Blog

Six months ago, it was just a simple idea based on a few brief conversations. Today, it’s finally a reality: the Beyond Tech Skills podcast.

Some background is in order. My good friend, colleague, and fellow Oracle ACE Director Liron Amitzi and I had been talking in person over an adult beverage or three (pre-COVID, of course!) and then texting and chatting for the past few years about the state of the IT industry. We found that even with our cultural differences – he’s originally from Israel but now lives in Vancouver, BC, and 20 years younger than me – we were remarkably like-minded about the fantastic opportunities IT has to offer to so many diverse folks around the world.

But we also saw there were enormous gaps:

• Folks often focused so much on the technology itself or their coding skills that they ignored the other two-thirds of what makes a truly great professional: the soft skills they needed to be successful, including the importance of gaining detailed business knowledge as well as how to communicate clearly and work together as a team.
• IT organizations were spending incredible amounts of time trying to find qualified candidates for positions at all levels, mainly because they had no idea how to interview people properly. Even worse, many great candidates didn’t get connected with great companies simply because they didn’t know how to handle the interview process.
• Finally, as we looked back over our combined 60 years of experience, we were disturbed by the ongoing lack of diversity in many IT organizations. Both of us remember a time just a few decades back when the “white bro developer” culture didn’t exist and the advantage that different backgrounds and viewpoints yielded across the entire software development lifecycle.

We decided it was time to take action. We’re leading off our podcast with a series of episodes on the interview process itself: how to find the right candidates for your IT organization – the ones with the right fit and finish to match your teams’ goals.

But we’re not stopping there! We’ve got a great series of interviews that will tackle all of the issues we’re most concerned about, including DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and how we can all make a difference. We’ll be talking to many of our colleagues across multiple technologies and industries over the next several months.

We’re planning to publish a new episode every second Wednesday starting on 11 February, but for now, please check out our introductory episode – just point your favorite podcast app at Beyond Tech Skills – and you can always stay up to date on our entire list of episodes at BeyondTechSkills.com.

In a year that started with only the third impeachment in history of a sitting President of the USA, a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, major unrest and justifiable demands for social justice and an end to police violence in so many of our towns and cities, and an unprecedented general election campaign that saw incredible voter turnout and post-election turmoil across my fine nation, I found myself drawing dark comfort from one of the most appropriate bumper stickers I’ve seen this year: Giant Meteor 2020. Just End It Already.

So what will 2021 bring? Here’s my viewpoints on technology, human civilization, and hope for an amazing year and decade.

Everywhere, the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT shows no signs of stopping its expansion into our daily lives, and that’s not a bad thing, either. Wearable devices, real-time contact tracing, and even cybernetic implants have made news in 2020. Remember that the whole point of IPV6 addressing was to make networking available for up to some 50 trillion individual devices by 2050, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that trend in this decade.

What’s also fascinating to me is the incredibly low-cost capabilities of IoT, made possible by cheap and reliable Raspberry Pi and Arduino computing nodes, sensors, and hubs. For example, today I’m putting the finishing touches on what I believe is a pretty sophisticated home security system, all built on IoT components. I’ve been able to build that with open-source software and a lot of help from online support communities. It’s not been without frustration, but I’ve learned so much from the experience that I’m ready to move on to more challenging tasks.

Machine Learning, AI, and Decision By Digital. All these IoT data sources offer our human civilization an incredible set of amazing opportunities, including more efficient agriculture, intelligent electric vehicles, “smart cities,” closed-loop recycling, cleaner air and water, and especially electric power infrastructure. But to clear the grain from the chaff, we’ll need ever-better machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digitally-driven decision making to take advantage of these exabytes of information.

Convergence, in Databases and Applications. 2020 clearly demonstrated that just-in-time supply chains have some weaknesses during times of stress from global events like the COVID-19 pandemic as well as local catastrophes like the Australian and Californian wildfires and a horrendous series of tropical storms and hurricanes. That means we’ll need to consider where our critical databases, applications, and infrastructure is located, too, so I’ll be watching trends towards converged solutions like Oracle’s Application Express (APEX) and its emphasis on its Converged Database strategy.

Emphasis on Objective Truth. Finally, if this past year has shown us anything – from the USA’s incredibly incompetent response to COVID-19 as well as the dramatically divergent political extremes about the reliability of the results from the USA’s general election – it’s the value of objective, verifiable, trustworthy facts and information. My country’s information infrastructure has been badly damaged, not just by recent nation-state actors’ hacking attempts, but by a deliberate rejection of expertise and knowledge provided by trustworthy professionals about everything from basic principles of public heath to how elections actually work.

