A new look, a new name...

Last Thursday we gave a new look to our products APEX Office Print (AOP) and APEX Media Extension (AME). Not only did they get a new logo, but the whole website and portal were also put in a more modern, minimalistic look.

At the same time, we announced that our company APEX R&D would from now on, sail under the flags of United Codes.

With United Codes we want to bring all of our products and services together under this new brand.

In the coming weeks, we will announce two more products, which I can't wait to show you!
In our heart, we love the Oracle Database and Oracle Application Express (APEX), so both products will be in this area.

United Codes

This blog post isn't just to say we have a new logo and brand, but I want to share why I'm thrilled about our new brand "United Codes".

When I look at my life, there has always been a constant, I love to bring ideas into reality with code.

It can be something small, like when I was a teenager and I was in love with a girl instead of writing a card, I coded a program that would show her name and hearts. She never saw it, as it turns out she wasn't interested, but it gave me so much pleasure when I got the code to work.

Bringing ideas to life alone is nice, but doing it together with others is even nicer. Together you can do much more.

I remember a day at Oracle Open World (OOW) where there was a coding challenge. Initially, I wasn't going to participate, but the night before the deadline, Martin D'Souza and I said; "lets code together for one night and see where we end up". It wasn't the fact that we won which gave a lot of pleasure, it was working together to bring the idea we had to life.

Our AOP product is not any different. I had this idea to more easily get template-based reports out of Oracle APEX. I started on a prototype and got it to work, but it only became really awesome when more people started to work on it, especially Sunil Tandan. Not only did we work together on something, but it also became a shared dream.

In my consulting career in many cases the best results happened when there was a mixed team from business, coders, and people who just were passionate about bringing an idea to life.

The name UNITED CODES describes someone who is able to master the "code of the problem" aka the „input-code“ as well as the "code of the target" aka the „output-code“, and unites them by knowing the "code itself" which is the key concept and solution.

The logo is in principle the union of two opposites, as for example body and spirit find their union and center in the soul. At the same time, it can be read as a narrative from left to right and thus tells the story. As a whole, especially through its center, it can actually be seen as a heart, which is also the center in man and the seat of the soul, of enthusiasm and devotion. At the same time - at the level of the spirit - the center is an eye that unites opposites in its ability to see. Furthermore, the sign can also be seen more than twice as the letter "C", the initial letter of the word "code" denoting the "united codes".

There are many more codes than those of the programming languages used in computer science. Each area has its own code and each problem has to reveal its own code first before it can be recoded into a solution. Experts for the input codes may be mathematicians, engineers, system theorists, cyberneticists, game theorists, or physicists. Experts for output codes are computer scientists and full-stack developers as well as certain specialists for implementing the code.

2030

What excites you for 2030? Did you already think about that?

What excites me is to bring ideas to life. In the short run I want to focus on Oracle Database and Oracle APEX, as in my view, it's one of the best tools to bring data and ideas to life. Oracle's mission statement resonates really well with me: "Our mission is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, unlock endless possibilities."

When you saw my VR presentation which I did two years ago, I already expressed my dream. I really believe the low-code development is at the start, I envisage we can build apps, just like Tom Cruise used his hands in Minority Report to get insight into his data:



During my research in this area, I believe the technology isn't advanced enough to go mainstream.
Although SpaceX already used it to design rockets, for coding inside a browser the technology wasn't good enough yet. This would be one example of how to bring ideas to life faster, but there are many other ways to achieve that.

I really love a quote from the movie Ratatouille which I slightly changed: 
"Not everyone can become a great coder, but a great coder can come from anywhere"

Many people have great ideas but lack the ability to bring it to life. With United Codes we can accelerate bringing ideas to life.

I want to finish this post by thanking the entire team at APEX R&D for all their efforts the last years to bring us where we are today. I couldn't wish for a better team and I look forward to starting this United Codes journey with them.