One of the reasons I decided to resurrect this blog is, to be fair, refresh my professional story-telling skills in English. As you may know, my native languages are Russian and Ukrainian, same for my family - and for the last two years I've been working from home. So, my English started to noticeably degrade.
If you work online - everybody is more or less on their own schedule, so you would rather send email instead of calling, there is no coffee breaks etc. As a result, I started to write a bit more eloquently, but technology conversations lag what I would call "the natural flow": I have to search for correct words instead of searching for the correct intonations.
And here comes the key topic: why would I care, considering that nowadays significant number of IT people just work from whatever they call their base (home/hotel/summer house/winter house etc)? My answer - because I learn from inter-person communication significantly more than I learn from written text! The way people tell their stories is much more than "just content" - it is all of their feelings/struggles/discoveries. It is a lot of extras that you cannot just dig our from the article or a blog post.
I've been speaking at various IT conferences for the last 20 years - and it always amazes me how much people undervalue live contact. I understand convenience of your own chair - but stepping out of it could bring you so much more!
In about a week I will be flying to Las Vegas for the first in-person conference since the beginning of COVID pandemia - BLUEPRINT 4D (June 6/June 9). I will have my own presentation there on Wednesday at 9 am - "Through the Looking-Glass: Database Views". As you can guess from the title, it will be SQL and PL/SQL-heavy - well, that's my normal style.
Hopefully, I will not stumble the same way I did at my first Oracle OpenWorld presentation (I had to simulate mic malfunction to buy some time and get back my voice :-) ). Two decades of experience are still two decades! And I really miss conversations with people, I really miss that great feeling of one big community that I had (and to be fair, that kept me within Oracle technology space).
Summary: person-to-person conversions are fun! Live events forever! :-)
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