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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!

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.

I know, I know … it’s been weeks since I finished participating in the 2018 Latin America Oracle Developer Champion (LAODC) tour, but I have an excuse: I’ve also been on vacation in the Galapagos and Ecuador for ten days, and then I took a brief break for some remedial surgery. This tour was one of the most intense ACE Director travel experiences of my life – nine presentations in five different cities over 11 days! – but I appreciated every moment of the opportunity.

My part of the tour got off to a rousing start in Asuncion, Paraguay at the PYOUG event with a visit from their internationally-famous Recycled Orchestra. The 30+ students constructed their instruments completely from recycled materials and presented several numbers to get our attendees revved up to learn all about Oracle technology, especially Cloud – which is ironic because Paraguay has just recently upgraded its national internet infrastructure sufficiently to allow their DBAs and developers to take advantage of Cloud offerings.

Next, it was time to scale the mighty Andes and head to Santiago, Chile, by way of Buenos Aires. (Just like in the USA, sometimes the shortest distance between two points … isn’t.) My newfound friend Marc Sewtz from Oracle – a wizard of all things APEX! – was my able traveling companion for an early-morning flight to Santiago.

We teamed up there with CLOUG, Anil Nair (master product manager for RAC), Connor MacDonald (of AskTom fame), and plenty of the local ACEs – nice meeting you, Alexis and Otavio! – for several excellent Oracle presentations, excellent company,  and some great Chilean wines and local beers. (Speaking is tougher work than it looks. We stayed thirsty, my friends.)

Next stop: Sao Paolo, Brazil, one of the true megacities of the world. We had a little extra down time upon arrival, so we joined up with ACE program commander Jennifer Nicholson at the magnificent Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) to view their collection of medieval and modern art.  A brief evening rainstorm didn’t cloud our spirits as we presented the next day on behalf of the GUOB and and their team to several hundred attendees.

Then it was time to head for the airport again and make the journey to Montevideo, Uruguay. I’ve dreamed of visiting Montevideo since I was in high school, and I was not disappointed – marvelous beaches and skylines, great company (nice to see you “at home,” Edelweiss Kammermann and Nelson Calero!), and a fantastic speakers’ dinner at the old Ferry Building that’s been converted to an open-air restaurant locus. Jennifer, Anil, and Marc even tried their hand at being cocineros for a few minutes. Montevideo had numerous squares scattered across the city on our way to our UYOUG hosts as well – a pleasant reminder of what I like about my native Chicago too.

Finally, I ended my part of the tour with a visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Buquebus ferry across the Rio de la Plata speedily delivered us to our hotel just down the street from the famous and magnificent Obelisco in the Plaza de Republica, a tribute to Buenos Aires’ founding in 1812. We spent a long day with ACEs and speakers at AROUG, and after another marvellous dinner at an Argentinian steakhouse, I set my sights towards my trip to Quito, Ecuador to join my wife to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary aboard ship bound for the Galapagos.

This trip was the culmination of a dream I’ve had since my teenage years – to actually see the cities and countries of America del Sur Australes that I’d only read about. I encountered vibrant Oracle User Groups and ACEs in every country I visited, as well as DBAs and developers that were hungry for the knowledge that I and my fellow ACEs and Oracle team members delivered. Thanks so much for the opportunity to present within your marvelous side of the world, my friends and colleagues!

Oh, and one more thing: I discovered that the Spanish word for developer in South America is desarrollador. How sexy is that?