This Meetup was put together quickly as it presented an opportunity to align with other events happening in the Oracle offices. Despite the relatively short notice we a turn out that really made great use of our speaker – Sid Joshi who walked through the Enterprise Level patterns supported by Oracle’s Integration Cloud (OIC) including a demo showing how PaaS4SaaS worked using Service Cloud and OIC making use of VBCS and integration (formerly ICS) parts of the API Platform.
As with all the meet-ups we allow the discussions to flow freely. So, the conversation probed different aspects of OIC. So with the follow up on Several Capgemini use cases of OIC that have won the team awards.
As the conversation has focused on OIC and the use cases rather than our ongoing Drones with APIs stories, I have had an interesting follow on discussion about the application of drones. The drone story has many threads. The initial driver for the work on the drone has been about bringing something interesting and distinctive to the meetup. The drone is very tangible, and the source of amusement which makes the meetups a lot more fun.
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 …
Last night we ran the latest of the Oracle Developer Meetups in London. This time Luis Weir presented on GraphQL, which got an very engaged discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of GraphQL, in-depth points about how the error paths should be handled among many other things.
The presentation material Luis used is based upon his Devoxx session earlier this year and can be seen here:
After a insightful and thought provoking presentation on GraphQL the Drones with APIs project had its latest update. Providing a lot of laughter to the evening’s proceedings. Including demonstration of flying the drone using REST APIs published via a gateway and Go back-end. This included the DroneDash presenting a visual presentation of the commands being issues via REST, as seen here:
Monday night (18th December) I co-hosted with Luis Weir the first London OracleDeveloperMeetup. Despite being a Monday evening in the run up to Christmas where a lot of people will attending Christmas events, needing to finish present shopping or event started their holiday we still had a tremendous turn out. With nearly 50 people out of almost 100 registrations coming to the Oracle London Office.
The evening kicked off just after 6pm with beer, pizza and time for people to Network. At 7pm we started with what had been scheduled to be two short 25 minute presentations to share insights into API design best practices and an overview of Apiary. Such was the interest, interaction and conversation in the subject and content that the session over ran. But here in lies one the benefits of a Meetup over things like conferences. In the Meetup the is space and time for the presenters to adjust to what the attendees wish to cover rather than beholden to the venue scheduling.
With the presentation and discussions finding a suitable pause, it was an opportunity for a call to arms to be made, and for people to try using developing APIs. With a mission defined which we hope people will try to continue with as it will contribute to the next Meetup. You don’t need to have attended last night’s event to participate in the next Meetup. If you want see what we’re going to try achieve take a look at the end of the slide deck. We think it will be be very entertaining and the source of a lot of laughter and amusement.
Some people did take up the challenge, others took it as an opportunity to talk further about the technology or just network.
We hope you will join our Meetup and register for the event when we announce the final details. In the mean time give Apiary a try, share with us the API you have designed.