[English] Connor McDonald: YouTube, Twitter and TikTok - It’s not about the follower count. It’s the followers that coun

00:00:00: Hello and welcome to another episode of Devs on Tape.

00:00:03: So you might be curious, this is the first episode of Devs on Tape which is in English.

00:00:08: So we try our best to cover what we see and we have a pretty good guest.

00:00:14: You might have seen it in the title of the podcast and we have plenty of topics to talk about.

00:00:19: [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:22: Yeah, welcome.

00:00:35: Ladies first.

00:00:35: Hi, Carol.

00:00:36: Hi, Kai.

00:00:37: How are you doing?

00:00:38: How are you doing?

00:00:38: I'm fine.

00:00:39: Great.

00:00:40: So we have a very nice guest from Australia

00:00:44: here in our podcast studio at DOAC.

00:00:47: Yes, welcome, Connor McDonald.

00:00:49: Glad you're here.

00:00:50: You're welcome.

00:00:50: It's great to be here.

00:00:51: My first ever DOAG.

00:00:53: I did virtual DOAG last year, but in the--

00:00:56: I won't say how many years I've been using Oracle,

00:00:58: but in all that time, I never, ever managed to get to a DOAG.

00:01:01: So the biggest conference, right,

00:01:03: in Germany for Oracle software, and now you're

00:01:06: trying the best in the first DOAG after corona, right?

00:01:11: Exactly.

00:01:12: And I'm absolutely thrilled to be here.

00:01:14: And it's one of those things where I always

00:01:16: wanted to get to DOAG.

00:01:17: but I used to live in the UK many, many years ago,

00:01:20: and the two conferences used to be very close together.

00:01:23: And I always felt sort of a loyalty aspect

00:01:26: to go to the UK AG, and then whoever I was working for

00:01:29: would say, "Well, we're not paying for you to go to DOAC."

00:01:31: And so it was always unfortunate

00:01:32: because everyone used to come back and say,

00:01:34: "Oh, you've got to go to DOAC,

00:01:36: it's so nicely run and well-organized, et cetera."

00:01:39: And I always thought, "One day we'll get back to DOAC,"

00:01:42: and it just never happened.

00:01:43: And then 25 years later, I finally got here.

00:01:46: And finally, at Devs on Tape, right?

00:01:48: So the right opportunity, and we can't steal it.

00:01:51: That was the thing that was-- that's

00:01:52: what tipped me over the edge, when I knew

00:01:54: I could get on Devs on Tape.

00:01:56: Great, so let's do a little rewind.

00:01:58: And maybe you can just introduce yourself

00:02:01: for every listener who might not know you.

00:02:03: I don't know if there's anyone, but in case

00:02:05: there's someone who doesn't know you,

00:02:07: maybe you can just give us an introduction.

00:02:10: Sure, my name's Connor MacDonald.

00:02:12: I was born in Perth, Australia, and work out

00:02:15: of Oracle in Perth, Australia.

00:02:16: I have spent some time overseas, but my job at Oracle,

00:02:20: officially, I think inside the Oracle HR system

00:02:23: says I'm a database advocate.

00:02:25: In terms of the actual remit of my job, what I'm meant to do

00:02:29: is effectively, my focus is solely on--

00:02:32: and it sounds cliche, but customer success.

00:02:35: And that is, it's very easy to go by any product,

00:02:38: whether it's from Oracle, Microsoft, whatever.

00:02:40: You get it home, you get it on your workplace,

00:02:42: and you start running it.

00:02:44: And it's probably just going to work,

00:02:46: but is it working as well as it could?

00:02:49: And so that's where the customer success thing comes in.

00:02:51: My job is to help customers get the absolute most out

00:02:54: of Oracle, because let's be honest,

00:02:56: if you're using some of the Oracle products,

00:02:58: they're not cheap.

00:02:59: And so my definition of cheap is it

00:03:03: feels expensive if you're not getting the value you should

00:03:05: from it.

00:03:06: So my official job title is customer success.

00:03:09: And part of that is going to conferences around the world.

00:03:12: A lot of it in Australia is going to customers

00:03:14: and just literally sitting with them and saying,

00:03:16: how can we make things better if things aren't going well?

00:03:19: Or even if things are going well,

00:03:20: how can we squeeze more out of that investment

00:03:23: you're making?

00:03:24: So that's pretty much my job.

00:03:25: It's a really flexible job.

00:03:27: I have a lot of autonomy.

00:03:29: It's just about making sure customers are happy

00:03:31: with their Oracle landscape,

00:03:33: which is, I love doing this job.

00:03:35: - Yeah, it sounds really great.

00:03:37: - This might have been my next question.

00:03:38: So if you were saying you're sitting together

00:03:40: with the customers, why are you still living in Australia?

00:03:43: because it's the most farthest part of the world

00:03:46: to travel to customers all over the world, right?

00:03:48: So maybe in Corona times remotely,

00:03:51: but how does this work?

00:03:53: - Well, I really can't explain the enjoyment I get

00:03:55: from sitting in row 38, triple D

00:03:58: on the back of a plane for 16 hours.

00:04:00: That's the real highlight.

00:04:02: - Oh yeah, great.

00:04:02: - But no, seriously, one of the things

00:04:05: that made me work out of Australia,

00:04:07: besides being born there,

00:04:08: is I spent a lot of time in Europe and the UK

00:04:11: back in the late 90s, early 2000s.

00:04:14: And my partner at the time,

00:04:15: we were planning on having children.

00:04:18: And we caught up with some English friends

00:04:20: and they had a toddler about two years old.

00:04:22: And we went out in the sunshine once

00:04:23: and we're playing in the park

00:04:25: and this toddler was just screaming.

00:04:28: And we couldn't work out why.

00:04:30: And eventually our friend said to us,

00:04:31: "Oh, it's probably it's the first time

00:04:33: "I think she's been on grass."

00:04:36: And at which point I thought,

00:04:38: as much as I love living in Europe and the UK,

00:04:40: if I'm gonna raise children, I'm going home to Australia.

00:04:44: And so there's perhaps a bias there,

00:04:46: but no disrespect intended to the European community.

00:04:49: But I always thought that if I was gonna raise children,

00:04:52: I would go back to Australia.

00:04:54: But if that hadn't been the case,

00:04:55: if I hadn't planned on having kids,

00:04:56: I would probably still be in the UK and Europe today.

00:04:59: But to answer your question, even though I'm in Australia,

00:05:02: the evolution of things like Zoom and the like,

00:05:05: one of the very few positives of COVID

00:05:08: is that people have become much more comfortable now

00:05:10: with doing remote work.

00:05:12: And don't get me wrong, I'm not a super fan of it.

00:05:15: I love being face to face with people,

00:05:18: but at least there is that backup now.

00:05:19: So I've managed to survive, so to speak,

00:05:22: living in Australia and dealing with customers

00:05:24: all over the world.

00:05:25: And we seem to be getting some success.

