UKOUG Breakthrough 2022 : Day 1

 

The evening before the conference the Oracle ACEs met up for some food at a curry place in the city centre. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for organising this! Earlier that day I presented my first face to face session in 3 years, and now it was time for my first social event in a similar timescale. I was pretty nervous going into it, and quite standoffish at first, but I gradually relaxed and “conference Tim” started to come back. By the end of the evening I was feeling a lot more comfortable with the situation. It was nice to get to meet up with a bunch of people I had not seen for a long time. It also made me feel a bit more relaxed about going to the conference the next day.

The one downside of going to a conference in your hometown is commuting. I don’t live far away from the venue, but regardless of the mode of transportation, commuting during rush hour is a nightmare. Instead I chose to wait for the rush hour traffic to die down and be fashionably late. That was the right move.

The first session I went to was Simon Haslam speaking about “Platform Engineering for the Modern Oracle World”. I’ve got a lot of time for Simon. Him and Lonneke Dikmans sowed some seeds in my brain a long time ago, which have ultimately had a big influence on me over the years. In this session he talked about the various approaches to automation over the years, culminating in where many people find themselves today. I found myself nodding my head in agreement with most of what Simon was saying during this session. I joked later that his session gave me post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when I thought back through many of those stages. 😁 A group of us continued the conversation about the topic after the session, which is always fun.

Next I moved on to the Oracle ACE Briefing. The first rule of the Oracle ACE Briefing is don’t talk about the Oracle ACE Briefing. Once again, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces, and some new ones. Once the session was over, and we knew everything there was to know about the Oracle Games Console (#OGC), I spent some time talking with Dominic Giles, while he desperately looked for ways to get rid of me. He didn’t succeed. 😉

By the time I finally let Dom go, it was time to watch Jasmin Fluri and Gianni Ceresa presenting “Git Branching – the battle of the ages”, or “Development Workflows: The Battle of The Ages!”, depending on which title you prefer. The session was a celebrity death match between trunk-based development (Jasmin) and Gitflow style development (Gianni). Gianni fought dirty, but ultimately Jasmin was able to overpower him and grind him into the dirt. At least that’s how I saw it. 🙂 Both sides gave compelling reasons for their preferred method, and ultimately there is a lot more similarity between them than some people would have you believe. As is often the case, there is no “best”, but what is “best for you”. Not surprisingly, this sparked another conversation at the end of the session, with a few war stories thrown in for good measure.

At that point I had to head off to beat the traffic across town, as I had some “real life” things to do.

So that’s was day 1 of UKOUG Breakthrough 2022. I know it will sound silly to most people, but I was stressing about the conference and it turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. Fingers crossed day 2 will go well also.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

One thought on “UKOUG Breakthrough 2022 : Day 1”

  1. I managed to get to the Oval for half of last year’s conference – thanks to a small breeze named Arwen. Felt uncomfortable at that one with some quite crowded rooms, some delegates closing ventilation to keep out the cold.

    So Birmingham was easy by comparison…

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