It’s been an odd few months on the content creation front.
When Oracle Database 23c/23ai Free was released I was no longer under NDA for the shipped functionality, and I pushed out a glut of version 23 content here. Since then I’ve been waiting for the full on-prem release so I can publish the remaining stuff, some of which was written 22 months ago. That’s nearly two years without being able to hit the publish button!
In that time I could have started doing videos to go with the existing 23ai posts, but after being burnt by the name change (23c to 23ai) I decided to hold back until the official on-prem release dropped. That has left me in a dead zone as far as content creation is concerned.
Proving functionality with daily use
The new features posts are pretty easy to write from a straight “how-to” perspective, but it’s hard to give true insight until you have been using products as part of real systems on a daily basis. There is that joke about “everything works perfectly in a PowerPoint presentation”. To a certain extent we could say everything works perfectly in a laptop demo. Until you can start running realistic workloads, it’s all a bit unknown.
Over time I’ll go back and revise posts as I learn more about the functionality, but that requires regular use in real situations.
Inspiration from daily use
In addition to proving functionality, real use will often inspire entirely new posts. In doing your job you come across things you wouldn’t have noticed by reading the docs or playing on your laptop. In some cases these types of posts may be more useful than the straight new features posts.
I guess it’s possible you might stumble on this stuff by accident, but the chances are a lot higher when you are using a product for real, and you have colleagues asking questions that approach things from a different angle.
Without daily use, the content feels a little lifeless.
My current state of apathy (#retired)
When I first got involved in the 23c/23ai thing I was really enthusiastic, churning out content and enjoying the process of learning new stuff. The stagnation caused by waiting for the on-prem release has made that seem like a distant memory. I feel totally apathetic about it all now.
I’m hoping they announce the on-prem release of 23ai at CloudWorld, and I’m hoping that will reignite the content creation spark in me, because at the moment I feel like I’m #retired. I need to start using this stuff in my job to actually care about it again.
Cheers
Tim…