00:05:28: - I mean, there's more trust since Corona.

00:05:30: So everyone is able to trust you more

00:05:33: because there's no other way to be that, right?

00:05:35: So that's great.

00:05:37: So you typically being in a plane for most of the time, right?

00:05:41: So if I just see your Twitter timeline,

00:05:43: I was always seeing the exotic places of the world.

00:05:46: So I'm just traveling around the world

00:05:48: and come from conference to conference to conference.

00:05:50: So basically I was just guessing,

00:05:51: are you still living in Australia

00:05:53: or you're just having your washing machine there

00:05:56: to just make a hop before getting to the next conference?

00:05:59: - Well, I think it's fair to say that one's Twitter persona

00:06:02: is perhaps not necessarily one's real life persona.

00:06:05: And so I've had a lot of people say to me,

00:06:08: "Oh, do you spend all your time traveling?"

00:06:11: This is in the pre-COVID time frame.

00:06:14: And the reality was, no, I used to spend probably at most,

00:06:16: maybe 30% of my time traveling, not even that.

00:06:21: But of course the other 70%, I'm generally not tweeting,

00:06:24: "Oh, I'm at home today.

00:06:25: Oh, I'm washing my clothes today.

00:06:27: I'm doing the dishes today.

00:06:28: I'm running after my children today."

00:06:30: That's not the most exciting Twitter.

00:06:32: - This is on Instagram, right?

00:06:33: So this is not Twitter yet.

00:06:35: - That's elsewhere, that's right.

00:06:36: Check my TikTok.

00:06:37: - Oh yeah, we record TikToks after this meeting,

00:06:40: didn't we say that?

00:06:42: - But yeah, so it is true that people get an artificial view

00:06:45: of the amount of travel I do.

00:06:47: But I must admit, one of the things that I noticed

00:06:50: when COVID came along is, there's the old saying,

00:06:52: you don't realize what you've lost

00:06:54: until it's taken away from you.

00:06:56: And certainly being a remote worker with Oracle,

00:06:59: even before COVID, I was a remote worker.

00:07:01: I worked from home five days a week.

00:07:03: And so for me, it wasn't necessarily the travel.

00:07:06: It was the fact, it was the destination.

00:07:09: Because for me to actually interact with other people

00:07:13: generally meant traveling.

00:07:15: Because if I went to the Oracle Perth office,

00:07:17: then most of the people in the Perth office

00:07:18: are sales consultants, they're out on site.

00:07:21: And therefore the only time I really got to interact

00:07:24: with other people was either customer visits

00:07:26: in the local area in Perth, or to travel to events

00:07:29: and educate people and take a conference.

00:07:31: So this is very much a selfish thing.

00:07:35: People say, "Oh, thanks for coming to this conference."

00:07:37: I never want to let onto them that this is all about me.

00:07:40: This is my way of actually being a social person,

00:07:42: being an active member of the community.

00:07:44: So without it, I generally would struggle.

00:07:46: - Yeah, I once saw your presentation.

00:07:49: So I'm very looking forward

00:07:51: to see your talk on this conference.

00:07:53: The presentation you did,

00:07:56: I think it was in Bonn a few years ago.

00:07:57: It was pre-COVID, right?

00:07:59: And there was so much love and so precise stuff.

00:08:03: Like you had just the black screen with the corners around it,

00:08:06: like a border around to see if it fits.

00:08:09: And there was so many slides.

00:08:10: I don't know how many hundred slides you had prepared for, like a 45 minute talk.

00:08:15: And I was guessing, how does he even do that in this time?

00:08:20: And then you went through the slides,

00:08:22: your presentation, and it was not in a hurry or something like that.

00:08:25: So I was guessing that you might have so much time to put in those presentations to present it like this.

00:08:31: So how much time do you really spend on preparing for those conferences we talk about?

00:08:35: Well, that's a good question. I've got better at it.

00:08:40: Certainly when I adopted my particular style of presenting earlier on, it took a long time to produce that content.

00:08:48: And it's an interesting one.

00:08:50: I've, someone asked me once this similar question

00:08:54: and I said, probably a good estimate.

00:08:56: And I don't know empirically how accurate this is

00:08:59: but I would generally say over the course of a talk,

00:09:03: I think people should budget an hour per slide.

00:09:06: So for me, if I do a 200 slide talk,

00:09:09: I think not the writing, the writing is easy

00:09:12: but the actual preparation to have a talk ready

00:09:14: for 200 slides is about 200 hours,

00:09:16: which is about a week and a half, maybe two weeks.

00:09:20: And I actually don't think that's too bad.

00:09:22: And I think the reason I like that sort of metric is,

00:09:26: and I'm actually doing a talk

00:09:28: on public speaking tomorrow morning,

00:09:30: not that I'm plaguing it,

00:09:31: by the time this podcast goes out,

00:09:33: I think that time will be gone.

00:09:35: But I think if you don't put in that amount of effort,

00:09:39: then really you're being unfair to the audience.

00:09:41: Because as we said, I get paid to be here.

00:09:43: I'm paid to come to this conference.

00:09:45: You know, it's a joyful thing for me

00:09:47: and someone's paying me a salary

00:09:49: to do it at the same time.

00:09:51: What is there else to ask for?

00:09:53: But the audience members, they're giving up their time.

00:09:56: They're actually giving up their time to hear you speak.

00:09:59: And so to sit there and not put in the ultimate effort

00:10:02: to give them something that will be rewarding for them

00:10:05: is I find just almost offensive.

00:10:07: And it's one of those things where, don't get me wrong,

00:10:11: there are sometimes due to time constraints,

00:10:13: pressure constraints, budget constraints,

00:10:15: that the content you give an audience

00:10:17: it's perhaps not as good as you'd like it to be.

00:10:19: But ideally, for me, I always try to minimize those occurrences.

00:10:23: For me, it's like, you know, these people have given up so much of themselves

00:10:28: to sit in an audience and prepare to be spoken to, then you should,

00:10:32: you should reward them with effort.

00:10:34: Yeah, that's my view.

00:10:36: So just to switch the perspective is a great way to prepare a presentation,

00:10:41: not to just only try to do your best to present something,

00:10:45: just to think about the people who are watching you,

00:10:48: that they need to be catched with the content.

00:10:51: Right. So that's a great view.

00:10:53: I try to get me to this 200 slides and one hour per slide.

00:10:59: I don't know.

00:10:59: So if you're speaking about one and a half weeks, you don't do it on full time.

00:11:03: Right. So how do you manage to get this time into these presentations

00:11:07: during your customer success work you do usually?

00:11:12: As I mentioned, I have a lot of flexibility and plenty of autonomy.

00:11:15: And I should give a shout out to my manager, Mike Hitchford at Oracle,

00:11:19: who's very much, he says, as long as you're getting the work done,

00:11:22: if you have any problems, come see me.

00:11:23: Otherwise, do what you need to do.

00:11:26: So he's great in terms of giving me that autonomy and flexibility.

