Monthly Archives: December 2018

Packt Christmas $5 Promotion

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Books, General, xxRetired

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Head over to Packt.com to take advantage

Yes it’s that time of year and Packt have launched their Christmas Promotion where the books and videos are all $5 (£4.76) including the two I’ve co-written and others I’ve tech reviewed.

Based on past trends, this is the best time to get any EBooks you want from Packt, there are other promotions but not as good as this!

Experian data breach report and analysis

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in General, Technology

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A good friend of mine (Howard Durdle) is a security expert and CSO, he pointed out this really good Twitter trail breaking down the newly published report on the massive Experian data breach.

https://twitter.com/sawaba/status/1072319618352627714

You don’t need to be a geek or a security expert to understand what is being said here, and more importantly reading between the lines as they say, the likely root causes. For me, this all points to cultural challenges, where organisational pressures or a lack of appreciation by mid level decision makers struggle to appreciate the need to invest in non functional factors such as security, patching and maintenance.

Sadly, Experian aren’t the first with this challenge, and won’t be the last. With DevSecOps etc the people building the software will understand the issue. But, I think we need to be working with educating the business stakeholders on the need for dealing with NFRs, and the need to prioritise certain types of issues.

UKOUG Conference 2018

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in API Platform CS, APIs & microservices, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

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With the start of December comes the UK Oracle User Group conference, or to be more precise the Independent UKOUG.  This year the conference is back in Blackpool, a slightly smaller venue than the ICC in Birmingham, but in many respects that made the event feel more vibrant and busy.

The user group also announced some of the changes it is making going forwards reflecting the changing needs of its members – SIGs being largely superseded by multi-stream single day events (Summits) with the Call for Papers for the first of these here.  A wider list of Oracle related Calls for Papers is available here.

Of course being a UKOUG Volunteer, I have been presenting and co-presenting.  The slides from my presentation sessions can be found at:

This was an abridged version of the an update on my presentation here 

My second presentation was a review of Oracle Integration Cloud, in which I presented some customer use cases of OCI  as part of a wider presentation on OIC by Sid Joshi. 

This was followed on the second day with two API based sessions, the first being a deep dive into custom API Policies on the Oracle API Platform.

The final session, was another short one looking at Apiary which was primarily a demo of what the solution can do.

On top of trying to keep up with my usual workload – a very hectic couple of days.