Tuesday 13 December 2011

UKOUG 2011


This was my first year at ukoug and I found it a really enjoyable and worthwhile experience. There were many great presentations. I luckily had the chance to see some of these.
Hilary presentation gave an excellent explanation of the latest error handling functionality apex has and how you can create an error table to hold your messages inside.
Roel did a great presentation on dynamic actions and how they can be used to control the content on your apex page.
John did a presentation that seemed to be very well received on the data dictionary outlining how you can use the apex views to display information about your application in the application such as charts and that tell you the average page load time for a user.
I also did an apex presentation that introduced beginners and gave a taster to new users to the tool and some the steps that can be taken to build an apex page. I had the biggest room I had ever presented in which was great
With the largest amount of people I had ever presented to which was also great. Having the opportunity to present at ukoug was a great honour and I want to thank all those that face me that chance.
One other presentation that has to be mentioned is cary milsaps keynote. If was a fantastic presentation, describing both his career and family life. You could tell the presentation came from his heart and it really was really felt by a lot of people. He talked about the key moments in his life and how without a number of events happening there things wouldn’t have happened.

Tuesday 9 August 2011





About the APEX Challenge and future direction


The APEX Challenge was launched by Apex Evangelists on 24th June 2011 as part of the PL/SQL Challenge website. The APEX Challenge is a quiz designed to test APEX developers’ skills and knowledge.


The weekly APEX quiz can be played at http://www.plsqlchallange.com. All you have to do is register and then you can login and play for free.


The number of users participating in the APEX Challenge has been growing week on week since it was first launched, with a range of players of all levels now taking part. The quiz allows you to challenge your colleagues for pride and gain stature within the APEX community through our range of player rankings.


Each month and quarter, prizes will be awarded to the top-ranking players. There is also a quarterly playoff, where participants compete in a ten-question shootout against the other top-ranked players in their category.


I have been part of the development team for the PL/SQL Challenge and APEX Challenge since they were first introduced, initially whilst working with Apex Evangelists on my placement year at university. I graduated in July and became a full-time developer working with John Scott and Dimitri Gielis at Apex Evangelists.

Part of my work is to continue the development of the APEX Challenge as well as writing and reviewing some of the quiz questions.


What we would really like is for the developers who are playing the quiz to submit their own questions; this will give a more diverse range of questions and help us build a large library.

To submit a question, log in to your account and click “Submit Quiz” on the orange navigation bar at the top of the page.



Our aim is for the APEX Challenge to be a great learning experience for our quizzers so here are some of the ideas we have for developing the quiz going forward:


Coming Soon

· Create an APEX application where players can access the answers to each question

· Give read-only application builder access to our past question library so players can access the area where quiz question authors test the questions. This will enable players to see the code behind the questions and test the results.

· Include some questions with screenshots to make the quiz more exciting

· A new APEX welcome page to better promote the APEX quiz


Possible ideas for the future

· Switch to a daily quiz but this would require a much larger question library

· Possibility of a live APEX quiz at an event with a number of APEX developers

Tuesday 19 July 2011

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2011

The reason I'm writing this post is to try to give a brief introduction to what Kaleidoscope is and my experience of it. The reason I have written this a few weeks later is that, since attending the conference, I have returned to begin full-time work after completing my degree so I’ve been rather busy.

First of all, what is Kaleidoscope?

Well, it's the annual conference organised by ODTUG (Oracle development tools user group). Although my view is slightly biased as this is the main conference I have attended, I have listened to what other developers have said and many of them, particularly on the APEX track, which I am most interested in as an APEX developer myself, have said that this is their favoured technical conference to attend.

You can see some of the leading APEX developers blogs and their opinion on the conference at APEX Blogs

The conference provides me with a great learning experience along with the opportunity to pass on my ideas and things I have learnt as a presenter as well as the chance to interact with some of the very best APEX developers in the world.


Saturday Arrival and Registration





Day 1 - the Sunday Symposium

The main highlight for me was hearing about the new features that will be included in the next version of APEX. The new mobile integration to be included will be phenomenal. The new error handling is going to make life easier and allow my applications to be much more user-friendly. Some other cool things were the fact that you can now fire dynamic actions from a button and one pet hate of all APEX developers for years has been the fact that a region and item button were different, this will be no longer be the case and the item button will match the region button. You can read the statement of direction and test some of the new features in the early adopter release 2 at http://tryapexnow.com

Day 2 - Monday

Although I had limited time to watch presentations on the monday, the main highlight had to be my own presentation. Although it was similar to the one I did the previous year, it was great for me to pass on some of my tips and help people learn some things that have helped me in the past. It focussed on tips and tricks that I have learnt and looking at some of the under-used features within APEX that can help developers enhance their applications.