00:11:29: And so I try and manage my own time.

00:11:32: And like everyone,

00:11:35: most of the time you have plenty of time to prepare for a conference

00:11:37: because you know early on that you've been accepted for a paper.

00:11:40: So normally there's plenty of time,

00:11:42: but like all human beings,

00:11:43: you know, you waste the first half of that time.

00:11:45: It's like, I must get round to starting that presentation.

00:11:48: And then it gets a bit frantic,

00:11:50: but I generally try to allocate time in my day

00:11:54: on there are some things that I have to do

00:11:56: and some things that have a bit of flexibility on.

00:11:58: So I'm lucky in the sense that

00:12:00: when I look after the Ask Tom website,

00:12:02: that I can occasionally skip a day

00:12:04: and that's not gonna kill the website.

00:12:05: There's plenty of content out there for people to see.

00:12:08: Similarly, if I'm going to customers,

00:12:10: then that's not something I do every single day.

00:12:13: It's intermittent.

00:12:15: And so the rest of the time I'll spend on,

00:12:17: I just view the term as called building content.

00:12:20: Now that might be slide content for presentations,

00:12:22: it might be video, it might be blogs, et cetera.

00:12:25: But for me, it's all just the same thing.

00:12:27: It's building content.

00:12:29: And ultimately then it's just a case of me

00:12:31: being able to schedule that time intelligently.

00:12:34: I've constantly fail at that.

00:12:37: So occasionally, a good example is before DOAG,

00:12:41: the two weeks before DOAG,

00:12:44: most of the content was built

00:12:45: after the children had gone to bed.

00:12:47: They sort of up late at night,

00:12:49: saying, "I should have started this three months ago."

00:12:52: But that's how things work out.

00:12:53: - Yeah, we already had an episode of "Devs on Tape"

00:12:57: a few months ago,

00:12:57: where we're just talking about procrastination

00:13:00: and how to avoid it.

00:13:01: We are not that successful until now,

00:13:03: but we hope some listeners are.

00:13:05: So you're just pushing everything forward

00:13:07: and this is not necessary right now.

00:13:09: I have plenty of time.

00:13:10: And then like one week before the conference,

00:13:11: you're just preparing everything, right?

00:13:13: - I feel that most of my technical life

00:13:15: and experience will serve as a lesson to others

00:13:18: to things to avoid in your life.

00:13:20: - Yeah, exactly.

00:13:22: Yeah, so you mentioned different social media stuff

00:13:26: you're doing.

00:13:26: So I was just remembering the nice setups you did

00:13:30: for your YouTube videos,

00:13:32: like toilet paper in the background.

00:13:34: And this is something I just recognized

00:13:36: from a few years ago, I think.

00:13:39: So you have like, how many followers do you have on YouTube?

00:13:43: It's a long time ago, I checked.

00:13:46: - I think, and if I'm artificially inflating this,

00:13:49: I apologize, but I learned a long time ago,

00:13:52: I learned an important lesson

00:13:53: by watching other YouTube videos

00:13:55: of people who are successful creators,

00:13:57: not necessarily in the tech spaces.

00:13:59: They said, don't obsess over things like the followers,

00:14:01: the views and stuff like that,

00:14:03: because otherwise you'll start making content

00:14:05: that chases that.

00:14:06: And a good example is that I think one of the most

00:14:09: popular videos on my own channel

00:14:11: is a how to install the Oracle database.

00:14:14: And so I think that was installing 12C back in the day

00:14:17: when I first did that video.

00:14:19: And when it got plenty of views,

00:14:20: my first thought was,

00:14:21: "Oh, I'll do a 12.2 installation and a 19C installation,

00:14:26: 18C installation."

00:14:27: Because people love installation videos.

00:14:29: And I thought that's all well and good,

00:14:31: but does it really serve?

00:14:33: It serves my interest.

00:14:34: Yeah, I'll be happy.

00:14:35: I get all these thousands of views,

00:14:36: but does it really actually benefit the community?

00:14:38: And the answer to that is no.

00:14:41: But in terms of how,

00:14:42: I think I've got somewhere in the vicinity

00:14:43: of 9,000 subscribers to my YouTube channel,

00:14:46: somewhere in that vicinity.

00:14:48: Could be less, could be more,

00:14:50: but I do better not to check.

00:14:52: Because yeah, it's, what do they call it?

00:14:56: They call it clout chasing, if you're chasing for clout.

00:14:59: And I just don't, I had a podcast funny enough recently

00:15:04: where I was the podcast host interviewing an Oracle intern

00:15:07: who has a very large number of followers on Twitter already.

00:15:11: And we were discussing about follower counts and stuff,

00:15:13: and she made a very good point.

00:15:15: And she said, "It's not the follower count,

00:15:19: "it's the count of followers that count."

00:15:22: And so yeah, like, I view a genuine follower count

00:15:27: on any social media platform

00:15:28: as the people you could reach out to and say,

00:15:30: "Hey, do you wanna get a drink?

00:15:31: "Do you wanna get a coffee?

00:15:32: "Hey, I'm having a bad time.

00:15:33: Can you help me out?

00:15:34: And out of the 9000 YouTube subscribers, I'm sure there is 9000 that would do that.

00:15:40: There's a much smaller number and they're the people that really count.

00:15:42: So it's not the counter followers, it's the followers that count.

00:15:47: Yeah, correct.

00:15:48: So are you checking your comments on a regular basis?

00:15:50: I think there might be many tech questions under your videos.

00:15:54: Right.

00:15:54: So I try to do exactly what you did, but I have an aura.

00:15:57: Like, explain that.

00:15:59: It's funny.

00:16:00: I generally do try to respond to YouTube comments

00:16:02: because in effect, that's a very similar kind of platform

00:16:05: to Ask Tom in the sense that people get,

00:16:08: they're halfway through something

00:16:10: and then they fit some sort of roadblock.

00:16:12: And even in my videos, they might be following,

00:16:14: most of my videos have an equivalent script

00:16:17: that they could run as well in either in my Git repo

00:16:19: or on Live SQL.

00:16:21: And so often they'll follow that link and they'll say,

00:16:23: "I'm trying to run this demo that you did,

00:16:25: "but I'm getting this problem."

00:16:26: And sometimes that's because they're on the wrong version

00:16:29: or they've just made a typo, et cetera.

00:16:31: But those kinds of comments,

00:16:32: which are really just follow up questions,

00:16:34: I'll always endeavor to answer.

00:16:36: I have to say I'm not particularly timely

00:16:37: because once again, you don't wanna spend your day

00:16:39: looking at YouTube comments.

00:16:40: - Yeah, under your own videos, right?

00:16:42: Just watch every day, you watch your own videos,

00:16:44: and then you look at the comments, right?

00:16:46: - And so, but if it's question and answer,

00:16:47: then I'll try to help out.

