Today was the first day of the Oracle OpenWorld Europe conference in London. Looking back at it, it was a very interesting and successful day. I learned some new things and my presentation in the afternoon was a hit.
My day started around 6:30 in the morning, even though the registration (collecting my badge) would not be possible until 08:00, as I still needed to prepare parts of my presentation. In the hour before registration I still needed to provision some new environments for my demo, as this was not successful in the past days because of loadbalancer creation issues on the Oracle Cloud. If this was still unsuccessful it would have created major issues for my presentation in the afternoon, but luckily the demo-gods where in my favor.
Around 8:10 I walked to the ExCel centre, had some breakfast and walked all the way to the other side of the centre to eventually find the registration desks. On arrival the thing that you could not miss was the massive crowds of people waiting in line for their badge. From some dutch people I heard that around 8:45 the waiting line was already an hour long. Again luckily for my I was a speaker and had the privilege to use a separate check-in counter specially for speakers. Instead of waiting a hour it only took me five minutes.
After check-in and receiving my speaker badge I walked around to find a nice spot to film the crowds and also shoot an intro for my daily vlog. Once filmed I used to Oracle events app to look at the sessions schedule to see where I wanted/needed to go first. Content-wise my focus today was on Blockchain, IoT, AI and Modern API development and the first session I planned to go to would start at 9:45, which meant I had another 30 minutes or so to walk around.
I decided to walk around the Oracle’s groundbreaker hub and the other booths in the exposition hall. Oracle had some cool booths to show how their cloud services can be used, including a Lego smart city using IoT and AI, a miniature industrial manufacturing line for creating wooden coasters in which you could laser-cut your name into using IoT, a booth that showed a running Blockchain beer brewery, and Pepper the robot that listens to commands and processes them with the use of a chatbot. I interview some of the people at these booths so hopefully they turn out great in the vlog.
Further more I visited some other booths from companies that where showing IoT related project they did. Most of the companies that have a booth a more end-user focussed so I normally skip that part of the exposition hall.
At 9:45 it was time for my first session to attend about Blockchain, IoT, AI: Maximizing Value Through Embedded Business Application. This 35-minutes session explained that besides offering platform services for these technologies that they also have pre-build application for a few of the major industries. Nothing that I had not seen before, actually I went to this session to see if there was a timeline available when we could expect these Blockchain and AI apps, but no answer on that yet.
The second sessions I went to was directly after the previous one and started at 10:30. The sessions was about Machine Learning for Java Developers by Suyash Joshi. The content was very interesting, but the execution was less perfect. The speaker had so much content that he was rushing his presentation, constantly saying he was almost out of time, even when he still had 20 minutes left. During the whole sessions I did not see any Java code being showed, only some working examples. I would have liked to see one complete example including the code.
After the session I found out that my session length was longer as I realized. Instead of being the normal 45-minutes I had a 60-minutes slot. So I decided to find a quite place to extend the content of my demo a bit and explaining more about the state of blockchain in 2019.
After preparing my presentation I got some lunch and went to my next session at 12:20 about Microservices at Scale: Taking the Next Steps with Kubernetes by Jesse Butler. Before the presentation started I had a nice chat with the speaker of that sessions and he mentioned that his demo environment had crashed and couldn’t show anything live, which was a shame. I still decided to stay though. The things he explained was more an introductory to Kubernetes, microservices and the importance of using Istio for traffic management and monitoring, and it lacking the next steps part. It was still a very good presentation by a great speaker, but because of the environment issues a very short one.
As the session was so short (30 minutes) and I couldn’t go to another session, before mine I just walk around the conference centre and chatted with some people I recognized.
Next it was time for my session at 13:40 about How to Build a Decentralized Blockchain app with Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. I went into the room about 15 minutes before it would officially start to setup my laptop and got hold of a wireless microphone. Usually the tension rises just a few minutes before I start, but this time it was different, the room was already filling up, which gave me enough confidence to do the session justice. Eventually I had a full-house (100/150 people in the room). Even though my session duration was extended to an hour I still had troubles showing everything I wanted. Nonetheless it went really well and got some good questions and complements afterwards.
After my session I had some extended discussion with some other people about the content of my presentation, which meant I missed a session I wanted to go to :(. I decided to chill a bit as I was really getting tired.
The last session I went to this first day was the sessions of Todd Sharp, How I Automated My Barn with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Oracle DB and the cloud. A fun a light presentation how he automated some part of his barn making it possible to remotely monitor it and even open the gates so his pigs could go outside. He showed some demo’s of it working and gave some insights in the code. Really enjoyed it.
After this last session I collected my jacket and went back to the hotel to freshen up. That evening I was invited to the Oracle BeNeLux Partner dinner in ZeroSette. This was a perfect ending to my day, where I could finally speak dutch again. Really nice to meat people for other Oracle partners I had not spoken with in years or even never before.
Tomorrow (or today, when this is posted) the second day of OOW London takes place. I can only visit a few sessions before flying back home in the afternoon, but more on that later today.
P.s. this post will be updated later with some images, once I’m back home.
