My First Oracle OpenWorld

This year I had the great opportunity to attend in person Oracle OpenWorld 2016 and JavaOne 2016. Since I was student, I heard how fantastic and big is this conference but you cannot realize it until you are in it.

All San Francisco is taken by a bunch of personalities from all companies around the world, and it’s a great space to talk about Oracle, show off our projects and of course, our vision as a team and organization.

In this conference you can see a big contrast between attendees profiles. If you walk near to Moscone Center, you probably will see attendees wearing suits and ties and talking all time about business. In contrast, if you walk couples block to downtown you will see more casual dress code (shirts and jeans) meaning that you are entering to developers zone.

Either way, the whole city is all about Oracle. Even, there are a couple of main streets that are closed to set up a lounge area, booths and entertainment. You can see hanging posters and glued around the entire city. It’s awesome.

Conference is divided in two, OpenWorld and JavaOne. So as I said, this conference cover a lot of interesting areas of technology.

I attended this year to polish our demos before the conference and to help Oracle Network Technology (@oracleotn) with our IoT Workshops. This workshop was at both OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences, I helped at JavaOne.

The idea behind the IoT Workshop was to introduce technical and non technical people to the IoT world. Show them how easy is to start and teach them the very basic tools, hardware and of course, code to connect things to internet.

From the beginning, we were skeptical in the results. This was the first time we ran this workshop in a big conference three days in a row. Our schedule was five sessions per day, one hour each session. The start was slow, but we got a lot of traction the consecutive days. The response from attendees was awesome. Last two days, pretty much all sessions were packed up. At some point we had a long waitlist and all people wanted to get the IoT Starter Kit.

Speaking of Starter Kit, we were giving away the kit to all attendees at the end of the session. The kit includes one NodeMCU with an ESP8266 WiFi micro controller, a push button, a buzzer, a resistor, a LED and some cables to wire the components. Attendees could take the workshop in two ways; from scratch, meaning that they had to use their own computer and install all required tools and libraries and then compile the Arduino code, wire the components and flash the NodeMCU or the expedited way, meaning that we give them pre-flashed micro controller and they just wire components.

It was very surprising that many attendees decided to take the long path, that showed us that they were very interested to learn and potentially keep working on their own projects. Part of the session, we spent some minutes talking about how OAUX is using IoT to see how it will affect user experience and propose projects that can help Oracle users and partners in their daily lives.

Specifically at JavaOne, we had many conversations about how potentially they could find a niche in their companies using IoT, and they came up with pretty cool ideas. It was so fun and interesting having direct contact with both technical and non technical people.

I think Java is one of my preferred programming languages so far, and I had never had the chance to attend a conference about Java. This time was awesome, I had the chance to present and at the same time be an attendee.

The rest of the team was working at the OAUX Exchange. We presented all our demos and I didn’t miss the opportunity to see how people get very excited with our demos.

And to close with a flourish, some OOW attendees were invited to visit our Gadget Lab to show more about our vision and new integrations with gadgets we have got lately.

Overall, OOW is the result of our team work and collaboration during the year. It’s where we see reflected all our work into smiles, wows and people’s enthusiasm. It’s a feeling that cannot be described.

Finally we are here rolling again, getting prepared for the next OOW. So stay tuned on what we are cooking up to surprise you.