ODTUG Elections - Please Vote

It's that time of year again that half of the positions for the ODTUG Board of Directors must be voted on by its paid members. I am up for re-election this year and would appreciate your continued support in helping the ODTUG community.

To view the everyone who is running for the board and the link to vote please go to: http://www.odtug.com/2014_election. Please remember that only paid ODTUG members are allowed to vote and that you are allowed to vote for up to five people.

I have included my campaign statement and profile below. Thank you for your support.

- Martin


Campaign Statement

Over the past two years, I have had the privilege to represent the Oracle APEX community as a director for ODTUG. I have made the decision to run again this year for the ODTUG board and am looking for your support in doing so.

During my two-year tenure, I have been involved in several committees within ODTUG that have helped bring conferences around the world, improved marketing initiatives, and organized developer contests.

I have been able to build strong relationships with other ODTUG board members, Oracle employees, and many developers in the APEX community. These relationships have allowed me to be a liaison between all three groups and help to relay ideas and opportunities to the appropriate parties. I hope to continue to be able to facilitate open communication over the next two years.

I am looking for your vote to continue as an ODTUG board member to represent developers within one of the world’s largest Oracle user groups. Thank you in advance for your support.

Bio Statement

Martin D'Souza is the CTO and cofounder at ClariFit, a consulting firm that specializes in APEX and PL/SQL development and training. He is also a volunteer director for ODTUG. Martin’s career has seen him hold a range of positions within award-winning companies. His experience in the technology industry has been focused on developing database-centric web applications using the Oracle technology stack. Martin is the author of the popular blog www.TalkApex.com, a designated Oracle ACE Director, coauthored and authored various APEX books, and is an active participant in various open source projects, such as Logger. He has also presented at numerous international conferences, such as APEXposed!, COUG, Oracle OpenWorld, and ODTUG Kscope, for which he won the Presenter of the Year award in 2011. Martin holds a computer engineering degree from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. You can contact Martin via email at martin@clarifit.com or by Twitter @martindsouza.
 

Leave it to the Experts

At ODTUG Kscope 13 this year in New Orleans, I gave a talk on responsive web design in APEX. During the presentation someone asked me about specific CSS width configurations for different screen sizes. My answer at the time (and I still stand by it) was to use what the APEX team provided as they have experts who's sole job is to focus on these details.

Case in point, today one of the developers on the Oracle APEX team (Shakeeb Rahman) tweeted the following question "Anyone know of a study that talks about web contrast and if dark gray is better than black for web text?". I don't know the answer nor have I ever even thought if it before.

Similar to most developers, my job requires me to to keep up to date on technology and design patterns but it's humanly impossible to be an expert in every single area. Having amazing and committed developers on the Oracle APEX team allows me to not worry about all the finer details and focus on providing my clients with solid solutions for their business problems using APEX.

To summarize, not only is APEX a great development framework for the Oracle technology stack, they also have experts covering all the small details that most developers have never thought of or don't have the time to research.

Here's the full Twitter conversation: