APEX Alpe Adria 2022 review

I

It was my first on-site APEX conference. I went from Prague by bus on Thursday at 2am to meet with Foex guys at Vienna to join their party bus. To meet at least few APEX enthusiasts before we arrive. I have to move across the city to to Foex headquarters and I used my Onewheel to get there in 90 minutes and 10% battery left. That was fun. All guys at Foex were/are very friendly and the journey to Maribor went well. We talked a lot. I met Peter, Matt, Karen, Frank, Fanel, Zsolt, one guy without LinkedIn profile and Dietmar.

I arrived at my hotel, put the Onewheel to the charger and went to bed for 2 hours. Then I went to explore Maribor. Drove along the river on both sides, went to the old town and didn't crashed. Beautiful city. Then I went to the first session with organizers and Patrik Wolf. That was very relaxed, very friendly, entertaining and also enlightening. The community around APEX is really something special and it is an honor to be part of that.

Here are some interesting numbers:

• there are over 70 APEX developers developing APEX in APEX
• they are spread worldwide in 14 countries in 11 timezones
• there are now 2 releases per year (spring, autumn), in 6 weeks delay it should be available on OCI
• they estimated 45000 active APEX developers worldwide
• there will be a free APEX Foundation certification for the beginners available this year

One must be blind to not notice the wast improvements in past few years, the dev team is really listening to community (now even through the APEX ideas app). I am really glad that Oracle recognized the value of the APEX and is putting more and more people on team.

Friday was packed with sessions. I went for CI/CD path to see how others do that and to improve this process for my clients. I still don't know if I improve my process or adapt something from these guys, but I am glad I was there. I now have a lot to think about.

• Source Code Management and Deployment Made Easy from Dietmar Aust
• APEX Application lifecycle with feature based deployment from Richard Martens
• Database & APEX Automatic deployment - A long story short from Lukasz Kosiciarz
• D.O.M.E. - Deployment Organization Made Easy by Zoran Tica

On coffee breaks I talked to people or tried to consolidate my thoughts before the next session starts. The whole day went quickly by. Even the afterparty was great and to my surprise I enjoyed it.

It is a great loss that Joel couldn't be around, but as Patrik said, he would be proud. This is the another example how great is the community when they/we know each other by names. I owe a big thanks to all the people I met there, it was a pleasure.

See you next year in Klagenfurt*.