00:16:49: One thing I have discovered on all social media platforms

00:16:52: is for every five valid comments,

00:16:56: there'll be five comments which are really,

00:16:58: here's a link to something you could buy,

00:17:00: here's a link to something that we could sell you,

00:17:01: here's a link to some ransomware

00:17:03: that we're trying to install on your machine.

00:17:04: So all those platforms are reasonably good

00:17:07: at filtering that out, but some always creeps through.

00:17:10: Same on Ask Tom.

00:17:11: On Ask Tom, we get a lot of comments.

00:17:13: I'll use the term in sort of inverted commas.

00:17:16: The comments are, "Oh, thanks for this post.

00:17:19: "By the way, have you ever thought about

00:17:20: "by getting this credit card?"

00:17:21: So we have to go through and clean them up as well.

00:17:23: - So you're doing it by hand,

00:17:24: or do you have any automated process to do so?

00:17:27: So you don't have to answer if we are able to circumvent it

00:17:32: and make advertisements for our podcast on your platform.

00:17:35: So how do you get rid of those comments?

00:17:38: - On Ask Tom at the moment,

00:17:40: this is something fairly new to us, Tom.

00:17:42: Only in the last probably 12 months,

00:17:43: we've started getting spam.

00:17:46: And I view that as, this sounds as a positive thing,

00:17:49: because you only get spammed

00:17:50: if people think that's a platform that's popular

00:17:52: and that people will see their spam.

00:17:54: - That's a very optimistic way of thinking about this.

00:17:57: And so at the moment we're dealing with it manually

00:17:59: and we have some simple tools in AskTom

00:18:01: where literally we just see the comment

00:18:03: and we just literally click a button and it's gone.

00:18:06: That obviously won't scale

00:18:07: if we start getting floods of spam,

00:18:09: but at the moment it's fairly manageable.

00:18:11: But it's weird, I view spam as a good problem to have.

00:18:14: It's, what do they call it?

00:18:15: A success crisis.

00:18:17: - We will see if AskTom is growing faster and faster

00:18:20: and you get really big spam amounts.

00:18:22: And then I ask you again if it's great to have spam, right?

00:18:25: So until we see no recapture thing on the comment input

00:18:30: field, so I don't have any worries about that.

00:18:33: Yeah, so you said you have--

00:18:36: I don't-- I will not repeat the number of followers

00:18:38: you have on YouTube, because in case of you

00:18:41: have 50,000 followers, we have to cut it out

00:18:43: in front of it, right?

00:18:45: So yeah, you are doing Twitter, right?

00:18:47: You're doing YouTube.

00:18:48: What else do you do?

00:18:51: I do a blog.

00:18:52: Oh, yeah.

00:18:53: - While we're on the podcast,

00:18:55: to do some shameless self-promotion,

00:18:56: so head over to connor-mcdonald.com.

00:18:58: - We are asking for that, and we put that in the show notes.

00:19:01: This is something we have to say in the podcast

00:19:03: every single episode, that they have to show,

00:19:06: to look into the show notes

00:19:08: to see all the links to your accounts, right?

00:19:10: - Well, what I'll do is I'll save you some effort,

00:19:11: and save your listeners some effort, hopefully, as well.

00:19:14: There's a website called Linktree,

00:19:15: which is linktr.ee.

00:19:18: If you go to linktree/connor,

00:19:20: that just brings up a link of all my links.

00:19:23: So linktree/connor will get you my blog,

00:19:26: my YouTube channel, my GitHub repo, Twitter,

00:19:29: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, email,

00:19:33: et cetera, et cetera.

00:19:35: So in terms of channels I use,

00:19:37: I have a YouTube channel, I have a blog.

00:19:40: I actually have started dabbling in TikTok.

00:19:42: - Oh.

00:19:43: - Happy to talk about why,

00:19:45: but so yeah, I've now got TikTok as well.

00:19:48: Obviously I'm fairly active on Twitter

00:19:50: and they're probably the main social media channels

00:19:53: I'm active on.

00:19:54: So I totally think-- oh, sorry, I have a podcast.

00:19:57: So if you go to the Spoken Nerd, as opposed to the Spoken Word,

00:20:02: you can get that.

00:20:03: How do the podcasts are set?

00:20:05: Wherever you find your podcasts, you can get it there.

00:20:07: So it's on Apple, Spotify, et cetera.

00:20:10: We have a similar service where we are putting up our stuff.

00:20:13: So yeah, we don't have--

00:20:16: we have a YouTube channel, right?

00:20:17: So our videos are also--

00:20:19: our podcasts are also uploaded to YouTube,

00:20:21: but there's just only the cover and a waveform.

00:20:26: - Yeah, something like a voice line or so.

00:20:28: - Yeah.

00:20:29: I've done a couple of podcast episodes,

00:20:31: much like we're sitting here,

00:20:32: but we have a camera on as well.

00:20:34: So then I'll publish them on my podcast platform,

00:20:36: but also as a video, which normally works well,

00:20:39: but it's hard to find guests that are happy to be videoed.

00:20:42: - Yeah, there might be a reason why we choose,

00:20:46: we have chosen the podcast platform to do so

00:20:49: because we don't have the time

00:20:51: and don't have the, is it called courage?

00:20:53: No, it is called the confidence to be on video or the same.

00:20:57: But I mean, we could think about doing the same thing

00:21:02: like just recording our faces in the podcast

00:21:04: and don't have a whole film production of a podcast studio.

00:21:08: So I mean, there's nothing special to see right now

00:21:11: in this room besides you.

00:21:12: I think there's, right.

00:21:15: So there are three people in the room with headphones on

00:21:17: and some cables on the table, but yeah, great.

00:21:21: So I will subscribe to your podcast too.

00:21:24: And we might do some cross promotion

00:21:26: because I guess you already have more listeners

00:21:28: than we have until now.

00:21:29: But yeah, we have to speak English again.

00:21:31: So we'll see if we can do that.

00:21:34: - Yeah.

00:21:35: - Yeah, so we might have a little switch over

00:21:37: back to the Oracle database,

00:21:38: which is your home basically, right?

00:21:40: So we have this question in our mind for our followers

00:21:44: or for listeners of the podcast.

00:21:49: If there's someone who wants to start with databases right now,

00:21:52: so like maybe from a school, back from school,

00:21:55: is it called like that?

00:21:56: Or trying the first job and being asked,

00:22:00: which database would you use to solve this problem?

00:22:03: How would be the procedure you would suggest to go then?

00:22:09: It's funny if you'd asked me that 10 years ago, or perhaps

00:22:11: even longer, because I used to do talks on--

00:22:14: I used to have a talk called Successful Application

00:22:18: development with Oracle, but it could be with any database.

00:22:22: And one of the things I used to say was,

00:22:24: go to the standard documentation set.

00:22:26: There's a book in there called the Concepts Guide.

00:22:28: Read that cover to cover.

