COLLABORATE16 – First Time Presenting

I just returned from another great Oracle user group conference in Las Vegas, Collaborate 2016. The folks at OAUG, IOUG and Quest did a wonderful job again! This was my second time attending Collaborate with last year being my first. In fact, right after last years’s conference, I opened up my blog and wrote my first post called Collaborate15 – First Time Attending. This year I took a chance and submitted two abstracts to see if I would get accepted as a presenter. I was fortunate enough that one of these presentations was selected (Extending Oracle EBS 12.1.3 with Oracle APEX 5.0). I was completed thrilled and a little nervous at the same time.

In addition to my presentation, I volunteered for the RAC Attack! pre-conference workshop on Sunday. The turnout was a little lower than previous years but we had a great bunch of attendees that were eager to learn. Many thanks to the other RAC Attack ninjas involved, Nelson Calero, Martin Klier, and Seth Miller.

The night before my presentation I was more anxious then nervous. I wanted to do this. I went through a quick run through of my presentation and made some final tweaks to some slides (does this ever stop?). I went to sleep and got maybe 4 – 5 hours of solid sleep until I literally started going through my entire presentation in a semi-dream state. I finally had enough and decided to get going to start my morning. I was fortunate to have the first session of the day so I could get it done right away and enjoy the rest of the day.

I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout of my session! The room was just about full and in the neighborhood of about 65 people. Between my slides, talk and the numerous questions asked we went the full hour. We had about 12 attendees that spilled out into the hallway for another 20 minutes of conversation. I was ecstatic to see the amount of interest in extending EBS with Oracle APEX. The feedback on my session from various folks was very positive but I’m now anxious to get whatever feedback was given via the mobile application to see where I can improve.

The best part of Collaborate is the number of FANTASTIC sessions available. Unfortunately, sometimes these are all happening simultaneously which makes it so difficult to choose! All in all, the conference was packed with lots of great information that allows you to take and apply to your day to day job as well as learning about emerging technologies (cloud anyone?).

I was thrilled to meet so many new people as well as ones I’ve been collaborating with via email or social media. It’s always nice to put a name to a face and get to know someone first hand. This is yet another benefit of these conferences as well as user group meetings in general…meeting people and networking.

If you haven’t been to Collaborate I STRONGLY recommend it. I definitely will be submitting abstracts for next year and hope to have topics that are interesting enough to allow me to get selected again.

Cheers!

Alfredo