I am visiting this, well, very artificial paradise dropped into the middle of a desert, so as to participate in Collaborate 07. It's been an interesting and fun several days. I have a room on the 26th floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, so I have a fantastic view looking out over the wave pool, lazy river and assorted pools between the hotel and the convention center. Better yet, I can see mountains right there on the horizon. Big ones. Snow on the top.
No, wait. No snow. The mountains with snow were the ones I could see from the former FIFA (international soccer federation) headquarters, which now house a conference center in which I gave a day two training in March - Zurich Switzerland!
Yes, I have been doing an absolutely insane amount of travel lately, and it is only going to get worse. In May and June, I will travel to:
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Medellin, Colombia
Bogota, Colombia
Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Munich, Germany
Zurich, Switzerland (again!)
Paris
Brussels
London
WOW! This is what happens, by the way, when you work really, really hard to build an exciting new tool (Quest Code Tester for Oracle), and then your company starts selling the product. Time to go tell people all about it!
So...please...take pity on me. Help me out. Order lots and lots of copies of Quest Code Tester and then maybe I can ease off on some of my travel!
No, this is really great fun, and quite an honor – to be able to travel around the world and tell developers about my ideas for best practices and testing. I am a very lucky guy.
Back to Collaborate 07.
There have been many interesting presentations on Oracle Database 11g, though still no firm news on when it will be available. I think that it is really good that Oracle is so cautious about committing to dates. They want to get the code right. Bravo!
It does, however, wreak some potential havoc. We (Chip Dawes, Bill Pribyl, Debby Russell of O'Reilly Media, and I) are finishing up a new 4th edition of the Oracle PL/SQL Pocket Reference, including 11g content. But we can't publish it until 11g goes production. Argh!
I did two presentations at this show:
Ten Things You Should Never Do in PL/SQL
About 150 people showed up to listen to a rather tongue in cheek performance; they laughed at most of my jokes, making me happy. Here are the ten "nevers":
1. Never ask for help
2. Never skip the coffee.
3. Never share what you learn.
4. Never doubt the gurus.
5. Never hide the details in your code.
6a. Never let anyone else read your code.
6b. Never read someone else's code.
7. Never worry about tomorrow. Code for today.
8. Never fix bugs that users haven't found.
9. Never assume an Oracle bug will be fixed.
10. Never say never.
Test Driven Development in the World of PL/SQL
I was really impressed. Over 50 showed up at 8:30 AM on Wednesday to attend a two hour talk on testing. Now, that's commitment and dedication! Check out my newly uploaded version of this talk to get all the details.
For my time at the Quest booth, I decided to take a different approach from the norm. We didn't have a magician performing at our booth (few did at Collaborate 07; it is a more commonplace phenomena at Oracle Open World, when marketing wallets open up wider). So I decided that I would to the magic show.
The title of my talk was "PL/SQL Magic Tricks".
And the two magic tricks that I demonstrated were:
· With nothing more than the power of symbolic logic, I will convince that SQL IS BAD!
· With nothing more than the power of smart software, I will convince that TESTING IS FUN!
I know, I know, not really magic tricks. But then, there is nothing magical about software. It's all attention to detail, logical thinking, and of course lots of thorough testing with Quest Code Tester!
So tomorrow I head back home, and then I get to stay home A WHOLE TWO WEEKS before getting on my next plane. Ah, that sounds nice....