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It's funny how JavaScript's 20th birthday was not as spectacular as it's shorter-named bretheren. When I first learned JavaScript in the late 1990's, I wasn't too excited as I was about Java, for two reasons most web developers know about JavaScript: weakly typed and non-standard browser implementation. The latter has been addressed by ECMA, but does that mean our code can now be more predictable and consistent?

The beautiful City of Vancouver (in British Columbia) played host to the North American Node.js Interactive 2017 conference earlier this month. That close to my backyard, it was simply inexcusable not to attend! I wasted no time in getting the support of my employer and am glad I did. Here's a little summary of my experience and what I learned at the two-day conference to share.

Earlier this year (2017), I had the privilege to share with the community, some of the work and experiences I gained helping to build some of the blocks that form the foundation of apex.world. In my presentations, I had shared some of the challenges I had integrating RESTful web services with Oracle Application Express (APEX). A crippling issue involved the use of Oracle Database Express Edition (Oracle XE) and communicating with web services over a secured protocol. The by-product of that experience led to the development of a simple Node.js application, which I named Suez.

Running a production application on an Oracle APEX instance? Then read on!

Making sure your application is up and running 24/7 doesn't need to be a daunting task, plus it may not even cost you a dime! UptimeRobot provides 50 free monitors that can poll your servers using the smallest interval of 5 minutes. You can easily monitor websites and receive multi-channel notifications of downtime. No excuse!

Before I begin, I just wanted to be absolutely clear that this post has nothing to do with Apple's nifty tool for sending out large email attachments.

In my previous post, I shared an approach for creating your very own Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance on a small budget. Briefly, the solution involves using Vagrant to create a very affordable virtual machine (VM) on Linode's pool of servers and run the OXAR build script, to setup the APEX instance very quickly and painlessly.

However, all that power (and savings) comes with great responsibilty.

After reading the article "The R community is one of R's best features" by David Smith, I felt there were a lot of similarities between the R and Oracle APEX communities, and hence, was inspired to pen a copycat post. So here it is:

Yet another Kscope journey has ended. This year's event was held in the beautiful JW Marriott Hill Country Resport and Spa, San Antonio, Texas. This is my fourth Kscope, third as a speaker, second at San Antonio, and first time taking home an award!

Love Oracle Application Express (APEX), but having trouble finding a decent, affordable home for your killer application? Here's one option you can consider that should not burn your wallet.

I feel like I have gone a full circle from my early days writing my blogs (or weblogs) in flat files as opposed to storing content in a database through a content management system (CMS). Prior to using Wordpress, I was heavily invested in developing with Drupal, and consider myself privileged to have used the knowledge of both platforms for work. All of sudden now, I have an urge to go back to my roots and focusing on creating blog posts without the bells and whistles.

We now have less than a week before Kscope 16 abstract submissions close. Have you submitted yours yet? If not, please spend a few minutes to consider the following reasons why you should:

After more than five years at the UBC James Hogg Research Centre (now also known as the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation), I am now ready to take the plunge and explore a familiar yet uncharted path. Familiar because I will continue working on a technology that I am very passionate about, though in a very different industry.

Want to get started on APEX development but don't want to muck around with Linux too much, then this guide's for you! As a follow-up to our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015, and to supplement Trent Schafer's excellent post on how you could build an Oracle APEX instance, here's a simple procedure that you can use to stand up your personal APEX development environment in probably much less than 30 minutes depending on your Internet connection bandwidth!

Here's a little weekend activity for those of you planning to attend our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015. To avoid network congestion during the event, please perform the following preparatory steps:

My first adventure in organizing meetups started late last year with the creation of the Vancouver Research Data Management Roundtable. The goal of the group was to gather members of both academia and industry, and engage in discussion on topics, issues and solutions in managing research data. We have since found a new home for the group. If RDM excites you, then I warmly welcome you to sign up for our mailing list kindly hosted by The University of British Columbia. Though it does help that you live around the area! We have a monthly "Data Cafe" that is co-organized with the UBC library folks.

I traditionally write a summary of what I learned and experienced at each technical conference I attend. I do this in order to help both my sponsors and I to take stock of how much value was created by attending a training event. I find this a good practice and give credit to my previous employer Nanyang Polytechnic for instilling this culture in me. This year, I decided to do this as a blog post as well and hopefully, provide others an opportunity to decide if KScope15 should be on your training calendar next year.