Riga Dev Days 2018 : Day 2

Day 2 of Riga Dev Days 2018 was pretty much a repeat of day 1 for me. My mystery illness continues. I spent most of the day in bed, but went to the conference to present my session calledย Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON.

I think the session went OK, but my brain was on a go-slow and I was struggling for words a couple of times. Thanks to Chris for pointing out my “pistol fingers”, which I seem to be doing in every shot he took… Personally I think pistol fingers look better than Jazz Hands, which he does during his presentations… ๐Ÿ™‚

I got some questions at the end, one of which I have referred to the “ORDS Gods in the Sky” (see below for answer), and spent some time chatting outside the room after the session.

I headed upstairs to the balcony to discuss some stuff with Martin Bach and Neil Chandler before going back to the hotel to crash… Again…

It’s a bit disappointing that I didn’t get to see much of the conference this year, but the main thing was I made it to my sessions. I hope to be back again and in better health next time so I cab be a bit more involved and learn something myself! ๐Ÿ™‚

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Reply from theย “ORDS Gods in the Sky”…

Question: Does ORDS support HTTP2?

Answer: ORDS 18.1.1 Standalone Mode on JDK 9 or later supports HTTP/2 out of the box no additional configuration required. In the case of ORDS running under an application server, it comes down to whether the application server support HTTP/2. WebLogic does not support HTTP/2 yet. Tomcat recent versions with JDK 9 or later support HTTP/2…

Riga Dev Days 2018 : Day 1

I woke up at about 06:00 feeling pretty terrible. Not physically sick, but dizzy.

I lay in the bath for ages, hoping that it would bring me to life. It didn’t. I got out of the bath to find my case was locked. I must have somehow mixed up the combination the day before, and didn’t know what it was. After Googling how to break into the lock and failing, I started the process of trying every combination from 000-999. Luckily the number was only about a quarter of the way through…

With clean clothes I then noticed none of my stuff had charged overnight, so my laptop and phone were nearly dead. Are you starting to see why I think I have a conference curse this year? I charged them up for a bit, then headed off to the conference, grabbing some diet coke on the way, hoping the caffeine would help and it did a bit…

I bumped into the few people when I arrived at the conference, but pretty soon it was time to present my session on analytic functions. Once the adrenalin kicked in I felt fine, except for a couple of times when I turned my head too quickly and felt like I was going to fall over. I think the session went OK. All the usual problems you expect with a live demo, but I think I managed to roll with the punches. I even managed to accidentally out the post I’ve been writing about my current “midlife crisis”, which I wasn’t sure I was going to publish, but I guess I am now… ๐Ÿ™‚

The event is held at a cinema, so you are standing at the bottom corner of the room, with your slides on the cinema screen, which is really good when you have live demos. The room was pretty full, with a few people sitting on the stairs because they didn’t want to fight their way across the row. I got some questions at the end, including one about my midlife crisis. ๐Ÿ™‚

The conference seemed really busy. Excuse my shocking camera work, but here’s a shot of the main concourse.

After the session I sat down for a chat with Chris Thalinger. It’s kind-of scary how similar we are (not physically). Needless to say we will never meet or speak of this again… ๐Ÿ™‚ We were joined by Ted Neward, Kamil Stawiarski and Patrick Barel along the way. Despite sitting in the shade I managed to get sunburnt…

I had avoided food all day as I had the feeling as soon as I ate something I would feel dizzy again and want to sleep. When Chris went to do his session I grabbed some popcorn, and sure enough once I ate it I could feel my bed calling! I headed back to my hotel and crashed for the rest of the day…

So day 1 of Riga Dev Days 2018 was a very short day for me, which mostly involved sleeping… Sorry. Let’s hope tomorrow goes better.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I figured out my charging issue. When I turn off the main light in my room all the power cuts out. That’s why none of my stuff charged…

Riga Dev Days 2018 : The Journey Begins

Having spent most of the previous day in bed with a headache, I woke up at 03:00 to get ready for my taxi at 03:00. Despite all the sleep I was not feeling too great.

