My EMEA Short Talk - WhichInstance?

My contribution to the EMEA ACEs Short Talks is a very old story and could be about the time I stopped being Technical.

We are taking almost 20 years ago when I was an E Business Suite Support manager in Fujitsu.

A customer had a problem where one off payments were not generating cheques (that is the correct English spelling of check).

Despite raising a TAR (the old word for SR, a Technical Assistance Request) with Oracle, we had not found the answer.  

I was unable to replicate in the test system so the DBA created me a clone so I could play investigate in the system safely.

I dialled in (yep the story is that old), which connected me to the live instance which resided on sequent1 (sequent used to be Oracle hardware of choice). Then I had to 'telnet' to sequent 2 where the clone was hosted.

I worked on the problem for many hours and then had a breakthrough, the error was in a setting in a profile option (as far as I remember, the error is not really important to the story).

I created a new file with a one off payment and ran it through the system from start to finish. Brilliant it all worked. I disconnected and went off to bed believing I had great news to share with the customer Monday morning.

Not quite what happened though, the customer rang me to say I had successfully tested their fraud procedure and they had found the payment I had made myself and the cheque had been destroyed and not posted.

I was horrified, I had created a cheque or myself in Production!!!!!!!

What happened was I had dialled into sequent1 but failed to telnet successfully to sequet2. I didn't realise because as the DBA had not renamed the clone (why did he need to, they were on separate machines?).

So I wasn't in the clones Live, I was in the 'live' live. I had fixed the problem and generated a one off payment to myself. 

I was begging to panic as to what this would result in. A complaint or even loosing my job, but the customer laughed and said it was  obviously a well intentioned error. If I was really going to defraud them I would have made the payment for more than £100!

2018 OOW - EMEA ACEs Short Talks

I blogged about this year's planned session before OOW.

We had a great crowd and the laughter was infectious. 

Michelle Malcher was our timekeeper and did very well, most people were so scared of going over their 4 minutes they finished early, in fact all people except Simon Haslam who went for a double slot.

At the end Michelle claimed EMEA credentials as she used to work in Germany and closed the session we her own thoughts. I was expecting another mistake example but Michelle talked about the importance of teaching people, especially the next generation that we all make mistakes and we learn from them.

This year I asked all the speakers to blog about their mistakes, and that includes me. I will add the links as they post them. Prize for first one posted goes to Lonneke.

Tim Hall - Production Gone
Julian Dontcheff - Sunday
Christian Trieb - Deleteddatabasebackup
Lonneke Dikmans - Reuse
Simon Haslam  - Paste
Gurcan Orhan - AutoCommitDeletes
Ami Aharonovich - Decisions
Kiran Taylor - Truncate
Alex Nuijten - TableConstraints 
Debra Lilley - WhichInstance?

This is one of my favourite parts of OOW, it talks a lot to get it set up, but it is fun and educational. Please consider me for 2019.

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2018 OOW - Final Thoughts

I thought it was a great OOW. It seemed more joined up in the messages, across their entire portfolio.

I did think it was smaller but that its not a bad thing.

I loved Larry, he seemed less scripted than in recent years, it was Larry at his best. 

All parts of the conference, sessions, exhibitions, CodeOne, all were closer together and enabled delegates to move more easily between them.

I have a folder full of things to follow up on, and a brain full of content to process.

There is lots of commentary on the event but here are those from my favourite analysts at diginomica. 

And make up your own mind with the on demand content.

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2018 OOW - Off Piste Fun

Despite how busy OOW is, I love it. I try and pace myself to get through the week, and try to get to bed at a reasonable time each night.

The conference party at AT&T Park was great fun, as you can see from this video of Alex, Roel and Chris Saxon (AskTom). I like this venue, we can walk to and from it, and having a special ACE area is a lovely treat.

'The husband'

It was going to be a cold evening as there was a wind about. Michelle bought us hats and gloves but we needed another layer. Luckily the exhibition had a scavenger hunt so we dedicated 42 minutes (of course) to rush around and get our cards completed and claim our prizes of snuggly OOW fleeces. I loved that they were grey and actually wore mine on the flight home. Hides the crumbs much better than the traditional black.

