Having a little fun with Wordle

I was able to stay away from socially hyped Wordle for a long time, but recently started to take a look at it. Despite my hesitation it is a great game and I really like it.

If it weren’t for my limited english skills and a profound lack of vocabulary. Just to come up with any 5-letter word was a challenging task, not to speak of finding THE right word.

So I set out to search for sites showing lists of words, which there are many around. Unfortunately none of those lists provided all the features I wanted for filtering: get me all words with an “A” on second position and a “Y” anywhere but not on position 2+3.

A long list of words and a need for filtering? That sounded like a perfect opportunity to build an APEX application to help me there.

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New APEX conference: APEX Alpe Adria

During the recent SIOUG and HrOUG conferences past October, my friends Dario Bilić, Aljaž Mali and Dietmar Gabauer had a great Idea: why not establish a proper APEX conference for our neighborly region?

As soon as Dietmar returned to our office after the conferences, we set up a meeting with Dario and Aljaž and instantly agreed that we want to do this.

Our goal is to have a first class APEX conference, with top speakers from abroad and from the neighborhood. All that for a minimum cost. This conference should be accessible for every APEX fan in the region, even if they are not sponsored by their respective bosses and pay everything out of their own pocket.

There it is: April 20, 2018, will feature the first APEX Alpe Adria conference in Graz, Austria.

We picked Graz as first location as it is fairly easy to reach from a number of surrounding countries. So no matter if you want to come by plane, train, bus, or car, everyone will be able to get a connection.

Call for Papers is still open until January 9th, but we already pre-confirmed two top speakers: Patrick Wolf and Joel Kallman from the Oracle APEX Development Team.

I want to encourage all APEX speakers from anywhere in or around the Adriatic region to submit an abstract to this conference. Together we can provide a fantastic lineup and and interesting program.
We would like to see submissions from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, Austria, Bosnia, Switzerland, and everyone else who wants to visit a beautiful town and be part of the best APEX conference in the region.

Lots of fun, a great community and new friends are guaranteed.

Did I mention the low cost of just EUR 30,- for the Early Bird tickets? Go and get your ticket right now, there is a limited number available.

 

It’s not too late, submit an abstract today!

Everyone knows I enjoy going to conferences. Not only is this a chance to meet many people I know from blogs and twitter finally in real life, but it is also a great learning experience.

At some point, after listening to dozens and hundreds of presentations on various conferences, you might come to a point where you say: I can do this, too! I, too, have something I’d like to show and share.

This is where you start submitting abstracts to your favorite conferences. This can be a regional meetup, your local usergroup, or something as awesome as Kscope.

Speaking of which, Kscope18 call for papers will end in a few days. Get your things together and submit an abstract there!

If you are new to all this, then following blog posts might be a good guidance:

If you are located in Europe and don’t get a chance to travel to the US for Kscope, then you can also consider the brand new APEX Alpe Adria conference in April 2018.

Question: Table names singular or plural?

Yesterday I put a question on twitter, to find out what others prefer: table names using singular or plural form. I expected one or two replies, not an avalanche :-)

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New Website for FOEX online

Last year was very eventful at FOEX, which kept me occupied and kept me from blogging. Thankfully I managed to attend a few conferences and stay in touch with the community through Twitter and Slack on apex.world.

FOEX is growing a lot and needed a new website design, so we had a brainstorming meeting and decided to again build it in APEX.

Last week we finally decided everything for the website was ready (as much as possible) and we released it. Please go to www.tryfoexnow.com and tell me if you like it.

In this post I want to give some background info how we built it and why we decided to do it this way.

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