The taxi driver was nice enough, but he didn’t have any receipts, which was annoying. I got to the airport just after 04:00 and it was really busy. Luckily the new queuing system at Birmingham Airport is really good and I got through security quickly.

The flight to Amsterdam took about an hour, followed by a couple of hours waiting for the next flight. Amsterdam airport was so incredibly hot, which made me feel terrible. It would have been a lot worse if I didn’t have an EU passport, as there was a massive queue at security. I guess I have that to look forward too. ๐Ÿ™

I got on the plane to Riga and managed to swap my window seat for an aisle, which was great. The flight took about 2 hours, but I was so tired it felt like a lot longer.

Once I arrived it was a quick taxi ride to hotel where I was greeted with a free upgrade to Debra Lilley status. Here’s a picture of my lounge. ๐Ÿ™‚

I have no idea why I got this upgrade because I booked the cheapest room they had and I have no status in this chain. I booked quite a long time ago, so maybe they ran out of cheap rooms and I was the first on the list to make way? ๐Ÿ™‚

It was only a little after midday when I arrived, so I did the obvious thing and went to bed for the rest of the day and night. I woke up at about 06:00 the following day, but that is a different story…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Warsaw

Oracle Code : Warsaw started for me with my first presentation of the day as I was in the first block after the keynotes…

My first session was aboutย Analytic Functions. It’s a little difficult to predict the makeup of the Oracle Code crowds. In some cities you get predominantly Oracle developers, while in others it’s the opposite. As a result, you never know how what you are doing will be received until you get there. I shouldn’t have been concerned as the room was full. I had a little glitch at the start, which was caused by my laptop switching between the hotel and event wifi. Once I sorted that the connection to my Oracle Cloud DBaaS service was fine, which meant I was able to run through my demos. ๐Ÿ™‚

Next I watched “Database DevOps and Agile Development with Open-Source Utilities” by Susan Duncan, which was another standing room only session. This included a demo of Oracle Developer Cloud Service, a freebie when you buy other Oracle Cloud services, and it looked pretty good. The demo was of the full lifecycle of an incident from logging through to release of a fix, which included database changes managed byย FlyWay, with a quick a mention of LiquiBaseย and utPL/SQL.

After lunch I went to watch “Graal: How to Use the New JVM JIT Compiler in Real Life” by Chris Thalinger. I finally got to see this presentation, having clashed with Chris’ session slot at all previous events. I’m trying to think of something to say to make it sound like I understood what he was talking about, but between you and me it was a complete mystery to me. He did some awesome “Jazz Hands” though! ๐Ÿ™‚ The session was a live comparison of Graal with an unmodified JVM, showing examples of potential performance improvements, and examples of where performance is no better too. I guess the take-home message that will impress most people is Twitter run all their Scala microservices in production on Graal and it’s saving them a bundle of cash because of improved performance…

Next up was Ewan Slater with “Honey I Shrunk the Container”, who amongst other things talked about usingย Smithย to produce microcontainers, which looks really interesting. In one example he was able to shrink a container from about 850 meg to about 85 meg, which is pretty darn impressive. It’s definitely more impressive than –squash.

After that it was me with my session on REST enabling the database. I think this was a case of preaching to the converted, but I did get some questions at the end. ๐Ÿ™‚

After my session I got chatting to some folks, so I missed the last session of the day, which meant that Oracle Code : Warsaw was over for me. Thanks to everyone that supported the event, including the Oracle Code crew, the other speakers and of course the attendees!