Day 3 – Tuesday

There were many excellent presentations. Dan McGhan’s plugin session showed some really cool plugins. Dimitri Gielis’ session demonstrating how we work within Apex Evangelists was very interesting. The highlight had to be Martin D’Souza’s “APEX 4 + HTML 5 = Awesome”. For this presentation, he won the speaker award for the conference overall. Some of the things he showed included the ability to define the type of input for your text field. The web sockets are very cool with the ability to use REST requests from the database to the client’s browser. You can download the slides from Martin’s blog at http://www.talkapex.com

Day 4 - Wednesday

Again, there were a number of really cool presentations. John Scott presented a really great presentation on plugins showing off some really interesting ones and discussed how to create the different plugin types you can use. Watching Steven Feuerstein’s presentation on "Best Practices for PL/SQL Development in APEX" was very interesting. Having worked with Steven on the PL/SQL Challenge project, it was interesting to see how he described different aspects of the project and practices used.

I also did my second presentation which was the last session of the day so people were excited about the evening ahead but I still had a good crowd which was nice to see. It focused on building an APEX page and how the different parts of the page link together, as well as simple examples in changing templates. This had a number of demos with different questions asked about various parts of the presentation, which is great as a presenter.

The main highlight of the Wednesday had to be the fantastic night on the Queen Mary. It really was a privilege to be able to visit such a famous ship. Seeing the really funny comedian Don McMillan do two great shows was also very good. This really was an awesome night and I want to thank ODTUG for surpassing any expectations I had.




Day 5 – Thursday

On the final day the awards were people and people were rightly awarded for their contribution to the conference and the class of their presentations.

I also attended Shakeeb Rahman’s presentation on “Oracle Application Express: User Interface Design & Themes”, which showed some really cool examples of what you can do with your themes.

In closing I want to thank all the staff and volunteers for all their hard work that made the conference such a wonderful experience to attend and present at.

You can also register for next years conference at http://kscope12.com

All I can say is, roll on San Antonio next year and I hope it will be as memorable as this one.


Wednesday 1 June 2011

First class grade and how I got there!

Well, I want to pass on some of my thoughts on how I achieved a first class degree. Over my 2nd and 3rd years I reached a 75% average, the threshold for achieving a first class being 70%. I achieved this through hard work, motivation, desire and the willingness to succeed.

I have listed a few dos and don’ts below that may help other students to succeed:

DO

· Attend your lectures – you will always learn something useful

· Read and re-read your module specifications – it’s very important to actually make sure you’re doing what you’re meant to be and you have not gone off course and done something different

· Speak to other students - don’t copy but share ideas, it will definitely help you

· Use your lecturers – fortunately my lecturers were very approachable and I could see them in person or email them to ask questions. You are paying for them, make sure you use them

· Put the hours in and plan your time

DON’T

· Leave things until the last minute - they will always take longer than you think

· Work all day and all night – the odd all-nighter is ok but your brain stops functioning after 36 hours (trust me I know!)

· Forget to back up your work

· Leave applying for a placement until the last minute

· Forget to submit your work

Hopefully this will offer some suggestions to help you achieve your goals.

Tuesday 31 May 2011

Final year at university

I thought I would share some of the aspects of my final year and why I have been so busy. The final year was by far the most challenging for me. Throughout the year I covered 8 modules on a range of subjects. I did some C# programming and some PHP website development.


The most exciting parts for me though were the advanced database modules and the final year project. In the first advanced database module we focussed on data warehousing and star schemas. This was something I hadn’t done before so I found it very interesting. I would post the assignment and solution but university may use the same case study next year so I don’t want to give away the answers!


In the second advanced database module, we looked at PL/SQL procedures and functions. I also worked with PL/SQL for the majority of my placement year so I found a fairly complex function and procedure to impress my tutors.


The rest of my modules were based on a final year project. The idea behind this was to follow the waterfall project lifecycle to create a product following each stage. I completed this project as a member of a two-person team rather than on my own, which meant significantly more progress could be made.


As part of the modules I also had to write three 3500 word essays. The first outlined the scope for the project and a range of project planning documents. The second report was a research report that looked at a range of journals, books and other websites to give us ideas for our product. The final report was an evaluation of the project as a whole and considered aspects that went right as well as what went wrong and how this could be improved in the future.


I thought it would be good to give an overview of what I did in my final year so any potential future computing students as well as employers within the industry could get an idea of what was involved.

Blog Neglected

Well unfortunately due to a very busy year at university and work along side of that my blog got neglected. You can however expect this to change for the foreseeable future, I have revamped my blog and intend to be blogging much more. I want to pass on some of the new things I’m learning as my career further progresses. You can also find me at ODTUG Presenting two APEX presentations in June. So come back soon to see my newest blogs!