NEW YORK—Software developers have long used their peers as sounding boards and for help on development projects—sometimes in person, but more frequently through online forums. Increasingly, these forums are also becoming places where developers earn status among their peers that can help advance their careers.
This is how Antonis Antoniou, who began his career with one of the world’s largest consulting firms, went from picking the brains of Oracle experts—known as ACEs—for help on a major project to eventually becoming an ACE Director himself. In the process of becoming an ACE, Antoniou also made a name for himself within the huge consulting firm where he started, which helped him make the move to his current employer, Luxembourg-based eProseed, where he is now technical director and member of the company’s Global CTO Office.
ACEs are made, not born. They prove their expertise in numerous ways, such as participating in online forums, publishing technical articles, and making technical videos. Forums themselves have evolved, in part thanks to online communities like Stack Overflow, which allow members to vote answers to technical problems up or down. This vetting process gives participants greater visibility in the community and helps them burnish their reputations as crack developers. In Antoniou’s case, he first became an Oracle Associate ACE, then an ACE, and finally an Oracle ACE Director. The ACE program is an important component of the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), an interactive community of developers, database administrators, and software architects who use Oracle technology and other computer industry-standard technologies (such as Java, Linux, and PHP). Potential users can register free.
“Your reputation on these sites is a huge credential,” says Roland Smart, vice president of Oracle’s social and community marketing.
Indeed, Antoniou says becoming an Oracle ACE was a significant factor in his professional success.
“People not only heard my name through the various social channels, but they could also identify me. I was recognized at various Oracle events [and] needless to say I got some attention from various employment agencies,” he said in an email.
Technical Collaboration
In addition to maintaining the ACEs program, the OTN also runs three educational Virtual Technology Summits every year, including one coming in March. According to Smart, these sessions include technical chats covering four technology tracks—Java, Database, Middleware, and Systems—with more than 80 archived sessions developers can consult at their leisure. OTN is also an ongoing web destination for technical content and collaboration via online forums.
“The OTN is a great place to supplement your formal training, and also a place to build your reputation,” said Smart on Tuesday during a keynote opening the Oracle Cloud Developer Day here.
The 800-plus developers attending Cloud Developer Day heard how Oracle is trying to make life easier for developers as workloads increasingly move to the cloud.
In addition to software as a service, Oracle offers platform as a service and infrastructure as a service to accommodate the needs of developers across a variety of languages and tools. The suite of tools and platforms are designed to work not only within the Oracle technology ecosystem, but with those from other providers as well. “Oracle is not a combination of siloed products, but rather an integrated cloud platform,” said Chris Tonas, vice president of Oracle mobility and development tools.
This means that developers can use Oracle’s development platform to do things like build extensions to existing on-premises or cloud applications, or build entirely new applications, such as mobile business apps.
Cloud-based development options will challenge—and force—developers to try new things. At times like these, it’s valuable for developers to have a community like OTN to turn to for advice and stay ahead of emerging trends.
Antoniou says another advantage of joining Oracle’s technical community is that it allows him to preview new products ahead of others. “What’s even more interesting is that our voice can be heard by product development and influence the direction and features of a product,” he says.
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