Year in review: 2024

I was thinking a year review would be interesting to do lik a summrized diary. Also being mindful and grateful for all the good things happening is great for the brain. It will also be interesting to come back to this in a few years. Don’t worry, I won’t get too personal :).

The most significant change this year was my change of employment. In 2016, after finishing school, I joined MT AG (now Hyand) working half the time and going to university the other half. Niels lured me into the APEX team by promising HTML and JavaScript. I quickly realized that it was actually a lot of database stuff, but quickly learned to love relational tables, PL/SQL, and APEX.

Since then, I’ve worked as a consultant on numerous projects and, learned a lot from my colleagues, and attended the first conferences. This was a super fun and interesting time, but last year I noticed more and more that I didn’t enjoy doing consulting as much anymore, and working on the APEX testing framework LCT I got a taste of how product development can be. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to do this full-time. I really enjoyed being part of MT, which consists of so many great people who made the decision pretty hard.

And boom, in April of this year, I drove to Leuven (Belgium) for my first day at United Codes. This was the obvious choice. The success of APEX Office Print showed the world how products around APEX are done. I met part of the team (Dimitri, Sunil, Jackie, Kevin x2) already at conferences, and it is always a joy being around these people.

My job title is “Product Lead”, which I interpret as I do anything that would be good for our products. This means developing, maintaining and marketing. A few accomplishments:

I could only do this with the help of the team and the support of Dimitri to let me try out ideas.

I really enjoy being part of this team and already have some great memories with them of like Belgian beer, Cheese and Wine, and the new office building.

Furthermore, I already have plenty of plans for 2025, and I think it is a sign of really enjoying my work when I have the burden of more ideas than time to accomplish all of it. I also enjoy thinking more about business aspects and having sustained focus on topics instead of jumping from project to project.

Another interesting aspect is that I now work with an international team. I never had to think much about time zone differences, and English is now the only way I can communicate with colleagues. I was never shy of the English language and always blogged and created videos in English, but nowadays, I don’t even actively think about talking in English, and I do think in English sometimes.

I still miss the old team at Hyand a lot, but luckily the APEX world is small, and I can see a lot of them at conferences multiple times of the year.

Last year I started going to conferences internationally. Conferences are really addicting to me. I imagine this is a short taste of how rockstar-life must feel. In a short time, you meet and talk to so many people, get the adrenaline rush of presenting in front of people, (hopefully) get applause, and then attend parties or do other fun activities. In a single conference day happens as much as in a normal week. This is super stimulating for the brain, so I do not want to miss out on them anymore.

The only downside is that after a conference I have post-conference blues where everything feels boring and unimportant for some days.

Love it. Kind of cozy as it is not as big as other conferences, but the Netherlands is a powerhouse in the APEX bubble, so you will always get fascinating sessions and speakers.

I love the Netherlands and the Dutch people, so it is always nice to be there. The old town of Amersfoort looks super nice (old castle?, with lots of water), and the restaurant we stayed at for the ACE Dinner had the most interesting interior decoration I have seen.

Since 2018 I spoke at every connect, so there was no chance I missed the edition in my hometown (Düsseldorf). It is a little bit bigger than APEX World and also has many people traveling internationally to attend. I was very excited to meet Mike Hichwa and Kris Rice from Oracle in person. This should also definitely be on the bucket list of any APEX enthusiast.

KScope is for me like the province of Champagne for sparkling wine, Silicon Valley for tech, Milan for fashion and Nashville for country music. I first attended in 2023, and it was also the first time out of Europe for me. Being in the States and experiencing its culture, meeting all the US-based experts, and being part of them gave me such a lasting impression that I just had to be back. Luckily, the committee liked my abstracts, so I was quite busy with three talks, one sponsored session, one lightning talk, and an open mic session. This was a lot, but I still enjoyed every second of it. Also, Nashville was cool to explore; I shared an Airbnb with Jon and Moritz before the conference, which was super fun.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it DOAG because of health issues. Luckily, I am better again and hope to be back there someday.

This year I was promoted to being an ACE Pro. This means I get some benefits like cool swag and credits to use in the cloud.

My favorite part of being in the program is just being able to get to know all the people during the dinners or adventures. The Oxford adventure last year was fascinating and will be a great memory for my whole life.

I am excited to see a shift towardsBluesky. Since Musk bought Twitter, it gets worse and worse for me. He spent a huge amount of money to buy a money-losing company, so significant changes were just a question of time. Twitter is definitely undergoing enshittification.

New features that need paid accounts, and the blue checkmark is nothing trustworthy anymore. The worst thing is the TikTok-like home feed of random attention screening posts. I signed up to get updates from specific accounts I followed, not to get a 🧵️ of “the most scary home videos”. A huge part of Twitter was also linking to other sites. Nowadays, Twitter limits the reach of posts with links in them, and link previews seem to disappear. Just to improve session times but making the product worse at the same time.

I also don’t buy any of the free speech crap. There are enough samples of Musk just following his interests and hiding stuff that he does not like. [1] [2] [3]. And what the hell should this even mean? This is the internet; just create a blog and put stuff out there. It really does not need for a specific 280-character post website to be the last line of free speech?!

If you haven’t already, consider checking out Bluesky. It is a nice way to stay in touch with Oracle folks.

Enough business. What have I enjoyed doing this year?

I recently got myself a 3D printer. I first thought this would probably be just another toy that I would rarely use, but the Black Friday discount on the Bambu Lab A1 (300€) was just too tempting.

And now I am fully into printing. I plan ahead at which days I print which things, and ordered several new colors of filaments. It is just super useful. Looking through the sites where people share their designs gives you so many ideas. I currently print a lot of gridfinity elements to organize my cable drawer, wall mounts for my Lego Architecture skyline sets, and plenty of gifts.

