Learning is not a spectator sport

I was very fortunate to attend the South African User Group Conference last month. It was my first time in the country and, as with all places you’ve never visited before, checking your own government’s travel website never talks about the good, it always highlights a litany of potential risks 🙂

However, I found the people wonderfully friendly, and landing in Johannesburg, the airport itself is simply amazing. It is beautifully laid out, and I had no problems getting transport to the conference venue.

The conference venue, Misty Hills Convention Center, was the perfect location for a new tourist like myself. Without trying to be insulting, the best term I can think of is “cliché”-in the sense that it paints the perfect picture of South Africa that an ignorant tourist like me might imagine. The venue is set in a dense, lush garden, and each hotel room is a thatched cottage nestled among the trees, complete with waterfalls and plenty of greenery.

There were even wild impala on site which needless to say, gave me a bit of a jump during my morning jog!

The conference itself was incredibly professionally run. Huge credit to Debs and the user group team for putting together such an amazing event. As expected, artificial intelligence and the database group were popular tracks. It was great to have some first-time casual conversations with various DBAs and developers, many of whom came from the banking sector in South Africa, so they had a vested interest in where the database was going with 26AI.

Another great initiative was the dedicated student track. Besides the slightly disheartening realisation that I’ve been working with Oracle technology longer than many of these attendees have been alive (!), it was fantastic to meet the next generation of IT professionals. They had a strong interest in database technology and artificial intelligence, and I ran an introduction to vectors and AI in the database for them, which seemed to be very well received.

Finally, a big thank you to Brovanture, an EPM company, who invited me on a game-day safari during our one free day before the event. People like to joke that all the dangerous animals in the world are in Australia, but for an Australian it was breathtaking to be up close with some of the amazing big animals of the African continent.

Next year, the event moves to Cape Town, and based on this year’s experience I certainly hope to return. Once again, a big thank you to the committee for inviting me.

Quick footnote: At the time of writing, there is only a single ACE in all of Africa. Kudos to Ahmed for being the sole representative, but I think a reasonable goal is to boost the number of ACEs in South Africa. If you are from Africa and reading this, please head over to ace.oracle.com, nominate yourself, and let’s grow the community there!