Why? oh Why! A great friend, an amazing APEX guy...

I couldn't believe what I read when I first got up in the morning. But it got confirmed by other posts and some people in OraTweet....

Carl Backstrom had a car accident on Sunday and passed away.

It's unbelievable, I wish it wasn't true! What do you need to say? How do you need to react to such a thing? I'm very sad, it's very painful, it's a great loss... He was such a nice guy and a good friend. My thoughts are with his family and friends.

Carl was one of the key developers in the APEX team. I liked to call him "Mister AJAX", as he was so strong in all the fancy web stuff. He was one of the persons who gave us the Interactive Reports in Oracle Application Express. He still had so many plans to improve APEX and make it even nicer. Carl had a nice blog, an excellent APEX example site with lots of web 2.0 features and he was a frequent poster on twitter.


But next to all his good work for APEX, I would like to remember Carl as a great friend. When you were with him there was always something happening. He had great stories, he liked to go out and have fun... He was an exceptional person who was always willing to help others.
On the picture, taken at the APEX Meetup, Carl is they guy with the biggest smile on the left.

Carl thank you for everything, I'll miss you.

APEX @ ODTUG 2009

In the last years the number of APEX presentations at ODTUG have grown every year. For 2009 we plan to have even more! The ODTUG board asked John Scott, Scott Spendolini, Patrick Wolf and myself to be responsible for the Application Express Track content at Kaleidoscope 2009.

2009 will be a bit different, as we'll have our own APEX track. It will be even easier to find all the APEX presentations as they will be held in the same room, possibly two!

The content of the next conference will also be decided on what YOU want.

Make your Mark - You can shape the direction of the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference by discussing and voting on topics in our new online Kaleidoscope Community. Tell us what you know you need to learn. You have ideas and we want to hear them!

Submit an Abstract - Don't wait until the last minute (abstract deadline is November 3), submit your abstract now. Not sure what to present? Begin participating in the Kaleidoscope Community and find out which topics are important to developers today.

Hope to see you there...

ApexBlogs.info fixed

The last couple of weeks the blogger sites didn't get updated in the Apex Blogs aggregator. Apparently the site is getting popular as I got a lot of mails to tell me.

The problem was the comments were not retrieved due to a change somewhere in the xml. As a quick fix I don't try to get the comments anymore, but at least you should see the new blog posts again.

Once I've more time, I'll update the packages again to retrieve the comments as well.

I used a backup to bring back all posts and updated from there, so all APEX posts should be there.

APEX SIG on Linkedin

I realize I didn't blog about it yet, but some months ago I created also an APEX SIG group on Linkedin. There are currently over 60 members.

Linkedin is an online network of more than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world. Already a lot of ICT people have a kind of curriculum vitae there and are linked to others.

So if you're doing something with APEX (Oracle Application Express) and are using Linkedin, feel free to join. Small remark: I try to avoid to include recruiters...