Anthony’s Last Day

Editorial note: This post is by Anthony, in case it’s not obvious. Contrary to appearances, this is a team blog.

Today will be my last day at Oracle.

In retrospect of my 11 years at Oracle, it has been a fun and enjoyable experience.

One of the things I want to do in my life is to learn and try out new things, and I think I am blessed in Oracle, as it provides me the opportunity to do so. At the time when I started at Oracle in Financials, building web applications using Java was new, and I jumped into projects using Oracle Applications Framework right away and worked on release 12. You will be surprised how little I need to know about Oracle Forms even 11 years ago. I took on a relatively complex module called the Funds Checker, which is responsible to ensure there are funds available in accounts before money can be withdrawn. This is an important requirement for Public Sector and Federal, and software vendors can not sell software to these sectors without it. Funds Check requires high scalability to process potentially millions of transactions from Subledgers and General Ledger, and APIs and performance considerations from the start is critical and essential.

I then worked on building Oracle Intercompany for R12 from scratch, and that was a great experience for me, as I got to know inside out in how to build and maintain an application. Recently, I learned from a friend of mine that she is working as a consultant on an implementation project for Intercompany on R12. It gave me a funny feeling when someone told you they only start using what you built 7 years later. With my past achievements, I eventually led a team of about 20 developers in the Budgetary Control project for Fusion as a Senior Dev Manager. At leisure, I also maintained a server and provide development tools for product managers and developers that can help ease their day-to-day tasks.

In 2007, I had a feeling that I am not learning as much as I used to anymore. Web 2.0, Social Web were booming that time, and I want to get my hands on them. The timing was interesting as Jake approached me and told me about AppsLab. I still remember the day when he told me about it in my office. The thought of being in an innovative tank is nothing I can resist, so I shifted gear.

In these past couple years in the AppsLab, the experience is invaluable. We built Connect, and Mix. We built mobile applications, browser extensions, javascript, and ruby libraries, SSO integration in Java, file sharing, etc.. We uses technologies like jQuery, HTML5, Shindig, Rails as our development tools. I find it amazing on how 4 people can achieve when we have the passion on the technologies and the work we do. I loved the team and the work. I agree with Rich completely that every company should have such a team to do innovations. It is truly an amazing experience to me. Kudos to Jake for telling me about it and bringing me on board.

During my adventure at Oracle, I met lots of good people, and I value our friendship. On the other hand, I was approached by a great opportunity recently, and my mind tells me that I should do a big move. It is time to say goodbye. I will be working on a SaaS product, focusing on the social and mobile platform. It should be fun.

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