It was twenty years ago today that the first incarnation of my website was born.
It started life as a few scripts and notes put on the internet so I didn’t have to carry them around on floppy disks or CDs when I was moving around between contracts. I had been working with Oracle technologies for five years before the website was born, but most of the early content was Oracle 8i stuff.
I added new articles now and then, but I guess it really started to take off when I was preparing for the Oracle 9i OCP upgrade exam. For the 7.3, 8 and 8i OCP exams I used books to prepare, but for 9i OCP I decided to do the beta exam. This meant there were no books available yet, so I had to do it the hard way. I wrote my own revision notes for the whole of the syllabus and put them on the website. They got pretty popular, as free things often do. 🙂 From that point on I just kept adding articles on a regular basis.
Over the last 20 years the site has gone through lots of changes, but also stayed reassuringly the same. It takes a lot of work to keep producing new articles, but what most people don’t see is the amount of time that is taken up reworking some of the old articles. Some of this stuff was written 20 years ago and I come back to things and want to hang my head in shame. Someone will ask a question about an article, I will read it, hate it and rework it. It’s a never ending job, and the more you write, the more you have to refactor down the line. 🙂
Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the last 20 years. It’s not over yet.
Cheers
Tim…