The 12 Factor App definition is now ten years old. In the world of software that is a long time. So perhaps it’s time to revisit and review what it says. As I have spent a lot of time around Logging – I’ve focussed on Factor 11 – Logging.
I have been fortunate enough to present at the hybrid JAX London conference on this subject. It was great to get out and see people at a conference rather than just with a screen and a chat console of online-only events.
It has been a busy week with the day job of delivering to customers, with a webinar with Oracle, Flexagon and a customer – Heathrow Airport. Plus two technical sessions for DOAG.
Webinar
The webinar is the latest step in the partnership between Capgemini and Flexagon. If you’d like to see it, the recording can be accessed here.
The webinar development was very much a team effort with Oracle providing the hosting and promo logistics (particularly from Jurgen Kress and input from Daryl Eicher). Presentation development effort with Flexagon (Dan Goerdt and Tanya O’Connor). Of course the great input from our Heathrow customers – Mark South and Nick Byng-Maddick.
We have another blog post related to the webinar sharing some more detail. This will be published in a week or so on blog.oracle.com.
DOAG
The Deutsche Oracle Anwendergruppe (DOAG) conference took place virtually this week. DOAG and the UKOUG events are probably the biggest of the European user group events. With UKOUG happening at the end of the month.
My presentations at DOAG have been an update on which GraphQL, gRPC or REST API technology to use (see the presentation material here), along with a brand new presentation, again relating to APIs. But this time we’re looking at the application and capabilities of the Oracle Cloud’s API which can allow us to manage a wide range of services (see here). While I don’t have the demo piece recorded, you can see the slide aspect here.
Coming up
As mentioned I will be presenting at UKOUG Together. I have another brand new presentation for this as well, which will look at GitHub Actions combined with Oracle Cloud. We also have our first 2022 conference confirmed, in the form of API World.
I recently presented at APIWorld about how API definitions go beyond the payload specification into providing details of terms and conditions and so on. You can see the presentation here (more about my presentations here).
One of the questions during the presentation did I have other examples of good APIs, reflecting the points I’d made. A very valid question, to which I didn’t have more examples to hand, hence this post.
So the easy answer would be to point to an excellent article on Nordic APIs (here) that address the question and explain why they rate the APIs. But that’s a little bit of a lazy answer and in all fairness, the examples provided are from organisations where APIs are recognised as a primary or important contributor to business revenue. So I’ve looked at areas where the API may not necessarily be seen by the business as the primary source of revenue. With the examples provided, we’ve described what we think is good, or not so good about them. Hopefully, through these examples, you’ll see why points are made in the presentation. So here are my reviews…
Opening of the blog post on blogs.oracle.commy Author Profile on blogs.oracle.com
World Festival Conference
We’ve also scored another success, this time we’ve been invited to speak at WorldFestival in August, this is an online conference organized by the same team behind DeveloperWeek. This is the first time outside of an Oracle linked event where I’ve been amongst the first few named speakers, so proud of that. The conference looks really interesting as it looks beyond just core developer themes with conference tracks on Space & Transportation, Smart Cities, Robotics, Digital Health to name a few of the 12 streams. Worth checking out.
I was fortunate enough to record a podcast with the team at Adventures In Dev Ops just before Christmas. The recording has been fine tuned and now available on their web site here. From my perspective, the discussion was really interesting and explored a wide range of areas around the challenges of monitoring.
As the podcast is linked to the book we’re writing for Manning (Unified Logging With Fluentd), there is a discount code currently running – poddevopsadv20.
Thanks to Charles Wood and Jeffrey Groman for having me on as a guest.
Other news …
I will be presenting at the online conference Blueprint LDN, check out the subjects being covered, looks very interesting.
We’ve been told because of current events in the US that this event is going to be rescheduled.
I am pleased to say that I will be talking about Fluentd at the Cloud Native eParty virtual conference on 2nd June 2020. I’ll be presenting at 4pm, and then hanging out on the conference slack channel to answer any more questions people might have.
This year’s UKOUG TechFest 19 conference is over. The first time in a number of years where the user group conference hasn’t been a combined Tech, Apps and JD Edwards event. I have to admit that I was a little concerned with the separation of Tech and Apps as some of the tech stack overlaps for the two groups – for example, Integration Cloud.
That said, the situation being what it was, I got involved with the committee for planning the event including inheriting the stream lead responsibilities for Dev (in the sense of modern development e.g. microservices etc) and what had been historically referred to as middleware (Integration Cloud, Digital Assistant, Helidon, WebLogic) with a lot of support and input from Mark Simpson, Grant Ronald and Susan Duncan.
From my perspective, I don’t think there was a concern (and this isn’t an attempt at being self-congratulatory) as the hard graft is done by the UKOUG office staff.
As the number of people was smaller, we had a smaller venue rather than the ICC in Birmingham or the ACC Convention Centre in Liverpool – which actually worked out well. The problem of the ICC and particularly the ACC is that main community spaces had been very large as a result atmosphere suffered. This time the Grand Hotel in Brighton was really busy and vibrant as a result.
We had a good blend of sessions covering traditional integration, low code, cloud, microservices, API, UI with people from customers, partners and Oracle travelling in from all over Europe and the US to participate and present.
In terms of my presentations and the ones, I managed to see, I’d particularly recommend checking out in the UKOUG library …
I’m pleased to confirm I will be presenting at JAX London over the 3 days of 7th-10th October 2019. where I’ll be talking about Good API Design. If you want to know more check out details here.
Another Spring means another excellent Oracle EMEA PaaS Forum for Oracle partners. Every Year Juergen Kress organizes the event, finding really nice venues to host several hundred people over four and half days.
The event is split into several parts, Monday afternoon normally involves Oracle Ace’s presenting on best practices, insights on applying the various technologies etc. For me this meant presenting on the London Developer Meetup, looking at how it worked, what has been successful, and what hasn’t. For those know have read my blogs on the subject (here) will know about our Drone initiative.
Then Tuesday is a single stream day where Juergen has managed to pull in SVPs and Senior Product Managers from around the globe to provide a high-level view of what has been going on with their products. For anyone consulting in the Oracle domain, this is incredibly useful. For example, there is a clear strategy coalescing around AI and Machine Learning both as a service proposition to users, but also how these technologies are being made available and used within other products. Other areas such as OIC and SOA CS have stability and maturity, and the road map is about maximising connectivity with the newer products.
But before the sessions start, Juergen starts with opening remarks, and demos’ something engaging. In previous years this has been things like Digital Assistants/Chatbots and so on. This year, we have been fortunate to be an active contributor by demoing the drone through the use of APIs and talking about the ideas. The dry runs of the demo on Monday went without a problem, but when it came to the main show, the drone was a little uncooperative – we think because the air-con had really kicked in. But importantly, even not achieving the desired result, the message of engagement made it home.
Wednesday is split into streams with in-depth sessions from the different Product Managers, he amount of insight gained from these sessions is tremendous, some of which is very much protected by safe harbour statements or not for public disclosure such is the honest and open discussions. The day closes with an Ace Director initiative which demonstrates the application of Oracle Cloud products to a plausible use case, and Luis Weir (Capgemini Oracle CTO) is part of. This session has become something of a tradition now.
The day’s business concludes awards, and for a second year the UK Capgemini team have taken home two awards for APIs and PaaS Contribution.
Luis Weir with his API award
The final two days are then a choice of Hackerthon or 1/2 day training sessions on different products with the relevant Product Managers, and an excellent opportunity to pick the brains of the presenters as well as get hands-on experience with the different products.
The week isn’t without it’s social and networking activities of course …
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.
This year’s 
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 
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