First of all I apologise for not having written much (nothing) for months, been busy with many things and also had little “imagination” for new things to share. Will go back at blogging more regularly soon!
This first post of the year is in two parts: first a look back and then a look forward… The visual version of this post can be found in the Conferences & Slides page.
Recap 2018
What a busy year! For me 2018 has been the year with the most conferences. I know there are people in the community with many more travels for conferences and events, but for me it was my busiest so far.
In total I had 8 local User Groups conferences and 1 Oracle Code event, on the side few local meetups I tried to organize with friends.
If most of the User Groups were not new and events I already been to like ITOUG, OUGN, NLOUG, BGOUG, DOAG and UKOUG, I had two new experiences: AOUG and POUG.
Austrian Oracle User Group
I had the chance to attend for the first time the AOUG event in June. I have been there right after Netherlands and my session seemed to be well accepted. I found the event a bit “oldish” on the side, like if they were doing the same thing again and again for too many years.
Apparently the organizers also had that impression as they went through an analysis of possible changes to increase attendance and make the event even better and they seem to be well motivated for 2019. The CfP is still open and I’m still thinking at what I could submit.
Pint with Oracle User Group (Poland)
I was really happy when I have been selected to speak at POUG as I heard so many great stories about this conference from attendees and speakers of the previous editions. I knew the conference was oriented towards a database audience and therefore slightly adapted my topic to be less Analytics and more wide.
Must be honest: it has been a really great experience and confirmed all the feedback I got. It’s really one of the growing and trending User Group in Europe with a young and fresh approach. The CfP for 2019 is about to close and already submitted few topics: fingers crossed!
Oracle Code Warsaw
2018 also was special for me as I have been selected to speak at one of the Oracle Code events. I presented about graph databases in Warsaw. Oracle Code is a quite different experience, first because it’s an Oracle owned event and second because of the audience: there is no way to guess who will be in the room. The events are free and target “developers” of any kind more or less, therefore a very different kind of attendees than normal User Groups. It has been a bit challenging to find a way to present my topic there but I did my best and hopefully the attendees went back home curious to try graph databases.
All in all 9 events over the year were maybe too much, they still require lot of preparation and investments. Mainly from a time point of view but also financially as I sponsor myself every single travel to attend a conference.
Forecast for 2019
I imagine my 2019 a bit less busy of conferences, ideally limit to 5-6 over the year sounds like an ideal plan.
We are just in February and I already had my first event.
I was last week in Italy to attend the ITOUG Tech Day 2019 in Milan and Rome. This is my first conference of the year for some time already, mainly because I speak Italian and therefore I could potentially connect better with the attendees and also because it’s a bit like my “beta test” event, where I test talks for the first time. (Don’t get me wrong: doesn’t mean the talks aren’t ready or finished!)
I already have another event on my agenda: the boat! I have two talks selected for the OUGN Spring Conference 2019 which will be held on a boat going from Oslo to Kiel and back in the second half of March.
Time for new topics …
2019 will be a year of changes from a topic point of view. I don’t expect to talk about OBIEE anymore! This is mainly because of the Oracle strategy: nothing changed for quite some time with the on-premises version of OBIEE. It’s all about cloud nowadays and I feel like there isn’t much to say about it because the Oracle strategy is to push the “autonomous” (not called like that anymore) version of OAC, the one where you have no access to almost anything and need to stick to the out of the box set of feature. In general I also feel like the topic isn’t something interesting attendees to a conference anymore and that’s the reason for events to not schedule many OBIEE sessions neither.
This year I will focus heavily on graph databases and machine learning. Graph databases can be interesting for various kind of profiles and a wider audience, and machine learning is still one of the trending topics (and can be extended to IA). Will see if these two will get me to some conferences for the rest of the year.
I will anyway start writing about that again soon here on my blog.
I hope to see many of you around soon !