Tag: @dev_champions

nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : Day 1

Day 1 of nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 started with me missing the opening keynote to spend time talking with Frits Hoogland about all things Vagrant, Ansible and Docker…

The first session I went to was Penny Avril & Dominic Giles with “What’s New from Oracle Database Development”. This was a quick run through some of the key features that have been introduced in 12.2 and 18c, which sets the scene well for some of the other talks happening over the two days.

Next up was “Database Design Thoughts” by Toon Koppelaars. I think this type of session appeals on several levels. To a beginner it is full of solid facts about basic database design. To someone with more experience it’s more about hearing things you know, but from a different angle. I spoke with Toon about the session when it was over and I’m pretty sure I would not be able to present this type of session.

From there I went to see “SQL Model Clause: A Gentle Introduction” by Alex Nuijten. What I really need to do is go home and write an article about this now I vaguely know what it is all about. Unfortunately I think I will leave it a couple of weeks and be clueless again. Alex did a really good job of explaining it, so it is up to me to get on the case soon!

From there it was two back-to-back sessions by me. First up was, “Cool New Features for Developers in 18c and 12c”, which was a collection of things I think are cool that were added in 12.1, 12.2 and 18c. There were live demonstrations too, which went well. I ran out of time, but I felt happy with the presentation. I had fun!

My next session was “Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON”. It was a struggle to fit this into 45 minutes, but I hope I got the main message across without rushing too much. The live demos went smooth too.

After the last session there was food and drinks and random chatting, with the odd rant, which you expect at tech events. All in all a great end to a great first day. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. At last year’s event I was ill and spent most of my time in bed when I wasn’t presenting (similar to Riga this year). It was nice to actually participate properly in the conference this year!

nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : The Journey Begins

The trip to nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 started at a pretty normal time. I left the house at 08:00, which was far too early really, but you never know about the traffic when you are in rush hour, so I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Rather than the normal 30 minutes, it took about an hour to get to the airport, but once there I breezed through security and had a full 2 hours before the flight, so out came the laptop.

The flight to Amsterdam was delayed by about 15 minutes due to the curse of Schiphol. Luckily I got moved to an exit row seat and had loads of space, so out came the laptop.

From Schiphol to Amersfoort was a train ride of about 50 minutes. The train had free wifi, so out came the laptop.

Last year my hotel was a bus ride away from the event, but this year I booked a hotel near to the station, so it was only a short walk then I was in my room, so out came the laptop.

Having a bit of space and wifi makes the day feel far less wasted. I was pretty productive in the end…

I spent the evening going through my talks and demos making sure everything was OK. As mentioned in a previous post I now have three sessions, so it takes quite a while to rehearse… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Riga Dev Days 2018 : The Journey Home

Cut to the end for the conference thank you messages if you can’t be bothered to read about my travel traumas. 🙂

It was a 04:30 start to get myself together, check out of the hotel and walk across to meet Chris and Ionut to share a taxi to the airport.

Chris used his magic credit card to sign us in as guests to business lounge for what was meant to be a quick pitstop. Pretty soon Chris and Ionut went to catch their planes, leaving me to wait another 3 hours for mine because it had been delayed. I think it’s a ripple effect from weather problems in the UK and Amsterdam…

I wasn’t so bothered about the delay to the first flight, because I’m in the business lounge, but I was concerned about the following flight, as I was due to leave on that before I was due to take off from Riga…

This post originally contained a really salty character assassination of the KLM staff on the transfer desk, but know I’m home I calmed down and revised it. During this trip I saw the best and worst of airport and KLM staff…

  • The KLM staff on the transfer desks in Schiphol were terrible. They thought they were helping, but because they didn’t understand customer service and basic queue management they failed terribly. Most people in the massive queues just required basic information. The most frequent question was, “Am I in the right queue?” Literally hundreds of people didn’t know this. All it took was for one member of staff to walk the queue every 10 minutes and explain what the queue was for and the vast majority of people would be fine, and many would have left the queue because they shouldn’t have been there.
  • Many of the Schiphol staff were hiding. Once I had sorted myself out I walked around the airport and noticed that most of the Schiphol staff were where the people weren’t. Of all days, this is when you need the staff to be helping, not hiding in groups away from the crowds.
  • I found one member of Schiphol staff who was really helpful, telling me to leave arrivals and come back in through departures as a “new passenger”. That saved me upwards of 2 hours of queuing. I only found him because I had to leave the queue because I needed the toilet.
  • Once I had a new ticket, for 6 hours later, I walked between departure gates for Birmingham flights looking to see if there were free seats. About 2+ hours before my scheduled departure I managed to sneak on to an earlier flight because someone didn’t turn up. Many thanks to the KLM guy that sorted this for me!

If you are listening KLM/Schiphol, most people don’t expect miracles, especially during exceptional times like this. They just want basic information and queue management. Any busy system needs some form of triage in place!

Once on the flight we were greeted with the news that we might have to wait for 2 hours in the plane due to runway congestion. Luckily this turned out to be 15 minutes. At this point I didn’t really care as I was on a plane…

After the 50 minute flight I was back in a warm and sunny Birmingham, which was a little disconcerting. I was hoping it would be cool and wet. Having suffered in the heat of Riga, I really wanted to moan about the cold of home. 🙂

So the trip home was not the best!

Back to the conference and some of the usual thanks.

  • Thanks to the folks at Riga Dev Days for inviting me. I’m sorry I was not well and couldn’t be more involved in the conference. Next time.
  • Thanks to the people who came to my sessions and who came to speak to me afterwards. Thanks for the evaluations too. I think my talks came 2nd and 6th (or something like that) in the speaker evaluations, which is pretty amazing considering how out of it I was. Maybe that’s the plan for the future. 🙂
  • Thanks to the other speakers. Despite me not seeing much of it, everyone I spoke to said it was a great event!

Hope to see you all soon!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The posts for this trip, which were mostly about my illness were:

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 called 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… 🙂

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! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Reply from the “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… 🙂

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. 🙂

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… 🙂 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. 🙁

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. 🙂

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? 🙂

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 about 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. 🙂

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 by FlyWay, with a quick a mention of LiquiBase 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! 🙂 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 using Smith 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. 🙂

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. 🙂

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… 🙂

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. 🙂

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. 🙂

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

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

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…