Welcome Noel

I’m happy to announce that AppsLab has grown by one, and we’re pleased to welcome Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) to our little family.

If you read here, you’ll recognize Noel’s name. I first met Noel back in June 2008, when he reached out to me to show me OraTweet, his Twitter clone built with Oracle APEX. OraTweet was entirely a side-project for Noel, who taught himself APEX and built it in his spare time, just because he wanted to scratch an itch.

I love this type of hacker spirit, and after working with Noel over the years, it became quickly apparent that to our team that if we ever had open headcount, I wanted to bring him into the fold.

So, when we had an unexpected opening when Paul (@ppedrazzi) left the nest last year, I immediately jumped at the chance to bring Noel to our little team.

Noel continues to operate OraTweet internally, and it has become quite the success story inside the firewall. Thousands of employees use it every day to communicate, collaborate on projects and generally GTD. OraTweet is available externally too for anyone to download and use. If you’re an Oracle shop looking for a quick and easy Twitter clone to deploy, or you’re an APEX developer and want to see how it extends to social applications, give it try.

Noel’s hacking isn’t limited to software. He also dabbles in Arduino and his Christmas lights and Halloween candy hacks are also very cool and documented if you’re into the internet of things. I’m sure he’s stoked to get his hands on one of those Android Open Accessory Development Kits announced last week at Google IO. I can’t wait to see what he’ll build, watch this space.

Anyway, we’re excited to add Noel, and I’m looking forward to adding another set of hands to the ‘Lab.

Welcome Noel.