Friday, October 29, 2010

Why do go to conferences?


One of the really nice things about working with Oracle APEX is the sense of community you gain through the forums with people scattered all over the globe.

Attending OpenWorld this year was a great opportunity to met face to face with several members of the APEX development team and APEX enthusiasts after communicating with them via forums and emails. It's really surprising how much personality comes through in the written word.

One of the strengths of APEX is how accessible the APEX development team is to the community. When you visit the APEX stand in the exhibition hall, the people manning it are from the APEX development team - you just can't get better information than directly from the person who developed the functionality.
They really are interested in your feedback and making APEX better. 


Leading up to OpenWorld I had contacted some of the team members asking for a small enhancement for Plugins.
A few emails later, they had agreed to include the functionality in a future release.
Catching up with Patrick Wolf at the APEX booth, we talked a bit more on the subject with a couple of different approaches, before landing on a final solution.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the 4.02 patch which includes my enhancement request - bug# 10157646.


So that's why I go to conferences - to meet up with people I know online, talk shop, share ideas, and learn new stuff I can use at work.
How about you? Why do you go?


The next conference I'll be going to is the AUSOUG 2020 Conference in Perth, Australia on Nov 22-23.


Maybe I'll see you there.


1 comment:

Peter Raganitsch said...

I really love to go to technical conferences because you meet so many people and catch up with old friends.

It's not about the presentations itself (although some of them are super interesting), but about the little talks in between when you come up with new ideas and share interest with others.

I just presented at the ODTUG APEXposed conference in Brussels and had the impression everyone liked and enjoyed it (the conference it is, not only my presentation ;-) ).

Another important thing is talking to current or future business partners.