I’m happy to announce that as of today I am joining Oracle as a Developer Evangelist for their Cloud offering. This position is a dream come true for me and I’m really excited to get to work sharing the amazing products and services that Oracle has to offer to developers around the globe.

My primary goal in this role is to engage with you and inform you as best I can about the products and services that we offer. I want to share how we can help you become a more productive developer and deploy your code in a painless and dependable manner. I have a lot to learn and I’ll do everything I can to get up to speed as quickly as possible. One of my first goals is to migrate this blog to Oracle’s cloud and I plan to share my progress in doing so in a short series of posts here on the blog.

I’ve long been an AWS user, but recently one of my projects at work has expressed some interest in getting our platform running on multiple cloud service providers so based on the recommendations of a few friends I decided to give Oracle’s cloud offering a look.  I’d heard a bit about their cloud offerings, but I honestly had no idea just how many services they offered.  I mean, seriously - everything from application/container hosting to messaging queues, security, AI, Machine Learning - you name it and they seem to offer a product or service to support it.  I guess it really shouldn’t surprise me though - cloud services are undeniably the future of our industry.

In my last post we looked at how to create a very minimal Slack clone with Twilio, ElectronJS and Angular 5.  Although I used Electron to give the app the ability to run as a standalone app, I didn’t really use too many features inherent to Electron so I thought it would be a good idea to continue building on this application as an exercise to learn more about the entire stack that I chose to build the application with.

I’ve heard plenty about Twilio over the past few years and had always wanted to learn more about their APIs.  They have a ton of different products - APIs for everything from SMS and Voice Calling to Video and VOIP trunking - but the product I decided to take a deeper look at was their Programmable Chat service.  I figured it would be a fun API to learn and at the same time it would let me dig into another project that I’d been meaning to dig into - Electron.  Electron is a tool for building cross platform desktop applications with HTML and JavaScript.  To super simplify it:  Electron combines Node.JS and Chromium to create a distributable application that runs on any desktop.

This one might fall into the “duh” category, but I recently found myself with a unique situation.  I was consuming some HTML from a third party and the size of the content inside a <table> was quite wide.  The original solution was to set the overflow to allow for horizontal scrolling, but the results left a bit to be desired so I was asked to come up with a different solution.  It’s always tricky when displaying content where you don’t control the markup, but that’s part of the fun of being a developer I supposed.  

In 2017 I attended the DevNexus conference in Atlanta and wrote my thoughts of it at the time.  I was mildly critical of some of the content at the time and as I look back on that review I realize that some of my complaints may have been more due to my own shortcomings at the time rather than the fault of the presenters or organizers.  Whether I liked to admit it or not, I’d fallen out of touch with our industry.  I didn’t know what Docker was.  I hadn’t ever heard of Kubernetes and didn’t know a thing about “serverless”.  I wasn’t using Typescript, Angular, NodeJS - I didn’t even have Node installed on my laptop!  In the months that followed I decided it was time to refocus my dedication to improving my skill set as a developer and at least learn about many of the latest languages, frameworks and trends.  Rather than criticize the conference for not providing content that was suited for me, I realized that I needed to be in a place where the content **did **matter to me as a developer.  After all, conference content is nothing if not directly reflective of current and future industry trends.

The last few days I’ve been going through the Vue.js documentation to learn a little more about the framework.  I’m impressed in its simplistic, concise approach to front-end dev and even more impressed with their obvious attention to performance with the framework.  However, one item jumped out at me when going through the documentation that reminded me of another article that I’d read recently so I thought I’d share a simple refactor to one of their examples that could make a world of difference in the performance of larger Single Page Applications.

I recently had the opportunity to attend Connect.Tech 2017 and wanted to write up a quick review of the event.  I’ll start off by saying this won’t be your typical conference review as I was privileged to attend in a much different capacity than I normally do:

That’s right, I volunteered, and it was an amazing experience that I highly recommend.  In my past (ColdFusion) days I had seen a little bit of the dirty underbelly of the beast that is running a conference, but this experience pulled the curtain back just a bit more and let me gain a new respect for what people like Pratik and Vincent go through to put on events that so many of us take for granted in the tech world.  Running a conference is a labor of love.  There’s always a fire to put out or issue to address.  Audio issues, timing, setup, teardown...wait, what’s that...a speaker couldn’t make it?  Cost is another factor.  Conferences are **not **cheap.  One sponsor shared with me that they asked the facility for an extra power strip for their booth.  The technician asked them who they should charge the $101 dollar rental fee for the power strip.  **One hundred and one dollars.  *For a power strip!!  ***