00:22:29: If you do that, you're literally more than most experienced

00:22:33: Oracle professionals out there, even if you're brand new,

00:22:37: because it talks about all the structures

00:22:39: and how things are important, what things not to avoid,

00:22:42: et cetera, et cetera.

00:22:44: And that advice, don't get me wrong, is still totally valid.

00:22:48: but no one's going to do that.

00:22:50: The days of people picking up a book, a technical book,

00:22:53: and reading it cover to cover seem to evaporate,

00:22:56: which I lament, but I'm also a realist.

00:22:58: The world has changed and people don't do that anymore.

00:23:01: And so as a result, my view is,

00:23:05: how can we get close to that experience,

00:23:08: but in a more modern way?

00:23:10: And the best way of describing modern way is,

00:23:12: I think the modern technical developer

00:23:15: coming out of a college is looking for bite-sized pieces.

00:23:19: They're looking for, I have a problem,

00:23:20: how do I solve this one particular problem today?

00:23:24: And for them, that'll be Stack Overflow,

00:23:26: it'll be a TikTok, it'll be a 30-second video,

00:23:28: it'll be the first paragraph of a blog post,

00:23:30: because God forbid they're not gonna read it end-to-end.

00:23:34: And as much as I could be cynical and old and a dinosaur

00:23:36: and say, you know, that's not how it should be,

00:23:38: et cetera, et cetera, the reality is our job,

00:23:41: in fact, my job in particular,

00:23:43: is to cater to how people are consuming information.

00:23:46: And as I said, that's one of the reasons

00:23:48: I've started dabbling in TikTok,

00:23:49: is the reality is people are looking for bite-sized chunks

00:23:52: to solve small problems.

00:23:54: Whether you're using Oracle

00:23:56: or any other database technology,

00:23:58: if someone's looking for a bigger picture answer

00:24:00: to that question,

00:24:01: I would put on my relational database bias hat and say,

00:24:05: whatever database platform you're planning on using,

00:24:10: before you think about the database platform,

00:24:12: I think the one thing that everyone would be very wise

00:24:15: to invest time in is SQL.

00:24:16: And I'd love to say that SQL on Oracle

00:24:20: is the only way to go, but I'm a realist.

00:24:22: The reality is people use SQL Server,

00:24:24: people use Postgres, people use all sorts of environments.

00:24:28: But it's funny how every year people say,

00:24:31: "The SQL language is a legacy of a bygone era

00:24:34: and will die out."

00:24:36: And those same people that say it the following year saying,

00:24:39: "Oh, we build product X

00:24:41: And guess what?

00:24:42: We're launching a new SQL interface to our product.

00:24:45: SQL is the ultimate stayer, the ultimate staying power.

00:24:49: And no matter what happens, I've failed to,

00:24:52: I've yet to see any product that has not offered a SQL

00:24:56: as an interface that has really thrived.

00:24:58: Probably the only one I could think of offhand

00:25:01: would be something like Mongo.

00:25:02: But even Mongo, when you look at its JSON query language,

00:25:07: it has a lot of the history of SQL in it.

00:25:10: It just looks like a JSON format of a SQL expression.

00:25:14: So the same rules apply.

00:25:16: It's a language for data access

00:25:19: where you're not actually specifying

00:25:21: how to do the data access.

00:25:23: You're simply saying, this is what I need.

00:25:26: Please database, go work out how to best do it.

00:25:28: So my advice for anyone coming out of an education

00:25:32: institution is first and foremost, learn SQL.

00:25:35: And then the platform doesn't really matter.

00:25:39: And don't get me wrong, inside Oracle,

00:25:41: we'll be happy to tell people that, well, it's

00:25:43: going to be very hard to change from SQL Server SQL

00:25:46: to Oracle SQL.

00:25:47: And the same people in SQL Server

00:25:48: will be saying it'd be very hard to change from Oracle SQL

00:25:51: to Microsoft SQL.

00:25:52: And the same people at Postgres will be saying the same.

00:25:54: But the reality is the SQL dialects

00:25:56: are all fairly similar.

00:25:57: The architecture underneath it is quite different.

00:26:00: And me putting my Oracle hat on, I

00:26:01: would say that ours is the best.

00:26:03: But rest assured, other vendors will say theirs is the best.

00:26:05: That's a debate for another day.

00:26:07: But for starters, if you learn SQL as a young graduate

00:26:12: out of university, you're well on the way

00:26:14: to being successful with any database.

00:26:17: And in particular, the only bias I will put on that

00:26:20: is I think the world is moving back to relational database.

00:26:25: For a while there, document databases

00:26:28: were the absolute be-all and end-all.

00:26:30: Everyone said these are going to cast aside the relational

00:26:33: database technology.

00:26:34: relational databases are like dinosaurs

00:26:36: in the whatever era it was.

00:26:39: Not, you know, no SQL is the,

00:26:41: is the meteor that's coming and gonna wipe them out.

00:26:44: And all I've seen in the last five years

00:26:46: is relational databases simply grow and grow and grow

00:26:49: in terms of their demand.

00:26:51: Part of that is the SQL language,

00:26:53: but also I think people have suddenly realized

00:26:54: that it's not just about storing data,

00:26:56: it's being able to intelligently access data,

00:27:00: intelligently manipulate data.

00:27:02: So for the young developer to return to that answer,

00:27:04: it's learn SQL first.

00:27:07: And if you learn a relational database,

00:27:09: I think you can't go wrong.

00:27:11: And then it's my job and other people like my role,

00:27:15: anyone in the educational role,

00:27:16: it's our jobs to then come up with ways

00:27:19: to let them learn SQL and relational database

00:27:22: in little bite-sized formats, bite-sized chunks,

00:27:25: no matter how we feel that's a frustrating way to go for us

00:27:30: because we're from that legacy of sit down,

00:27:32: do a long course, do a lot of reading, et cetera.

00:27:34: - Reading books, right?

00:27:35: - Yeah.

00:27:36: It's not our right to tell them

00:27:39: how they should be consuming information.

00:27:41: I can't tell my own children,

00:27:43: you shouldn't be spending time on Snapchat

00:27:45: or TikTok, whatever,

00:27:46: because that is the medium by which they will learn things.

00:27:50: And I think we have to cater to that.

00:27:52: - So when they're watching your videos, right?

00:27:53: And start using Oracle databases.

00:27:56: - Well, they watch my videos because they're forced to.

00:27:58: - Oh, right.

00:27:59: - Yeah, when I republish a video,

00:28:01: I say, "Boys, start clicking the view count."

00:28:03: - Yeah, then we'll be back at the follower count.

00:28:05: - Make sure you subscribe.

00:28:07: No, my boys don't have a great deal of interest.

00:28:10: To their credit, every time I publish a video,

00:28:13: they'll often put some random comment in saying,

00:28:15: "Yes, I really enjoyed this video."

00:28:17: And I can tell it's them,

00:28:19: 'cause it's such a banal comment.

00:28:22: But yeah, good on them for being loyal to the family.

00:28:24: - At least they are not selling credit cards

00:28:26: on your comments, right?

