Whatever happened to SydOracle

 

 So I haven't posted in mumble years. What happened ?

 

Firstly there was this thing called Twitter. There seemed to be less blogging and more tweeting, and the twitter thing never suited me. I'd consume my RSS feed collection at times that were convenient to me (mostly on the train), and the tweets all seemed to come overnight or while I was actually working, and by the time I saw them, the sequencing and lack of nuance in the content made it all too hard.

 

Secondly, back in 2014 I switched from gigs, either contracting or consulting, into a permanent, full-time job. Gigging meant never being entirely sure what was going to come next, so I consumed and played with stuff pretty widely. While I've still been doing a range of stuff in my job, there has been greater direction and focus, and a bunch of the rabbit holes I've followed have been deep and of little interest to a wider community.

Also (and this is probably 2b, rather than 3), it is quite an atypical workplace, especially from an Oracle perspective. I've worked in large telcos, utilities, government, logistics, insurance, defense... And this isn't a large organization with thousands or tens of thousands of users. It isn't enterprise-y, and some of the challenges would be almost incomprehensible to people used to larger organizations. And unlike the consulting organizations I worked for, it isn't pushing for exposure and I would be limited in what details I could include to explain the context of some of the work.

 

And of course, there's been family and similar grown-up stuff. Kids, house, medical things (a detached retina and resulting eye surgeries - recommend avoiding if possible), those ugly Trump years. Oh and that pandemic. 

 

Which brings me to now-ish. I've been doing the work-from-home thing since the early days of the pandemic with every sign of that continuing. The youngest of my children finished school almost a year ago. And the end of some of those ties to location has led to the end of the 'Sydney' part of Syd-Oracle. Moved a bit further down south, close enough that the train will still get me to Sydney in 90 minutes, but the car will get me to the beach in less than 15 and the lake in half that. Plus I'm no longer working out of a corner of the bedroom, but have a room that I can call my 'Office'. 

 

I don't plan to start blogging again. The permie job continues. Maybe next year, I'll do a post to explain Long Service Leave . Yes Twitter may be sinking slowly into the swamp, but there's still Trump.