Yesterday, I celebrated my first year in the Oracle ACE Program. I have been nominated by Mohamed Houri and supported by very well known and brilliant people in the Oracle Community (Kellyn Potvin Gorman, Tanel Poder, Deiby Gomez, Franck Pachot and Ludovico Caldara), and during this last year, I had to participate actively in the community.

If you’re reading this post and you are interested by Oracle Technology, I will try to explain why joining (or participating) to it is a good thing for everyone, you, Oracle, and all the Oracle professionals.

 The ACE Program

Oracle ACE program recognizes all the people who are working with Oracle products (and not specially with their badass Cloud platform !!), who talk about their experiences and knowledges, who give regular help to customers across forums, blogs etc.

As Tim Hall mentioned it in a post I read a couple of months ago, you don’t have to be a fellow expert on a technology to be recognized in this program. And even, Oracle want to use this program to promote their badass Cloud Platform, you don’t have to talk about it, in all what you write.

In the program, there are 3 levels: ACE Associate, ACE, and ACE Director. Explanation of these levels are given in the ACE Program website (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace/become-an-ace/index.html#acelevels).

Recently I have validated my award and I will probably remain in the program for the next year.

Why to join (or participate) to the Oracle Community?

First of all, you can participate to the Oracle Community without being an ACE.

You can participate to the community by many ways:

• you can blog on your experiences and knowledge
• you can test or review some specific products in the Oracle products’ portfolio
• you can write articles and submit them in OTN or Oracle related papers (OracleScene from UKOUG for example)
• you can tweet about the technology
• you can help other users in Oracle forums
• You can organize meetups or public meetings
• You can create and/or participate to one or many Oracle User Groups
• You can present some technical stuff during Oracle International Conferences or meetups
• etc etc.

In my case, I like to attend Oracle Conferences because I like to present session during these ones, but the most interesting thing is to share time, technical opinions (and beers) with speakers, blogger, fellow experts etc. (I’m not a big fan of these marketing events where sales and marketing people are the kings because they sell or promote Oracle products, and you suck because you are just a simple technical guy).

During these technical conferences, you usually attend sessions (sometimes up to 6 per day) and those ones are always interesting because you chose them before ! You learn a lot about other projects that have been done in other countries etc. To sum up … you learn a lot, surrounded by the most brilliant people in the Oracle world !!

Then I like to organize meetup in my area to present some of my work and to invite international speakers that want to present their work, we talk about our experiences, we drink some great belgian and french beers and share some pizzas … like at home, the only difference is that we are not watching a football game but we are talking about Oracle products !

Another interesting thing, but a little more under the hood, is to interact with people by using modern social tools (twitter, blogs, and sometimes email). Recently, I worked with Pieter Van Puymbroeck (@vanpupi). First he asked me to borrow a java source code I wrote a couple of years ago. No matter with that, but after some code enhancements (yes, my code was a bit crappy ! 🙂 ), he encountered some problems to reproduce what I did. I was my great pleasure to work on the code with him and to review his platform (and mine too) to discover finally where the problem was. What a great experience to share knowledge with other people !

Now I start my second year in the program and I hope it will be as rich as the first one of knowledge sharing. And I hope I will continue to learn about technologies with other people.