00:28:27: So you have some extra income.

00:28:29: So maybe this is another format. So you said that they can consume.

00:28:33: So everyone can consume all the different mediums, right?

00:28:37: Like TikTok, short videos on YouTube, long videos on YouTube and everything else.

00:28:42: But what is necessary then would be like a path they can walk through.

00:28:48: Like you said, learn SQL.

00:28:50: After that, learn a relational database.

00:28:54: Right.

00:28:55: But then they need a path to walk on.

00:28:57: If you read a book, you have the strict order.

00:29:00: You can read it from cover to cover, right?

00:29:02: And then, you know, everything based on each other.

00:29:04: So if I start typing in SQL on YouTube,

00:29:07: I have so many hours to watch videos and see whatever.

00:29:10: I don't have the feeling that I would get everything I need,

00:29:15: right? Because there's no structure like in a book.

00:29:17: Besides I'm watching tutorials or something like that.

00:29:20: So I need something to lead on.

00:29:22: Maybe this is another format for your YouTube channel.

00:29:26: Connor reads. So you're sitting there, 30 minute bite-sized chunks,

00:29:30: where you just read a book in 30 seconds, right? That might be a good,

00:29:34: good way for your channel.

00:29:36: Well, it's interesting. Like,

00:29:38: I'm not going to call you an old dinosaur because I'm far older than you,

00:29:42: but I honestly view that I think the younger generation

00:29:47: aren't particularly interested in the path. And I'm with you.

00:29:52: I find that distressing. However,

00:29:54: I honestly don't think they are.

00:29:57: When I was, I had interviewing an Oracle intern

00:29:59: on my own podcast recently, I was asking her,

00:30:02: I said, how do you navigate?

00:30:04: You know, she was doing a SQL course at uni

00:30:06: in their current coursework.

00:30:09: And I said, how did you get into, you know,

00:30:11: tackling problems?

00:30:12: And not that I want to put, you know,

00:30:16: my own voice in her head, but trying to paraphrase,

00:30:18: it was very much about, I start with a task at hand

00:30:22: and I'm totally in the dark.

00:30:25: And so I'll Google or find a TikTok or find a YouTube

00:30:28: or find a blog about how to write my first SQL statement.

00:30:32: And then I'll write the first keyword.

00:30:34: And then that's task one is complete.

00:30:36: I've satisfied that problem.

00:30:38: Now I'm on to task two.

00:30:39: What do I do now?

00:30:40: Oh, okay, now I need to list the columns.

00:30:42: Okay, so task two is how do I find the columns?

00:30:45: And the whole thing was simply about

00:30:47: how do I overcome solely the next hurdle, nothing else.

00:30:52: And I find that sad,

00:30:55: 'cause it's just not the way I think

00:30:56: that technology should be learned.

00:30:58: But I think that's the reality of the world.

00:31:00: I think the reality is solve the next task only

00:31:04: and then move on from there.

00:31:05: And I think that you can see from the popularity

00:31:07: of things like Stack Overflow,

00:31:09: that people are so very much focused in the minute,

00:31:14: in the small details.

00:31:15: How do I get over this hump?

00:31:17: And everything else doesn't matter.

00:31:19: And I could even be a bit flippant and say,

00:31:21: You look at even the way we develop applications nowadays,

00:31:25: is that not that agile was ever meant to be this,

00:31:27: but people often take the agile methodology

00:31:30: and bastardize it or manipulate it to be,

00:31:34: I shouldn't think about the future.

00:31:36: I should only think about the next iteration,

00:31:37: the next sprint, the next bit of work.

00:31:40: The people that built out agile

00:31:42: never meant it to be that way.

00:31:43: They said, yes, we tackle work in bite-sized chunks,

00:31:45: but we always have a focus on the bigger picture.

00:31:48: But bigger picture is hard, and so people dismiss that.

00:31:50: People sort of, "Yep, no, no,

00:31:52: all I have to worry about is the next sprint."

00:31:54: And so I think even the way we build applications nowadays

00:31:58: has become just solve the next hurdle,

00:32:00: just get over the next hurdle.

00:32:02: And I think that's fraught with problems

00:32:05: and fraught with danger.

00:32:06: And I think I've worked on enough agile projects

00:32:08: that have failed because they've lost sight

00:32:11: of the bigger picture.

00:32:12: And I worry about this generation of developers coming out

00:32:17: who are focused on just solve the next problem.

00:32:20: Having said that, which sounds all gloom and doom,

00:32:23: is I worked at a project where,

00:32:27: this is before I joined Oracle,

00:32:28: with a group of very young developers

00:32:29: who had never used Oracle,

00:32:31: and many of them had never used a database.

00:32:33: And they just jumped in.

00:32:34: This was a 100% Oracle solution they were building

00:32:38: in a very high transaction environment,

00:32:40: so thousands of transactions per second.

00:32:41: So they had to get it exactly right.

00:32:43: And these people knew nothing about Oracle,

00:32:44: nothing about database.

00:32:46: And they just charged on in this same mindset.

00:32:48: Okay, learn how to write a SQL statement.

00:32:49: Okay, learn how to write an insert.

00:32:51: Okay, and let's build an application.

00:32:54: And things weren't working,

00:32:55: things weren't going at all well,

00:32:57: but to their credit,

00:32:58: they were as dismissive as I was of that approach.

00:33:03: That approach also makes people very keen to ask questions,

00:33:08: very keen to reach out for help,

00:33:09: and very keen to struggle on their own,

00:33:12: fail, and then say,

00:33:13: okay, how do I get myself out of the mess?

00:33:15: And so to their credit, over the three years

00:33:18: I was on this project, they went from people

00:33:20: who were totally ignorant of Oracle technology

00:33:23: and database technology, to people that were not just

00:33:26: very skilled in it, but big fans of it,

00:33:29: and big fans of their wins.

00:33:31: We had something which had a lot of latency,

00:33:33: a lot of performance problems,

00:33:34: but I re-architected it to do this,

00:33:36: I read about this, I learned this,

00:33:37: and I refactored it to do this,

00:33:39: and now it runs, rather than 60 seconds,

00:33:40: it runs in half a second.

00:33:42: And so I think, as I said, as distressed as I am

00:33:46: about people taking these very near-term view

00:33:50: approaches to development,

00:33:52: there will be plenty of failures and plenty of crashes

00:33:54: and plenty of problems,

00:33:55: but I think that same approach

00:33:57: will help them navigate their way out of that.

00:34:00: And I think it's a bit maybe pretentious of us

00:34:05: as old school technicians to say,

00:34:07: "Look, if you listen to us,

00:34:09: you won't have those failures and crashes."

00:34:12: Whereas if we look back at our own careers,

00:34:13: I think we all have them.

00:34:15: Now that we've navigated that way through them,

00:34:17: we feel entitled to say, look, we can help you avoid that.

00:34:22: But I don't think these people want to avoid it.