It’s going to take at least a few years to restore that faith and trust in public institutions so that we can move on to tackle the enormous problems facing our human civilization in everything from climate change to clean energy transformation. But I’m optimistic that we can still get there because, as Jeff Bridges says in Starman, “When things are at their very worst, humans are at their very best.”

Bring it on, 2021! We are ready to be at our very best.

As you’ve probably heard, I’ve tossed my hat into the proverbial ring for ODTUG Board membership.

This is the first time I’ve ever run for any position of this stature in my life, and hopefully my platform and vision for the future of ODTUG will help you decide if I’m worthy of this honor. (My fellow candidates’ positions are also there, so please do take the time to read through our credentials and proposals.)

One thing is for sure: We have a most excellent roster of ODTUG candidates to choose from! I’m amazed at the talent that we have attracted to ODTUG, and that’s why I firmly believe we’re the premier Oracle User Group in North America bar none. So no matter who you vote for, please do vote! It’s crucial that every member of ODTUG has their voice heard, especially in these challenging times for our families, our careers, and our industry.

As we start the second half of 2020, it’s a great time to reassess where we’ve been and where we’re headed. For example, I just realized it’s been six whole months since my last blog post, but it’s not like anything happened since the beginning of the year, right?

It’s hard for me to believe that in late January, as I was getting ready to attend what turned out to be my last in-person Oracle User Group event for the year (so far), that my greatest worry was whether the conflict between the USA and Iran might erupt into a shooting war while I was speaking in Tel Aviv at ilOUG2020. That seems like such a fond memory of relative normalcy when compared to once-in-a-generation events like:

a) a Presidential impeachment that further polarized USA politics;
b) a pandemic outbreak that the USA should have tackled and defeated handily;
c) record disruption of economic systems worldwide as a result of the pandemic;
d) major civic unrest after years of brutal police violence towards people of color, and many of us have said at last “Enough!”; and finally
e) increasing tensions between several major world powers.

Through all this drama, my wife and I have spent countless hours worrying about younger family members all in possible contact with COVID-19 through their work either indirectly or directly support health care in hospitals, nursing homes, and the Veterans’ Administration. We’ve sewn face masks for them, sent messages of encouragement and thanks, and made sure they knew we loved them and honored their commitment to their professions.

And what better time could I have personally chosen to move my career in a different direction?

In mid-April, I said a fond farewell to the team at Viscosity North America, as I’ve decided to concentrate more on volunteerism for causes like Hire Heroes USA as well as helping our local US Congressman during his efforts to secure a second term during the upcoming 2020 general election. In both cases, it’s been a great opportunity to develop some real-world use cases for Oracle Application Express (APEX), Visual Builder, and Machine Learning, which I’ve been writing about since early 2020. In my role as ODTUG’s Database Community Lead, it’s been exciting to help some excellent authors publish their knowledge on our TechCeleration portal. (Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re interested in volunteering to share what you know!)

So while I don’t know what the rest of 2020 holds for us all, I’m going to stay positive, focused, and most of all, science-based. If there’s anything positive that the COVID19 pandemic has provided, it’s the ability to learn just how many of us will decide to listen to scientific experts, follow their advice, and work together to get through these challenges. 

Stay safe, stay healthy, and most of all, don’t forget to vote in upcoming elections. It’s the only way things get better for everyone else!

I officially started my career as an Oracle DBA in 2001, but my path to that role spans two previous decades working so many different projects, organizations, and teams that I’ve often forgotten what it was like to be an applications developer. I still remember the thrill I got the first time I wrote a SQL statement and actually got back a meaningful result; I recall the first time that I successfully built a new PowerBuilder application that pulled data right out of an Oracle database gave me a similar jolt of joy.

I recently returned to my application development roots when I decided to build a new set of applications using Oracle Application Express (APEX), and I used my experiences this past summer as a volunteer for a US Congressional campaign to construct a series of use cases and requirements for a mobile, flexible, responsive application for voter canvassing. Now thanks to my editors and colleagues at IOUG, I’ve had the opportunity to chronicle those experiences from my perspective as an “old-school” Oracle DBA with a new article series entitled A DBA’s Journey to APEX. So far that journey has three parts:

• Part 1: From Napkin to Application In a Single Weekend explains how I constructed the original specifications and data model and built the original database schema for the application.
• Part 2: If We Build It, the Voters Will Come chronicles my introduction into setting up an APEX workspace and building the first rough draft of the corresponding application components.
• Part 3: Give Them a Lever, and They Will Move the World explains how I delved more deeply into APEX’s reporting and data entry capabilities, including development of a mobile application for voter canvassing.

All content is free courtesy of IOUG SELECT. I hope you get as much out of reading them as I did out of writing them. Happy computing!