My experience from OUGN18 conference

Our first Oracle conference attendance has been to the Spring Seminar 2018, organised by the Oracle User Group of Norway. The experience has been unforgettable.

We have been working with Oracle APEX since two years ago. This technology isn’t very well known in Spain. For this reason, it has been great to be two days surrounded by professionals of such high level in Oracle technologies.

We arrived on Wednesday and visited the city of Oslo. It’s an incredible and beautiful city. From the first minute there, I felt like home. While we were traveling by train from the airport to city center, we could see a beautiful landscape full of tiny red houses covered by the snow.

After we left the luggage at the hotel, we went to buy a Norwegian hat because I forgot bringing one. We visited the Royal Palace of Oslo, the town hall and Akershus fortress. Finally we had dinner at the port of Oslo.

The day after, we embarked on the Color Line cruise. As soon as we entered, we went to the opening session of the conference. A great stage with music and lights to present the #OUGN18 set in a Mexican party. Unfortunately, the opening and keynote sessions were in Norwegian. It’s a point that could be improved for future editions.

During the two days of the conference, we had the pleasure of attending sessions about Oracle JET, Oracle APEX, performance and tuning for Oracle DB, chatbots, Docker, Artificial Intelligence, and among other topics. Those sessions were given by such good speakers as Alex Nuijten, Roel Hartman, Alan Arentsen, Ricardo Gonzalez, Daniel Morgan, and other great and well know professionals of the sector.

On Saturday we leave the ship after breakfast. We went to the hotel, which had private terraces for each room with spectacular views of Oslo.
Later, we went to have lunch. We tasted reindeer meat for the first time. They were meatloaf in sauce with vegetables and potatoes. When we finished eating that delicious lunch, we had some rest. Then we went to visit Vigeland Park and its sculptures. It’s a very beautiful and large park that was completely snowed. We were looking at the sculptures made by the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland and playing around with the snow. To end the day, we had dinner at the Italian restaurant of Jamie Oliver allocated at the port area.

On Sunday morning, before going to the plane, we visited the area near the Oslo Opera. It was a cold day and it was snowing. We had a delicious burger at the train station for lunch before saying goodbye with great sadness of this wonderful city.