00:34:24: I think they want to basically follow that rocky path

00:34:27: because they know that that's how

00:34:28: they'll gain their expertise.

00:34:30: And I think it sounds parental.

00:34:32: Our job is just to make sure

00:34:33: they don't cut themselves too badly.

00:34:36: - Sure, I mean, besides getting away from the dinosaur

00:34:39: you called me earlier, so.

00:34:40: (laughing)

00:34:41: I can really say that this learning by doing thing is definitely the way I went

00:34:49: back then, because I mean, you can read a book and you can use 10 percent if your

00:34:53: job or your task or your problem you try to solve is in this 10 percent of the book

00:34:59: or even in this book and you just need the single part and you know everything of it.

00:35:03: So but if you have just to tackle the problems or the task you have at that

00:35:06: time, you might be the specialist for exactly that.

00:35:09: So maybe your tasks and your work and what you have to do is forming your career

00:35:14: and forming your skill set. Right?

00:35:15: So if you're reading books and watching every video to have all the knowledge,

00:35:19: you might just need it for the next crash,

00:35:22: but it's not sure that you exactly know what's happening there.

00:35:26: You might be,

00:35:27: you might having a easier access to where to find the solution and you don't

00:35:32: make that silly, silly problems or silly mistakes you're doing if you're a

00:35:37: a beginner, right? But I think the learning by doing thing is you have a problem,

00:35:41: you find a solution on YouTube, on Stack Overflow.

00:35:44: And the next time you have this issue,

00:35:45: you will be at the same place to watch again and copy paste again.

00:35:49: Or you just have it in your mind because you already made that. So this is,

00:35:54: this is something I was seeing when I talked to my father,

00:35:57: how he learned all this stuff. I mean,

00:36:00: they had plenty of learning by doing back then,

00:36:02: but they read books and books and books exactly that. And I, I,

00:36:06: I will not say that I never read a book before,

00:36:09: but if you have like the book of Stephen Feuerstein,

00:36:13: for example, I don't know if anyone who's saying

00:36:16: that it's read from cover to cover is saying it truthfully.

00:36:20: I don't exactly think.

00:36:21: - And to cycle that back to this conference

00:36:24: and DOAG and user groups is I think one of the benefits

00:36:28: is for those people that do have this approach of stumble,

00:36:32: ask for help, stumble, reach out to thing,

00:36:34: stack overflow, et cetera,

00:36:36: that naturally will start to build them a community.

00:36:41: Whereas if I followed my own advice

00:36:43: and just sat there and read the concepts manual,

00:36:46: then I might shortcut myself or fast track myself

00:36:50: to being more knowledgeable.

00:36:51: But in that process, I've never spoken to anyone else.

00:36:54: And if I do the opposite,

00:36:57: which is just solve little problems

00:36:59: and not think of the big picture,

00:37:01: every time I hit a problem,

00:37:02: I'm probably gonna have to either solve for myself

00:37:04: which is fine, or I'm gonna have to reach out somewhere.

00:37:08: It might be Twitter, it might be Stack Overflow,

00:37:10: it might be on an email group, et cetera.

00:37:12: But even though it's not my intention,

00:37:14: I'm starting to build a community of people.

00:37:17: And ultimately, that's what leads to successful things

00:37:20: like user groups.

00:37:21: And so as much as I disdain it,

00:37:24: I think it's a good idea that people do

00:37:26: these little tiny bite-sized chunks

00:37:27: because what'll happen is they'll start build communities

00:37:30: and therefore you end up with prosperous organizations.

00:37:34: such as Doeg, Uka, Uji, et cetera.

00:37:38: I think the long-term future of such groups

00:37:41: depends on these younger generations

00:37:42: being prepared to reach out to communities.

00:37:44: The Oracle intern I interviewed

00:37:46: has over 40,000 Twitter followers,

00:37:48: just by being someone who constantly reaches out to Twitter

00:37:51: to say, "Hey, I'm doing this, am I doing it right?"

00:37:53: Et cetera.

00:37:54: And I think that's a good lesson for a lot of people,

00:37:56: is that you'll build a community,

00:37:58: and I think then we all win.

00:38:00: - So talking about communities,

00:38:02: So you already mentioned Ask Tom, right?

00:38:06: Can you tell us more about Ask Tom?

00:38:07: What do you do there?

00:38:09: What is the goal of the platform?

00:38:11: And why is it the perfect place to go

00:38:14: if you have a question around Oracle products?

00:38:17: Ask Tom started off back in the day

00:38:20: with Tom Kite, who is a famous Oracle person from many years

00:38:24: gone by.

00:38:24: And when he started the site, he was currently,

00:38:28: like a lot of us were, we were answering questions

00:38:30: on public forums.

00:38:32: And what would happen is there was no control over that.

00:38:35: You had to sort of pick and choose your questions.

00:38:38: And if you wanted to get a bit more,

00:38:39: a closer relationship with anyone asking questions,

00:38:42: if you gave them your email address,

00:38:44: then the next day there's a hundred emails in your inbox

00:38:47: and you have to tackle them.

00:38:48: So Tom thought he'd build a little simple website

00:38:51: such that he would have more control

00:38:52: over when the questions come in

00:38:53: and which questions he chose to answer.

00:38:56: And Tom did that for 14 years.

00:38:58: It's one of the very first ever APEX sites.

00:39:00: In fact, it actually was built before Apex was built.

00:39:03: It was built in the sort of the language

00:39:06: that Apex is built in,

00:39:07: and then got migrated to Apex at a later date.

00:39:09: But yeah, Ask Tom went live in May, 2000.

00:39:12: So it's been around for a long time.

00:39:14: When Tom retired in 2015,

00:39:16: we, and the site had been dormant for a little while,

00:39:19: we kickstarted again,

00:39:20: Chris Saxon and myself started answering questions.

00:39:23: And so to people that are unfamiliar with Ask Tom,

00:39:26: it used to be Ask Tom for Ask Tom Kite.

00:39:27: Now it's AskTOM for Ask the Oracle Mentors.

00:39:30: We wanted to keep the name, but obviously change,

00:39:32: rebrand it, so to speak, to reflect what it is.

00:39:35: - I didn't know that.

00:39:36: - So we call ourselves Ask the Oracle Mentors,

00:39:38: which is the same acronym.

00:39:40: And really it's for anyone who's currently using

00:39:42: the Oracle products or considering using the Oracle products

00:39:45: that are database focused,

00:39:47: because Chris and I's expertise is in the database world.

00:39:50: We encourage people to ask questions there

00:39:52: and interact with us there.

00:39:53: You could argue that, well,

00:39:55: why wouldn't you just use Stack Overflow?

00:39:58: And we don't try to compete with Stack Overflow.

00:40:00: We encourage people, we often put,

00:40:02: if we find an answer on Stack Overflow,

00:40:04: we'll say, well, there's some activity over here,

00:40:06: go check out that as well.

