Yesterday concluded the AUSOUG Perth 2 day annual conference. This is probably the best conference of all to catch up with my local peers and colleagues. It seems each year I’m having to remember more and more names and faces at the Perth event which is great; it feels much like a highschool reunion of sorts (and apologies to those whose name I forgot - given I celebrated my 33rd birthday yesterday, old age is my excuse 
Once again Connor McDonald took line honours on the best speaker award, and Tim Hall runner up. I know Tim was pretty chuffed with the award and I’m particularly happy I had the chance to originally invite him down for the AUSOUG conference, because the members obviously liked what Tim had to say….. not as much as Connor, but nearly (and also another great endorsement for the Oracle ACE Director program).
I thought the DBA corner was particular strong this year, what with (in no particular order) Connor, Tim, Penny Cookson, Alex Gorbachev, Guy Harrison, Barry Matthews (the rumour is Barry actually sold 4/7 an Exadata server and more presenting. I couldn’t understand a word they were talking about, but I am a “developer” anyway. As Alex identified on his blog the local DBA audience is small, but they appreciate real technical content from people who are excited about presenting the latest database concepts, and I think it shows the top 2 papers were taken by DBAs.
I also caught up with David Peake of Apex fame, had a punch up out back of the convention centre over Apex vs ADF, which I lost, and now I’m an Apex convert (insert slightly bruised smiley face here ;-( David is on a somewhat mad dash around the world presenting Apex topics; and I thought my trip from OOW was bad enough, David’s is just nuts. However jet lag or not, David’s presentations ran well and were well attended; especially popular in the local market. Brenden Anstey’s Apex/JDev showdown was a popular topic, showing there’s life in this classic debate yet, and I was happy he took time out to present given his current silly work schedule.
The SAGE Computing Services crew were in full presentation force again this year, with Penny Cookson and Eddie Harris introducing Apex reporting solutions, Ray Tindall a security smack-down with Oracle, Scott Wesley on PL/SQL conditional preprocessor code (or how to insert malicious code), and myself on database based web services (of which I had a full room which was pretty good IMHO - though it’s so hard to fit a 1hr OOW presentation in 45mins so it was very rushed). For such a small company I think we punch way above our weight at these events. Yet I think we mostly get a buzz out of seeing familiar friends and work colleagues each year who are keen to hear what we have to say and to share war stories, so that’s pretty rewarding in itself (everybody say: awwwwwwwwww). We’ll get around to putting the presentations up on the website soon.
I worked out by the end of next week I’ll have done about 5.5 days (5 x JDev 1 day masterclasses, 4 x 45 min presentations, + 1hr online eTraining event) members facing presentations to AUSOUG this year, which is a pretty reasonable effort if you ask me, especially given the amount of effort behind the scenes to prepare such. I’d be really happy to hear of some new topic ideas for next year from you the reader along the JDev/Oracle developer lines, so if you have a few ideas shoot me an email please.
Next I’m off to the AUSOUG Gold Coast conference to do pretty much the same thing again, + the addition of my JDeveloper masterclass this time with a Queenslander accent. Most annoyingly JDev 11g went production yesterday, so I’m rushing to update the masterclass notes before my trip. Oracle, you could have at least waited another week! Oh well, no rest for the wicked, or Oracle ACE Directors for that matter.
If you’re going to the GC conference, please come up and introduce yourselves, I’d love to have a chat. See you at GC!
(and yes, the post title was deliberate 