High Five POUG: Polish Oracle User Group Conference?

I’ve just returned from presenting at the 2nd annual POUG Conference, this time in Krakow, Poland (the first was in Warsaw). This is the Polish Pint with Oracle User Group conference and is exactly what a conference should be. Educational, Informative, Well-executed and Fun.  It was based in a lovely city, with a wonderful friendly people, good food and great beer!

As you might imagine, with a name like Pint with Oracle User Group, there is beer to be drank. But in this case it was as available as the tea and coffee – and completely free! Several hundreds of litres of it were consumed over the course of the 2 day conference, a tiny little bit of it by me. I suppose this is the side effect of having a conference in a micro-brewery. Talk about organization skills!

Brewery and Conference Location!

There were around 30 speakers giving talks, many of them well-known Oracle ACEs of various hues but a couple of first-timers who were excellent too.  It also reminds me that you don’t need to be an expert to speak at conference. You don’t need to know the n-th level of detail like Jonathan Lewis. You just need a story to tell about something you did that was interesting! I assume we’re all doing something interesting in our jobs from time to time? If you are not, you might want to try to find a job with interesting things to do, then talk about them!

One unique thing was being walked onto stage to a thumping good tune (I picked Human, by Rag’n’Bone Man) by an anthropomorphisation of the POUG Logo – basically a young ‘Oracle’ dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi. They were also there to help out the delegates and speakers with any queries or problems they may have. Usefully they were all current or recently completed students on their way to being a doctors, vetenarians or structural engineers. High quality help indeed!

Many thanks to Kamil, Luiza and everyone else at POUG for a wonderful conference to remember.

I was debuting a new conference talk about Histograms. The talk went well, I think, but there are a couple of tiny kinks to iron out for the next time I present it – in Slovenia and Croatia – next month. Best remove the POUG-specific slides too, right Adam!

oh, and the talk of the Conference was…Martin Widlake, with a gigantic beer!

Martin Widlake giving a rather good talk about the parallels (and perils) of Beer and Development