A Neate Blog


3 July 2019

UKOUG Southern Technology Summit

Tags: Oracle JET - UKOUG - JavaScript - Hermes - Chatbot - Microservices - Helidon - Fn Project


Early July I had the pleasure of presenting at the UKOUG Southern Technology Summit, this one day conference contained various streams but I mainly attended the Development stream. Three of the sessions that stuck in my mind were Phil Wilkins’ presentation of “What Makes A Good API”, David Callaghan’s session on “Hermes’ Chatbot, Holly” and finally Susan Duncan’s session on “High Productivity in a Microservices World”.

My session focused around Oracle JET, specifically delving into the history of the toolkit and equally the benefits I see of using JET. The session contained a presentation followed by a short demo, at present the demo can be accessed on my GitHub here.

For me, Phil’s session highlighted key areas to consider when designing an API, the presentation was aimed at a variety of experience levels ranging from beginner to experienced; I felt that everyone who attended took away a piece of valuable learning whether it was dealing with API versioning or how the OWASP Top Ten applies to APIs.

David’s session delved into the detail of how they have built a chatbot for Hermes (Holly), in detail he focused on the user experience and how they went through various iterations of the chatbot’s language and syntax style, resulting in a more human/humorous way of interacting with consumers, it turned out the more factual and direct the chatbot was, the less people used it!

Susan presented a variety of Oracle’s open source tools and projects that Oracle has started in an ever-changing technological world. Her session included topics such as:

If you have a spare moment, I’d encourage you to check out any of the three open source items above, I’m biased towards Oracle JET but I hope to add more blog posts in the future around Helidon and Fn Project.

Overall the entire conference was a great experience and I met a variety of people ranging from UKOUG newbies to Oracle SMEs! If you’re a student it’s a great opportunity to learn about technology that will help you in your career and also it’s free to attend, wins all round!

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