I've said throughout all the posts how blessed I am to have so many friends through all these communities. I even had a chance to catch up with most of the conference family.

I went to the OakTable World and listened to Mogens give his unique take onGDPR which started a great discusion. His ability to make people learn by questioning themselves never disapoints.

I said in my pre OOW post that there was no time for the traditional triathlon this year. I really missed the swim, but on Friday morning when it as all over Michelle and I took an Uber up to the bridge and walked both ways across it. It was a lovely way to end the week.

Not a stock photo, just my iPhone

I love San Francisco.

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2018 - Women in Technology

My dream is that as a topic WIT or any diversity category will not warrant a posting in the future.

Signs were good this year at one point in the CodeOne Developers' lounge I had to queue in the Ladies restroom!

At Oracle HQ I met with one of my favourite ladies, Maria Colgan. She had some chocolate giveaways for her sessions. How cool when you have your own candy!

There are so any great female speakers at OOW and the ACE program announced that we have 12 female ACE directors > 10%  for the first time. Welcome Rita Nunez to the group.

At the Partner PaaS Council I received their first WIT sticker, I love it.

There was a diversity stream at OOW but this time I was simply not able to attend, disappointing but unavoidable.

The Groundbreakers Community had a WIT breakfast in the amazing setting of The View in the Marriott. 

There was a speaker from Technovation. They help disadvantaged girls to solve problems with technology. The program includes 12 weeks mentoring through the building of a mobile app and have helped over 20,000 girls in over 100 countries.

They told us about a group of deaf girls in Brazil who they helped write a sign language app. 

Lori Lorusso then talked about the ACE program and gave a great passionate pitch. 

It was a great way to start the day and catch up with friends and encourage each other. A special thanks to all the men who attended.

All the ACE ladies had scarves and then we got the opportunity to talk to  those who attended about how the program works.

ACE program ladies

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2018 OOW - Usergroups

This was my first year at OOW without being a usergroup leader, although I am still very much involved.

UKOUG did have a meetup but I wasn’t able to attend, hope it was fun. 

This year the usergroup area was in the centre of the exhibition which is such an improvement on other years. This year there were no EOUC people manning the stand but I did install a UKOUG virtual assistant! Actually, I just left one of the really clever vidipack on the stand. You can also see the content of it here.

Over the years I have made many friends in the community and OOW is always a great time to catch up. Communities in Oracle overlap a lot, many are in the ACE program or  are partners. Much of what I do, is because of the camaraderie. I am blessed.

I also got the chance to make a video for the Sangam conference in India where I will be immediately after apps18. If you look carefully you can see UKOUG's Brendan in the background.

Of course, I did my bit for EOUC, facilitating the ‘even ACES make Mistakes session’.

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2018 OOW - #PaaS4SaaS Thoughts

I have always had an interest in #PaaS4SaaS, both the integration capabilities but especially the ability to extend the SaaS applications. Within Accenture I think I will be doing even more of this and I'm quite excited about this continuing opportunity. 

The partner advisory council before OOW, updates in the ACE briefing and the partner round table I attended on the Thursday, all enforced my belief we are at a tipping point.

All new Cloud SaaS implementations are at least considering PaaS. Universal credits have helped with the adoption and there are other initiatives available which I think will grow this even more. I am in no doubt that Oracle are doing all they can to deliver on their promise to be the best and widest coverage in Cloud. 

Chatbots are a fast growing area, perhaps the quickest marketing to production I have ever seen. The new Digital Assistant will be a differentiator and best news to me was the work planned between the Digital Assistant and SaaS development teams. 

VBCS is developing rapidly and less aimed at the citizen developer (me), but I'm working on that for an industry solution and again very exciting.

I would like to give a special thankyou to Jürgen Kress who runs the partner community for PaaS. It is a really active community and he uses the ACE directors in the community (his smurfs) to help with understanding what we need. 

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