation at many of these conferences, so I don’t have to pay for most of my travel to those events. However, that also means I often have to do double-duty at the company’s vendor table to help salespeople decode Oracle DBA tech-speak, and so I often miss out on conference content and chances to learn alongside the event’s attendees.
TANSTAAFL
As the saying goes, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Presenting at these events demands a commitment to experimenting with the technology that underlies the presentations, mastering how it works well enough to present it effectively, and spending time with other professionals – ACEs and Oracle Master Product Managers and technology experts like Bryn Llewelyn, Maria Colgan, Anil Nair, Dominic Giles, Gerald Venzl, Marc Sewtz, and Steven Feuerstein, just to name a few! – to understand precisely why something is working the way it does.
As Tim has already mentioned, this simply takes a lot of time, especially in the run-up to major conferences like COLLABORATE, KSCOPE and OpenWorld. And since my employer doesn’t pay me to experiment on their time, that means I’ve got to either dedicate some of my non-billable time to design tests that demonstrate what I’m presenting about. So that means it’s not unusual in January and February to kiss my wife goodnight at 9:30 PM and toddle down to my chilly basement home office for several hours of exploration, testing, frustration, success, and hopefully some sleep usually in the wee hours of the morning.
It doesn’t end there, of course; with Oracle’s new release schedule, there are significant new features coming out every few months, and that means I’ve got to tweak, re-tweak, and rebuild at least a few slides between conferences and user group events. As I like to remind people, at most events you can usually find an ACE Director at the end of the hotel bar typing madly on his keyboard until the presentation is as close to perfect as possible.
So Why Do I Do It?
If this sounds a lot less glorious than you imagine, you’re right. So why do I keep doing it? For several reasons:
- I absolutely love presenting. I am in the fortunate position of doing something I love: standing in front of a crowd (the bigger the better), talking about technology I understand pretty well, telling stories about what I’ve been through – especially the mistakes and disasters! – and even pontificating about what I believe the future holds for our industry. It’s unbelievably edifying to see a light go on above someone’s head when they learn something new, see something in a completely different light, or even disagree and debate a bit.
- I stand on the shoulders of giants. My mentors – Arup Nanda, Kerry Osborne, Tom Kyte, Daniel Morgan, Maria Colgan, Penny Avril, Tim and Kellyn Pot’vin Gorman, Jeff Smith, Charles Kim, Connor McDonald, and dozens of other presenters and Oracle ACEs too numerous to mention – gave me a boost up, helped nurture me as a presenter and writer, encouraged me to try for ACE – and it would be shameful not to pay that support forward.
- It’s time to give back. Most of all, I’ve spent almost four decades in IT, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff happen. If I’ve learned anything, it’s figuring out that sometimes it’s more important to know what not to do in a sticky situation that can save a database, a project, and even a whole team. There’s a whole new generation of DBAs and developers coming into our industry that could really benefit from my experiences, and the only way our industry – indeed, our civilization! – gets better is by transferring that knowledge and uplifting our colleagues. That’s my passion and my purpose.
Note: These observations are entirely my own, and are not endorsed by Oracle Corporation, the Oracle ACE program, or my current employer.
