Month: September 2025

Joel Kallman Day 2025 : Announcement

Since 2016 we’ve had an Oracle community day where we push out content on the same day to try and get a bit of a community buzz. The name has changed over the years, but in 2021 it was renamed to the “Joel Kallman Day”. Joel was big on community, and it seems like a fitting tribute to him.

When is it?

The date is Wednesday October 15th. That’s just over two weeks away from today!

How do I get involved?

Here is the way it works.

  • Write a blog post. The title should be in the format “<insert-the-title-here> #JoelKallmanDay“.
  • The content can be pretty much anything. See the section below.
  • Tweet out the blog post on social media using the hashtag #JoelKallmanDay.
  • Publishing the posts on the same day allows us to generate a buzz. In previous years loads of people were on social media retweeting, making it even bigger. The community is spread around the world, so the posts will be released over a 24 hour period.
  • Oracle employees are welcome to join in. This is a community day about anything to do with the Oracle community.

Like previous years, it would be really nice if we could get a bunch of first-timers involved, but it’s also an opportunity to see existing folks blog for the first time in ages! 

The following day I write a summary post that includes links to all the posts that were pushed out through the day. You can see examples here.

What Should I Write About?

Whatever you want to write about. Here are some suggestions that might help you.

  • My favourite feature of {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
  • What is the next thing on your list to learn.
  • Horror stories. My biggest screw up, and how I fixed it.
  • How the {a specific piece of tech} has affected my job.
  • What I get out of the Oracle Community.
  • What feature I would love to see added to {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
  • The project I worked on that I’m the most proud of. (Related to Oracle tech of course)

It’s not limited to these. You can literally write about anything Oracle or community related. The posts can be short, which makes it easy for new people to get involved. If you do want to write about something technical, that’s fine. You can also write a simple overview post and link to more detailed posts on a subject if you like. In the previous years the posts I enjoyed the most were those that showed the human side of things, but that’s just me. Do whatever you like. 

Do I have to write in English?

No! It’s great to see people contributing to their own community. Google Translate does a pretty good job of translating them, so we can still read them.

Do I need to write about Joel or APEX?

I’m sure people would be happy to read stories about Joel, or content about APEX, but you don’t have to write about that. You can write about whatever you want, so long as it has an Oracle and/or community spin…

So you have a little over two weeks to get something ready!

Cheers

Tim…

A little story of Oracle APEX (Low Code) for the win

As the undisputed worlds worst APEX developer, I just wanted to share a little story that illustrates why I love APEX when trying to deliver value as quickly as possible.

Background

We have an interface that uploads data from an on-prem service to a 3rd party product running on a cloud service. It does this by pushing files to a S3 bucket on AWS. It’s a scheduled task and it works fine.

Occasionally the end users need to send some different data through to the bucket for the 3rd party to pick up. The first thought was we could give the users access to the bucket and let them use a tool like Cyberduck to push their file to it. This doesn’t sit well with me as there are no guard rails, and if they break something, it’s up to us to fix it.

So after chatting with my boss I suggested I knock up a quick POC in APEX to allow them to upload the files.

What I did

We already had an APEX environment for this on-prem system, so I didn’t have to worry about any APEX or ORDS setup. I could just piggy back on the existing infrastructure. We use Azure AD, so it is really easy to enable MFA for APEX applications using the APEX social sign-on functionality (see here).

I created a single page app that allowed the users to upload a file to the server, and then call a script on the server to transfer the file to the S3 bucket.

It was a few minutes and we had something that was working and ready for the users to try.

I talked one of the users through it, and he successfully uploaded a file. I told him to hold off until I had squared things on my end, as my boss was away.

When my boss got back we discussed it, and couldn’t think of anything more we needed to do, so basically we were ready to go live with it.

Why low code works

The reason why I like low code is it only takes minutes to go from idea to solution for little things like this. You can be a pretty mediocre APEX developer, like me, and still deliver value quickly, and more importantly safely.

Another big plus for APEX is this isn’t a solution that will go out of date when a new framework appears. I’ve got apps I created over a decade ago that are still up to date and running fine. The database is patched on a regular basis, and we apply APEX patches as they are released. It just works. If we compare that to some of our other software, the effort of trying to keep them in a supported state is considerable, and in a few cases it’s nearly impossible.

Conclusion

For any APEX developers out there, you already understand why APEX is so useful for anything from quick prototypes to complex enterprise developments. For people that haven’t used low code tools before, you will be surprised how much of your existing development workflow could be replaced by them.

Remember, our job is to get value to the customers in a timely manner. If we are being held back by our development environment, that is our problem, not theirs.

This is just another example of me cosplaying as a developer. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve written a small number of articles about APEX over the years, as well as some surrounding technologies.