In the evening we went into town to get some food and I was introduced to a drink called The Terminator, which tasted really nice, but was rather deadly. I think it contained more alcohol than I normally drink in about 2 years… I was also given a shot of some vodka which was incredibly smooth. Despite feeling rather inebriated, I was sensible enough to switch back to water and juice for the rest of the evening. The photos of me with the empty vodka bottle and some bison grass (from the bottle) in my mouth were staged. ๐Ÿ™‚

I was intending to be in bed really early as I needed to be up in the morning at 04:45 for my flight. I got back to the hotel at about midnight, so that didn’t work out so well… Thanks to the POUG folks for taking us out for the evening. It was much appreciated!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Warsaw – The Journey Begins

For a change it was a normal wake-up time for me. The advantage of flying late morning is you don’t have to get up so early. The disadvantage is the traffic. I left an hour earlier than usual, just to make sure, and it paid off. I missed some of the traffic, but there were some questionable decisions by my taxi driver. He seemed like a nice guy, but his SatNav was taking us on a rather strange route, and when he chose to ignore it, it seemed to be for all the wrong reasons, like he was speaking on his phone and missing the turn… Despite the long time and erratic route the price was the same as normal. Odd… ๐Ÿ™‚

Having started off super early I arrived in plenty of time, so much so that the Brussels Airlines desk wasn’t open. Despite this delay, I managed to get through security pretty quickly, grabbed some food and a drink and parked at a table for about 90 minutes to do some work.

The first flight of the day was Birmingham to Brussels. We took off on time and it took about 55 minutes, so no drama there. The lady in the seat behind had a really shrill laugh, which I couldn’t block out with headphones. I noticed a number of people turning to look, so I wasn’t the only person this was annoying.

I had a 2.5 hour stop at Brussels, so not surprisingly I got the laptop out etc.

The 2 hour flight from Brussels to Warsaw was delayed a little, but it didn’t make much difference to our arrival time. I was meant to wait for Brendan to get a taxi, but instead Brendan was waiting for me. We got an Uber to the hotel, then it was pretty much time for the speaker dinner. I was going to duck out of this, but got persuaded. It was a good evening. ๐Ÿ™‚

I mentioned in a previous post on the subject, I had agreed to do a second presentation to fill and empty slot. I went through that presentation a couple of days previously and wasn’t happy with it, so I spent the evening doing some work to tailor it more to the Oracle Code audience, who are not all Oracle techies…

Tomorrow (probably today when this gets released) is Oracle Code : Warsaw. See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Warsaw, Poland

In a little over a week I will be travelling to Poland for the first time to speak at Oracle Code : Warsaw.

The Oracle Code events are free 1 day events. The fact they are only a single day means it’s pretty hard to get a slot. As usual I put in a few papers, so they had alternatives in case there were subject clashes with other speakers. I got an acceptance for one of my talks, so happy days…

About 5 days ago I had an email from the organisers asking if I wanted to fill another slot… Does this sound familiar? So now I’m doing two sessions at the event. ๐Ÿ™‚

I think my destiny this year is to be the backup kid. Have talks, will fill in at the last minute… ๐Ÿ™‚

The hotel and flights are all booked, so all I’ve got to do now is turn up… ๐Ÿ™‚

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : India – Bengaluru to Birmingham

Following my normal pattern, sleep was a little fitful the night before a flight. I got up early and walked over to meet Sebastian at his hotel. We were on the same first flight, so we shared a taxi to the airport.

We purposely started early to avoid the traffic, making it a really easy journey in to the airport. We got through check-in and security really quickly, which left us with about three hours before the flight. Neither of us had the correct status for this flight, so we paid to get into the lounge and chill for a few hours. Happy days…

As we were boarding my boarding pass dinged on the machine and I had a free upgrade to business, which was nice. The flight to Dubai took about 3.5 hours and I was able to work for the whole of it, which was great. I answered a few emails and did an upgrade of one of our Dev systems. Travelling would be so much easier if it was always like this… ๐Ÿ™‚

After a 2 hour connection I was on a 7.5 hour flight to Birmingham. Unfortunately there was no free upgrade for this flight, so it was back to cattle class… The flight itself was fine, bit I was getting a bit desperate to land by the end of it.

