Oracle Code : Paris – The Journey Home

I left Oracle Code : Paris a little after 5 PM. I got in the taxi, got a few miles down the road and realised I had left my phone charging in the speaker room. Doh! I got the taxi to turn round so I could pick it up. Phone in hand, I got back in the taxi and off we went…

The roads were a lot slower the second time round, but I kept drifting into sleep so I didn’t mind so much. I was awake when the motorbike hit us. It wasn’t bad and I get the impression it happens all the time judging by the taxi driver’s reaction. He just waved his hand and carried on…

There was a bit of a “misunderstanding” at the airport with the taxi driver. I was a bit out of it at this point, so I didn’t really notice how much I was actually charged. Let’s just say the cost of the detour was significantly more than I would consider reasonable, but by the time I noticed I was in the airport and he was off to start his retirement…

I got into the airport and went to the check-in desk, where the lady told me I had the wrong name on my ticket. It said “Tim” not “Timothy”. I showed her my boarding pass from the out-leg and it had the same mistake. I was sent off to the security desk for them to check it all out. I got the distinct impression if I hadn’t had the boarding pass for the out-leg they wouldn’t have let me check in, but since I had already flown out of Birmingham under the “wrong name”, I might as well fly back. I was sent back to the check-in desk and allowed through…

Boarding started unusually early. Once on board I got a free seat next to me, which was good, and an announcement that we would be held in the plane for 60 minutes because the air space above the airport was too busy for us to take off. That was not so good…

Once we did get under way the flight took about 50 minutes and was fine. Back in the UK it was a short taxi ride home, watching live messages of the penalty shoot-out. Well done England. Bad luck Colombia. We’ve lost on penalties so many times. It’s a bad way to go out. 🙁

And that was Oracle Code : Paris done!

Thanks to the Oracle Code folks for organising the event and letting me come along. Thanks to the attendees and other speakers at the event. Thanks also to all the people took pity on the sickly child that I was during the event. Thanks also to the Oracle ACE Program and Oracle Developer Champion Program for helping me be ill in every country in the world… 🙂

Please let this be the end of the curse!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Paris 2018

Oracle Code : Paris started with a short walk from the hotel to the venue. After signing in it all began…

The first session of the day was a keynote by Lonneke Dikmans called “What Happened to My Order? The Need for Orchestration in Modern Architectures”, comparing BPEL orchestrations with orchestrations and choreography used in microservices and serverless architectures. It was a really good introduction to the concepts.

Next up was James Allerton-Austin with “Building a Chatbot Front-end for Blockchain Transactions and Serverless Functions APIs”, which included a description of the stack offered by Oracle and a demo of selling Larry’s car. During this session there were also brief stints by Karim Zein and JeanMarc Hui Bon Hoa.

From there I went to the speaker room and started to feel decidedly odd. I sometimes get migraines that don’t give me a headache, but make me feel dizzy and nauseous. The following couple of hours were mostly lying on the floor and going to the toilets to puke.

I did pop in to see “Build a Decentralized Blockchain Application with Hyperledger Fabric and Composer” by Robert van Mölken, hoping it would distract me.

I also popped my head in to Women in Technology (WIT) session to see what the turnout was like. It was very busy. It was in French, so I could understand what was going on. 🙂

After that I went back to the speaker room floor, then before I knew it, it was time for my session, but not before another conversation with the toilet bowl…

Adrenalin is a wonderful drug. I warned the audience I might have to leave suddenly, but I managed to get through my session without any major problems. I lost the internet connection a couple of times, and had to reconnect to my 18c DBaaS instance on Oracle Cloud. The new laptop behaved itself though. Once my talk was over the Adrenalin started to subside and I felt worse again, but not as bad as before. I was sitting still and chatting to some of the folks in the speaker room for the rest of the afternoon, and I only remember puking once more after my sessions, which was an improvement…

Pretty soon it was time to leave for the airport and Oracle Code : Paris was over for me. Thanks everyone for making it happen. Sorry I wasn’t able to participate more. This year’s conference curse seems to be continuing.

I’ll write about the journey home in a separate post as that is already proving “interesting”, in a conference curse style… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Paris – The Journey Begins

It was a normal start to the day. I woke up with my regular work alarm, packed and got a taxi to the airport.

