Over lockdown I fell in love with Oracle APEX, while using it to build a donation tracking application for Progetto Dogon, a local non-profit here in Italy. My end users immediately noticed the lightning speed, attractive UI, and many handy new features I was able to deliver in the new system. What they didn’t know, is that APEX did most of the work, while I got to take the credit. It was the ace up my sleeve.
Friends and colleagues know that when something inspires me, I go all in, so I kept learning more about APEX over the past year with the goal of finding a way to join the development team in time. The Harvard CS50x online course I was taking to refresh my knowledge of C and Python let us use any technology to implement our final project, so I used APEX to build an art collection tracking application that I hope to continue enhancing and make available as open source on GitHub eventually in case others might find it useful. If you’re curious to check out what I built, here’s a short demo I had to submit along with the source code for my final grade in the course.
Many colleagues helped me on my APEX learning journey by answering my newbie questions about the tool, but I gradually began to feel confident enough to start answering a few questions about APEX myself on our internal discussion forums. It was eye-opening to witness how many Oracle employees and teams are using APEX on a daily basis to build themselves applications they and their teams use to get their jobs done.
By listening to all the back episodes of The Oracle APEX Talkshow podcast on my daily morning walks, I got to “meet” many of the APEX dev team members including Joel, Mike, Carsten, Patrick, Marc, and others, and became aware of the scale, reach, and passion of the APEX community by listening to numerous other guests on the show. It was a group of like-minded folks across the globe looking out for each other, helping each other succeed. I felt compelled to join them.
Long story short, I started a new chapter in my Oracle career on the APEX dev team on October 1st, and look forward to using this blog to chronicle the new tricks that this old dog learns along the road. We’ve come a long way together since EXEMACRO EXETRG in Forms 2.3 in 1990, but a consistent thread through my Oracle career has been helping the community make the best use of Oracle’s tools and helping make our tools the easiest way to build database-backed business applications. That journey continues in my new role…
Dive Into APEX 