Thursday, 15th of June and Friday 16th of June, the first Full Stack Conference of the Dutch User Group took place, a mergers of the DBA - SQL Day & the Fusion Middleware Experience, The Tech Experience 2017. A milestone for the Dutch User Group, but also for the Oracle Community.
Already in the opening speech of the chairman something important happened, the OGh (Oracle Gebruikersclub Holland) announced their name change to nlOUG to the public. With this the name is in line with other Oracle User Group and easier to recognise international.
So, what are my personal experiences with the Tech17 of the nlOUG?
As Member of the Organisation
For me personally the Tech Experience 2017 started right after the Fusion Middleware Experience of 2016. My fellow board members have always known that I was in favor of a Full Stack Conference like many of the countries surrounding us. Now that we had 3 big seperated events in 2016, it was time to start looking to combine some of them. For one, simply because of the workload shared amongst the organisation teams, but also to be more attractive for international speakers and visitors.
Since our APEX World is a somewhat famous event, it made sense to merge the DBA & SQL event with that of the Fusion Middleware. Since we were able to add our BIWA knowledge in here as well, it made a somewhat special line up with dedicated tracks to almost any Oracle topic you can think of (besides APEX).
On the Tech Experience itself we had a great team of volunteers working together to make this event a big success!
As a Speaker at the Event
In between all the hassle of organising the event with things like helping out our speakers, socialising with the attendees, talking with our sponsors, keeping track of time, technical difficulties and more, I was able to find time to share some of my personal experience and knowledge with the attendees as well.
I presented a double slot with the Cloud ACE Team, trying to combine up to 17 different Cloud Offerings from Oracle to create a story for the audience to familiarise themselves with the Oracle PaaS Cloud. However, as a real user group aim should be on customers, I also presented a Customer Case Study together with Frank Houweling about how we implement the ADF performance monitor at a customer and tackled a lot of performance issues.
As a Volunteer at the Event
As organisation, we asked our SIG Leads committee as well as our board members to be present and help out with the organisation of this event. For me personally that also meant spending a hand or two (or three?) to the event. From welcoming our international speakers into the Netherlands and Amersfoort on Wednesday evening I had an early morning rise on Thursday to prepare the location. Helping out the sponsors to get to their booth, looking over the rooms to see if all the technical equipment is in place and working, greeting our speakers, pointing out where their session would be held and handing out the speakers wifi. A whole handful already before the opening speech or first keynote even started.
After the keynote, it meant to host one of the parallel sessions, making sure the speaker is there, helping them connecting (if needed), making them feel at home and discussing their presentation. During the session I would keep a track of the time and inform the speaker if necessary, while in the end I was able to thank the speaker on behalf of the organisation and hand them over a small present from the nlOUG.
As Member of the Community
Finally, a Full Stack event in the Netherlands, no need to take a plane somewhere to see an Oracle User Group Conference, but basically in my backyard. An awesome feeling and an awesome time I had. As a developer, mainly focussed on Java, Fusion Middleware & Cloud, I was still able to connect with Maria in her keynote about the Oracle Database 12c. After which I got to see Lucas his presentation about Machine Learning, a topic that I have no hands on experience with yet, but that looks promising. Next up, Ralf with his presentation about Case Management in the Process Cloud, a personal interest since I am using Case Management on premises at my current client. A good overview was presented and I got wiser and more enthusiastic about PCS during the presentation.
The next day I got to see Duncan doing his Developers keynote, Frank & Steven doing their chatbot show and ending the event with Lucas doing a final keynote called ‘It’s a wrap’. A presentation that contains a lot of highlights about the Tech Experience 2017, his point of view on the content as well as on the future of our workfield.
Although I only had a couple of free slots, I still got to see a lot of interesting presentation and enjoyed it.
Summary
As a member of the Community, I would not have wanted to miss this conference, it is great we have this in the Netherlands and I hope there are more to come.
As a volunteer, I am happy that my work was appreciated by all attendees & speakers and I hope I have contributed to the Oracle community.
As a speaker I am honored to have presented at the very first Full Stack Oracle User Group Conference in the Netherlands.
And as Organisation & Board-member I am very proud of our team, volunteers, speakers, community and sponsors for making this happen and making the Oracle Community a better place in the Netherlands.
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