The drive was quick and the taxi driver was interesting, which helps. I couldn’t do online check-in because my ticket was with Air France, but the flight was Flybe. Neither website would let me check in online. I was dreading an epic queue, but fortunately the airport was quiet. Even so, I witnessed someone wearing ear-buds being asked the same question multiple times. Can’t we pass a law to make it legal to smack people that do this?

The flight to Paris was due to take off at 11:35, but it was about 11:50 when we finally departed. I got lucky with a free seat next to me, so I was able to get the laptop out and do some work. I was not so lucky with the folks on the other side of the aisle, who were far too loud.

I took a train from the airport to the city centre, then got a taxi from there to my hotel. It was about 5 minutes walk from the conference venue and 10 minutes from the Eiffel Tower, so I walked across to check them both out, then it was back to the hotel to run through my session and demo for tomorrow, then crash…

Cheers

Tim…

Paris to the Netherlands

airplane-flying-through-clouds-smallGetting to bed at 01:00 and having to wake up at 04:30 is not ideal, but it was worth it.

The alarm went off at 04:30, I had a quick shower, checked out of the hotel and took the shuttle across to terminal 2 in Charles de Gaulle airport. Despite the early hour, there were a lot of people around. I grabbed a coffee and caught up with my blog posts. By the time I had done that, it was time to board the short flight to Amsterdam.

We boarded on time, but unfortunately the flight was delayed by about 50 minutes, so a 50 minute flight became a 100 minute plane ride. 🙁

From Schiphol airport it was a train ride to Leiden. I actually got on the wrong train initially, so I had to get off at the first stop and turn around. 🙂 Once in Leiden it was a taxi ride to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge. I ended up arriving about 3 hours late, but it was a free-format type of day, so being late wasn’t a major problem. I’ll write a separate post on that event.

At the end of the day I headed back to the hotel, did some washing and went bed to try and catch up on some sleep.

You can see video of the trip and my hotel here.

Cheers

Tim…

Paris Province Oracle Meetup

paris-province-oracle-meetupThe reason for me being in Paris was to speak at the Paris Province Oracle Meetup. Breaking my journey to the Netherlands with a quick trip to Paris was a really easy way to connect with more people.

The Paris meetup is very similar to those found in other cities around the world, including Oracle Midlands in my home town. We all gathered at about 19:00 in the AVNET office in Paris and I did two talks with a short break between them. The first talk was about pluggable databases and the second one was about running Oracle databases in the cloud.

I like these local meetups. They feel a lot less formal and more personal than some (but not all) conferences. It just feels more natural to me. I really enjoyed doing the talks and the crowd seemed to respond well to them, which was nice. I’ll definitely be back again, if they will have me. Maybe next time I will get to do some sightseeing in Paris too. 🙂

The meetup finished at about 21:45 and Stew Aston took me out to get some food. We chatted for ages about life, the Universe and Oracle. 🙂 Once the food was over, he gave me a lift back to my hotel and by the time I got into bed it was about 01:00.

Big thanks for Yves for inviting me across to the event, and thank you to everyone who came out to support the event. Without you it can’t happen. Also thanks go out to the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to let me fly the flag. 🙂

So that’s paris done in less than 24 hours. Next stop the Netherlands!

Cheers

Tim…

Birmingham to Paris

airplane-flying-through-clouds-smallThe day started at a rather civilised time of 06:00, which makes a change. I usually book early flights, forgetting I have to get to the airport a couple of hours early, then regret the decision later. 🙂

The taxi driver didn’t have any receipts, then the lady “managing” the queue at the baggage drop left a lot to be desired. Fortunately the lady on the baggage drop desk was awesome and lifted my mood. The departures screen did its normal thing of saying “Gate opens in 5 mins” for 20+ minutes. I was one of the first on the plane and the flight was fine. A bit of a shaky landing, but that was probably down to the bad weather.

My original plan was to head into the city and have a look at the sites, but after I had got through airport security and made my way to the hotel, time was moving on.

The citizenM hotel is really cool. The rooms are quite small, but the lobby is great. Added to that the wifi is incredible. I uploaded the following video to YouTube in about 5 seconds. 🙂

I grabbed a coffee and headed off into the city. By the time i got there it was an hour before my session, so I parked myself at the AVNET office and wrote this blog post. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…