Once I landed in Birmingham it was a quick taxi ride home and Oracle Code : India was done. ๐Ÿ™‚

These are the posts I wrote during this trip.

Thanks to all the Oracle Code crew for inviting me and sorting everything out. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and Oracle Developer Champions Program for letting me continue to fly the flag. Thanks to all the attendees that help make these events really successful, especially all the folks that came to my sessions and spoke to me after the sessions.

I spoke toย Saiย about coming back to Bengaluru in December for the Sangam 2018 event. Let’s see if that works out… ๐Ÿ™‚

I’m not looking forward to working out how much of my own money I spent on this trip… ๐Ÿ™‚

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Bengaluru โ€“ 2018

Today was Oracle Code : Bengaluru.

I spent the last few days working from my hotel room so I was feeling a little stir crazy and was ready to get out and meet people. Then I destroyed my demo… ๐Ÿ™ย After spending some time putting it back together again I headed off to the conference venue, which was across the road from my hotel, soย that involved waiting for a gap in the traffic for 10 minutes. ๐Ÿ™‚

The event was really busy. I had a slot before lunch and once everyone filed in it was standing room only for myย Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON session.

After the session I spent hours chatting to people and posing for photos. I had a lot of questions about ORDS, so I opened my laptop on a counter surface and talked some more, answering questions by working through articles I had written. It was really good fun. I had a short break, to record a video for the event, then it was back to chatting to folks. As a result, I didn’t get to see anyone else’s presentations, but these events are all about getting us together and enthusing about the technology, so it didn’t matter.ย Before I knew it the event was over.

I hope everyone had a great day. I know I did. ๐Ÿ™‚ Thanks everyone for coming along, being so enthusiastic and coming to speak to me. ๐Ÿ™‚ Thanks to the Oracle Code crew for putting on a great event and inviting me to it. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Developer Champions program for letting me be involved in these events.

After the event I went over to meet with the Oracle Code crew and Developer Champions to get some food. After eating far too much and saying my goodbyes it was back to the hotel to get some sleep before the flight home tomorrow!

Thanks you all and see you all soon!

Cheers

Timโ€ฆ

Oracle Code : India – Hyderabad to Bengaluru

I mentioned in the previous post I ducked out of the evening dinner as I needed to get some sleep. I had very little up to this point, and having to get up at 03:00 to get a flight suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. ๐Ÿ™‚

I got some really nice food from the hotel and went to bed. In typical Tim style I was so nervous about not waking up in time for the plane I didn’t sleep. When 03:00 rolled up I felt quite bad. I went down to the desk to check out and meet Lori and Sebastian, who were on the same flight as me. At that point my stomach started grinding, I started to get the sweats and shiver. I won’t go into the details, but I started to wonder if I would make it to Bengaluru with any dignity intact…

In the taxi I felt quite bad, until I noticed the driver falling asleep and then the adrenalin made me feel super focused. I had a flashback to my taxi ride from hell between Jalandhar and Noida. We made it to the airport in one piece. Once the adrenalin subsided I felt terrible again.

The flight was really short and easy, but I started to feel like I was going to puke once we had landed. I was stopping in a different hotel to the others, but I piggy-backed on their ride, which was a big car with great aircon, which made me feel much better.

By the time we got to their hotel I was feeling quite good. I walked down the road to my hotel and went to bed at 08:30. Once I had some sleep I was feeling good, so I logged in to work to for the afternoon shift (UK time).

I think all this drama was caused by a lack of sleep. Debra can tell you some stories about what happens when I don’t sleep properly (hospital in Jalandhar and Machu Picchu). I’m such a delicate petal. ๐Ÿ™‚

I have to โ€œwork from home (from India)โ€ for a few days before the Oracle Code : Bengaluru event. See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. On a strange note, my room number in the new hotel is the same as in the previous hotel. Freaky!