Editor’s note: For posterity’s sake, I’m reposting some content that we created during our time at Oracle. These statements and views are those of the author and do not reflect those of Oracle’s current user experience organization. Developing concept products that embrace emerging technologies Working with emerging technologies brings unique challenges for developers. There are… Read More
Author: mark.vilrokx
Now that Oracle Open World has come and gone, I have some time to go into the details of how this project was conceived and realized, and how it faired at OOW. Let’s start with that last one. I guess to no one’s surprise, the actual booth with (free!) beer was a crowdpleaser; we blew… Read More
IoT Cloud Brewed Beer @ OOW
For the past few months we have worked together with the Oracle Developer Community and Alpha Acid Brewing on a secret IoT project. Come see (and taste!) it at the Developer Lounge in Moscone West during Oracle Open World. Hope to see you there! Cheers, Mark. Update: Want to learn more? Check out this video… Read More
Introduction Another Maker Faire has come and gone, the 12th one already. Unlike last year, Oracle had a booth again at the Maker Faire, staffed by my colleagues and myself throughout the weekend, where we showed of some fun demos. Here are some impressions, both from reactions in our booth and from the grounds. The… Read More
Introduction In the first part of this series I introduced the concept of Developer Experience and why I think it is important that we start investing more into improving the Developer Experience. In this part I will lay down some foundations on how this could be done. The pillars of DX Know your user (i.e. the developer)… Read More
Introduction For the past 2 years I have been trying to raise awareness of the concept of Developer Experience (DX) both inside and outside Oracle. Over the next few days I will release a couple of blog posts delving deeper into this subject. This first post will concentrate on what DX is and why I feel it is… Read More
At the end of November, Laurie’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team organized another fabulous hackathon, this time in collaboration with the Oracle Sydney Office. The goal of the hackathon was to integrate several Oracle Cloud Services and hack together an application built on top of those Cloud Services, using a toy or other device. The AppsLab was… Read More
This is part 2 of my blog post series about the Ambient Visualization hardware (part 1). Also, please read John’s post on details about the creation of the actual visualization, from concept to build. In the first part, I focused on the hardware, a sonar sensor connected to a NodeMCU. In this second part, the focal… Read More
As John mentioned in his post, one of the projects I worked on for OOW16 was the devices to provide the data to his Ambient Display. Unlike previous years, where we record attendance and then produce a report a few days or weeks after OOW, Jake proposed that we’d somehow visualize the data in real-time and show it… Read More
ODTUG Kscope16
Just like last year, a few members (@jkuramot, @noelportugal, @YuhuaXie, Tony and myself) of @theappslab attended Kscope16 to run a Scavenger Hunt, speak and enjoy one of the premier events for Oracle developers. It was held in Chicago this time around, and here are my impressions. Since our Scavenger Hunt was quite a success the previous year, we were asked to run it again to spice up… Read More
Samsung Developers Conference 2016: A Developer’s Perspective
Last week several of my colleagues and myself had the privilege of attending the Samsung Developers Conference (SDC) in San Francisco. It was the 5th time Samsung organized a developers conference in San Francisco but only the first time I attended, although some in our party were present previous times so I had some idea of what to… Read More
IoT Hackathon: Team Waterlytics’ Entry – Part 2/2
Editor’s note: Our team participated in many of the Summer of Innovation events held by Laurie (@lsptahoe) and her team. Here’s Part 2 of Mark’s (@mvilrokx) project from the IoT Hackathon held at Oracle HQ, July 30-31. Enjoy. After all the prep work for the IoT hackaton where we agreed on our use case and settled on the hardware we would be… Read More
Connect All the Things: An IoT Nerf Gun – Part 2: The Software
Introduction In the first part of this series, I showed you how to mod a Nerf gun so it can connect to the internet, and you can electronically trigger it. In this second part, I will show you some software I created to actually remotely control the Nerf gun over the internet using various input devices.… Read More
Connect All the Things: An IoT Nerf Gun
Introduction As part of my foray into the Internet of Things (IoT) I was looking for a project I could sink my teeth in because I find it easier to learn something by doing it rather than just reading about it. It just happened to be that at JavaOne this year they will have a… Read More
IoT Hackathon: Team Waterlytics’ Entry – Part 1/2
Editor’s note: Our team participated in many of the Summer of Innovation events held by Laurie (@lsptahoe) and her team. Here’s Part 1 of Mark’s (@mvilrokx) project from the IoT Hackathon held at Oracle HQ, July 30-31. Enjoy. Last week I participated in the IoT Hackathon at HQ which is part of “The Summer of Innovation,” a series of events… Read More
An IoT Hackathon in Utrecht
I recently attended a hackaton in Utrecht organized by Laurie Pattison (@lsptahoe) and her team as part of their “Summer of Innovation” series. The theme was Internet of Things (IoT) and this marked the first time that they organized a hackathon specifically for an outside partner, eProseed. All the previous hackathons were internal Oracle events. Initially… Read More
Kscope15 Impressions
As per Jake’s post, we got to spend a few days in Florida to support the Scavenger Hunt that we created for the Kscope15 conference. Since it ran pretty smoothly, we were able to attend a few sessions and mingle with the attendees and speakers, here are my impressions of the event. This was my… Read More
Twilio Signal Conference 2015
Editor’s note: If you read here, you know we heart Twilio, especially Noel (@noelportugal). Remember the Rock ’em Sock ’em robot build? This week, Twilio (@twilio) held its first Signal conference and Raymond and I were there to see what’s new in the world of web enabled communications and the likes. For those of you not… Read More
Maker Faire 2015
This weekend the 10th Annual Maker Faire Bay Area took place in my backyard and rather than fighting traffic for 2 days with the +130,000 attendees I decided, as I have for the last 9 years, to join them. Unlike last year, Oracle had no presence at the Maker Faire itself, so I had plenty… Read More
Development on Windows 8.1 Phone and Tablet
This is a follow up to my previous post (“Where are the Mobile Windows Devices?“) in which I gave my initial impressions of mobile windows devices. As part of our assessment of these devices we also developed a few apps and this post details how that went. Getting Started Windows Phone 8.1 applications have to… Read More