I definitely want to start designing my own models in 2025. That’s why I am currently learning CAD software (Fusion360).

In January of last year, I went skiing for the first time. As a beginner, I fell a lot and spent most of the time on a blue (easy) slope. I also fell on the third day and overstretched something, so I had to stop earlier than I wanted. Nonetheless, it was so much fun that I dreamed for a long time about it, and I had to come back. So in January 2025, I am back to northern Austria to give it another try.

I haven’t blogged as much this year on here as I now blog and create videos for United Codes (blog, YouTube). I still like to have my own platform and plan to do on here.

Technically, I also started to migrate my blog from Gatsby to Astro. Gatsby is sadly kind of dead and has issues with developer experience. The output (statically generated HTML) is great, and Gatsby definitely is a milestone for great static HTML generators (Gatsby Image is so great).

Astro is now the cool kid in town, and to me, that makes totally sense. It is framework-independent and has no JavaScript by default. Build times are way better, and I want to stay in touch with the new stuff :).

Unfortunately, this takes some time to migrate and is tedious. I need to sit down and push this in 2025.

I joined the apex.world team in late 2023. This year, we launched its AI Assistant. It was a great learning experience. We build a RAG system on APEX community content. The base is all the blog posts that are promoted in the content section, API and documentation, and some YouTube videos, mostly from Oracle.

I was mostly involved in building the data model and getting the content from the web into our database. For that, I built a small crawler with Playwright that visits the blog posts, extracts the document content (without sidebars, headers, etc.), removes unnecessary parts and transforms it to Markdown.

We also use 23ai features to chunk the content, but we moved from the Oracle Vector implementation to Qdrant as we use the free edition of the database and vector indexes require too much disk space for the 8 GB data restriction.

My feelings about the rise of LLMs are mixed. It is a super helpful tool for some cases, but crazily overhyped. Everybody is (of course) searching for use cases. We have some greats like RAG, summarizing text, and predicting simple lines of code.

But for every great we have horrible hallucinations, generated Images, Videos and Music that just look off and now heavily overused that I am already tired of it, and rubbish, waste of time generated content everywhere.

We are definitely super far from any AGI (artificial general intelligence; we need that word because AI is so overused that AI is actually not smart). GPT5 is delayed, costs billions and there are already signs that hallucinations are inevitable, and the world is running out of training data where a large part is already not valuable content.

The people who invested huge money into AI will be the last to claim that it is a big overhyped. I think the next few years will only show small improvements for far too many investments. So I want to find the real benefits of the model instead of chasing AI dreams. Maybe I am wrong, but currently I fear economic bubbles and the negative effects of the power and water consumption for, on the bad side, horrible hallucinations, off-looking AI-generated ads, but no real productivity gains.

I also develop and maintain APEX plug-ins at United Codes. My go-to way for developing UI plug-ins is to use Svelte. Svelte is great as it has a super nice syntax and it compiles down to native JS that does not need some runtime dependency (unlike React, Vue, etc.).

This year Svelte 5 was released that changed quite a lot. They introduced runes for explicit state and lifecycle indicators. This makes the syntax a bit more complicated, but I definitely see the reason why this is safer in the long run for any developer. I really trust Rich Harris (Svelte creator) and his team to bring Svelte and SvelteKit (application framework with backend support) in a direction that benefits both developers and users.

Coming back to Oracle APEX, I have a GitHub Template to bundle a Svelte component into a WebComponent. You can start a local development server that loads all Oracle APEX assets so you can develop a component that uses APEX JS APIs, CSS classes or variables. In the end, bundle it and load the Web Component from APEX. Using it is just as easy as rendering a single HTML element and passing its properties.

I am a huge film fan. I feel my entertainment time is scarce, so I want to make the most out of it. I see TV Shows and most series as ways to pass time. A great movie instead can lead impressions on me for years, or even a whole life. There are exceptions for great shows doing the same, but there are reasons why Airplane (1980) is still cited frequently where I don’t remember much of House of Cards (I am serious - and don’t call me Shirley). I believe this absolutely makes sense, as a well-produced movie takes years of work for roughly 2 hours, while shows are economically optimized with often too many people involved. And when the perfect story, direction, acting, music, production design, camera work, makeup, etc. come together, the result is one of the best pieces of human art for me.

For me, films are not just entertainment but actually education. A good film makes you think and see the world from different perspectives.

Letterboxd says that I watched 103 this year (as of 30th Dec), which is the highest since 2021 (all my stats). I watch plenty of older movies instead of going to the cinema all the time. Releases of this year were mediocre, but I heard this is a result of the writer guild strike and still COVID effects. These are my top movies of this year:

I thought it would be fun to start learning Dutch to spy on my Belgian colleagues speaking Flemish. I am now on a >240-day Duolingo streak and can speak a few sentences. Unfortunately, I am still puzzled when I listen to them talking in Flemish, but I can talk a littlebit about boterhammen, olifanten and ”Ik spreek en beethje Nederlands maar niet goed”. It is still a long road and requires more time to really get better. I learned again that learning a new language is indeed hard.

2024 was a great year with significant changes and growth. My biggest transition was from APEX consulting at Hyand to product lead at United Codes. I miss my old colleagues but really like the new challenges of launching and maintaining, creating content around them and APEX in general, strategizing about the companies future. I’m grateful to be part of such a talented and supportive international team at UC.

I attended great conferences and intend to do so in the future. Being promoted to an Oracle ACE Pro was also an honor.

On the personal front, I discovered a new passion for 3D printing and skiing. I enjoy being part of the apex.world team and still enjoy watching a great movie. Hopefully, next year, my Dutch skills will be way better.

I am excited for 2025 and wish the best for you too! Hopefully, our paths will cross :).