Flashback Friday: Remembrances from ODTUG’s Past

ron-backmann.jpgGuest Blogger: Ron Backmann

As I look back at all the conferences that I have been to and been involved with, ODTUG’s Kscope is by far the most informative and least sales orientated. We have been attending ODTUG’s Kscope conference for the last five years and have made great friends. I am a consistent advocate for this conference and bestow its virtues to all in our organization that will listen. The content of the sessions is in-depth and includes best known practices of the users of the products. The conference points out the “gotchas” that exist within the software and allows the “users” to affect future development and deployment of the software.

Okay that is the business portion of this post.

This conference is the most fun anyone should be allowed to have. The planned events by the ODTUG team have always been fun and great networking opportunities. Though I am partial to the APEX track, I have met and enjoyed the company of others at the conference as well. I have used these opportunities to pick the brains of all people involved with ODTUG and several APEX luminaries such as:

•         New Orleans: speaking with the late Carl Backstrom watching his beloved Lakers

•         Texas Hold’em games in Washington, D.C., Monterey, and Long Beach with Joel Kallman,David PeakeJason Straub, and our Canadian friends Francis Mignault, Patrick Bonneville, andMartin Giffy D’Souza

•         Going out in Long Beach with our friends from across the pond John ScottDimitri Gielis, and Baby AE

•         Learning all about Apex Lib from Patrick Wolf

•         Learning everything about collections from Dan McGhan

•         Winning a bet against Scott Spendolini when the Packers beat the Steelers

•         Meeting the very calming persons of Doug Gault and Raj Mattamal

•         Hanging out with Monty

Do you notice a theme here?

And all the others that I have missed in this post, I have learned a great deal from all of you in sessions and afterwards. I have benefited from your openness and willingness to share your vast knowledge and enthusiasm with a person who was tasked to replace a couple of spreadsheets. Which has now grown into an infrastructure of several Terabytes of data supported by an APEX front-end that gets 3M+ page views a month and supports 1,500 concurrent users across the United States.

I consider all of you my friends. Thank you ODTUG and the APEX community.

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