00:40:08: But one of the things in Stack Overflow is,

00:40:11: Stack Overflow is what I would call a free-for-all.

00:40:13: For every person that asks a question,

00:40:16: anyone can answer a question.

00:40:18: And that's why Stack Overflow uses a voting system,

00:40:21: because they're using the community

00:40:22: to come up with an idea for what they think

00:40:23: good answers versus not good answers. We try offer a different model which is if you're an existing

00:40:29: user of Oracle products then if Chris and I can't answer that question then we know inside Oracle

00:40:34: the person that looks after that exact product and we can get hopefully the best answer possible.

00:40:39: And don't get me wrong sometimes we get it wrong, Chris and I are only human,

00:40:43: but we set up a site saying that if you have a question that you want to actually ask

00:40:48: Oracle people, I don't want to fashion an answer from the community, I want to get an answer from

00:40:53: and the people that actually own the product,

00:40:55: then that's why we put Ask Tom there.

00:40:57: And that's why we don't see ourselves

00:40:58: as a competitor to Stack Overflow.

00:41:00: We're offering a different kind of service.

00:41:02: And for the same reason,

00:41:03: we often see questions that have come in to Ask Tom,

00:41:06: ask the same day on Stack Overflow,

00:41:08: 'cause people wanna get both sort of points of view.

00:41:12: And we're not gonna go,

00:41:13: "Oh, well, don't waste our time

00:41:16: because you put it on Stack Overflow."

00:41:17: We like people to ask questions in many places

00:41:19: because they'll get a much more rounded view of the answer.

00:41:22: Yeah. Is there any goal for AskTom for the future you already have in your mind?

00:41:27: Or is it just a successful platform where all the questions are getting answers

00:41:31: and it should just run like it's running now?

00:41:35: We're constantly looking at ways to improve AskTom.

00:41:38: And one of the things that we find is when people come to AskTom,

00:41:41: they generally get via Google, they'll do a Google search.

00:41:43: They get to, they hit a question that we've answered over the past 20 years.

00:41:48: One of the things we do find is if that

00:41:50: question doesn't exactly answer

00:41:51: or doesn't exactly answer their question,

00:41:54: they'll go back to Google because inside Ask Tom,

00:41:57: we probably don't have an excellent cross-reference.

00:42:00: If here's a question,

00:42:00: here's an answer that's possibly similar.

00:42:03: So we're doing some work on Ask Tom

00:42:04: to come up with some tagging and some metadata

00:42:07: to try and make the site more,

00:42:09: of more benefit to users,

00:42:10: especially if they don't find the exact answer they want,

00:42:13: then hopefully with a couple more clicks,

00:42:14: they'll be able to get to an answer

00:42:16: that's maybe more suitable for them.

00:42:17: So we're putting work in those lines.

00:42:19: The other one is we have a partnering site

00:42:23: to Ask Tom called the Dev Gym,

00:42:25: which was originally built by Stephen Feuerstein,

00:42:26: but it's now run by Chris Saxon,

00:42:29: which is a different thing for people

00:42:31: who are more starting out on their Oracle career.

00:42:33: We do things like classes and quizzes and workouts,

00:42:36: and it's more of an educational site.

00:42:39: And at the moment,

00:42:40: those two sites pretty much sit separately.

00:42:42: It's easy to click between them,

00:42:43: but they offer sort of two different things.

00:42:45: We'd like to get to a stage where

00:42:47: someone might click on say something relating to Apex.

00:42:50: And if we can see by the metadata of that question

00:42:53: is probably what we call a newbie question.

00:42:55: Someone saying, how do I create a classic report?

00:42:58: Then we're hoping to have some metadata

00:42:59: which will say, okay, here's your answer to your question.

00:43:02: But by the way, here's a link to a class on that

00:43:05: that you can get in the Dev Gym.

00:43:06: So a bit of cross pollination

00:43:08: because some people ask questions

00:43:10: because they're currently learning something.

00:43:12: And so it'd be nice to say, oh, you're learning Apex.

00:43:15: go here, oh, you're learning PL/SQL, here's a free course.

00:43:18: You know, it sounds weird for an Oracle person

00:43:21: to be saying we're investing a lot of time

00:43:23: into creating more and more free stuff for our users,

00:43:26: and people say, oh, that sounds weird,

00:43:27: but that's probably a reflection

00:43:29: of how Oracle is also remodeling itself as a company.

00:43:32: - It is basically everything all the other competitive,

00:43:35: the challenging companies who are next to Oracle

00:43:40: are doing right now, so if Oracle doesn't do it,

00:43:43: it would be worse.

00:43:44: But it was a great wording to say,

00:43:46: oh, this is your answer.

00:43:48: You might see there's a cause about that.

00:43:50: It's basically better than if you're just

00:43:51: pasting automatically a link under this question.

00:43:54: Here are the Apex basics.

00:43:56: Just click on it, learn it, and then come back,

00:43:58: answer the, ask a question again.

00:44:00: - On that topic, one of the things that irks me,

00:44:03: one of the things that annoys me more than anything else,

00:44:05: whether it's on Ask Tom, Stack Overflow,

00:44:08: Oracle forums, any forums,

00:44:09: is when someone asks a question

00:44:12: And the answer that comes back from someone in the community

00:44:14: is RTFM, read the manual.

00:44:18: Because I find that incredibly judgmental

00:44:22: because, and don't get me wrong,

00:44:24: we do a lot of questions that ask Tom

00:44:25: and sometimes I'm going, you see a question,

00:44:27: you're going, man, that, yeah,

00:44:28: I know exactly in the manual where that answer is

00:44:31: and we'll often send them the link.

00:44:33: But that's different to saying

00:44:35: you should have read the manual

00:44:36: because then you're judging someone.

00:44:38: You're saying, I don't believe

00:44:40: that you actually put in the effort.

00:44:42: And even if they didn't, even if someone was lazy,

00:44:45: even if someone just couldn't be bothered,

00:44:48: what right do we have to say,

00:44:50: I'm gonna judge you for that?

00:44:52: And so one of the things that we have in Ask Tom

00:44:54: is Chris and I have a policy of we will never say RTFM.

00:44:57: We might say, all right, here's a link in the docs

00:45:00: where it answers that question,

00:45:02: but we'll give them the link.

00:45:03: And nothing annoys me more than people say RTFM

00:45:05: because they spent their own time just to down someone,

00:45:09: just to make someone feel worse about themselves.

00:45:11: Yeah, and maybe just push themselves upright.

00:45:14: So if they're saying read the manual,

00:45:16: we might have to put the explicit sign on the episode if we're trying to curse right

00:45:20: now. So we didn't know.

00:45:23: So, yeah, it's a better way to not judge.

00:45:27: It's it's it's correct.

00:45:28: So

00:45:30: I was trying to to see in our usual

00:45:34: categories we are usually doing in the end of our podcast.

00:45:38: I have a couple of questions and because of the spontaneous recording right now,

00:45:42: you didn't even see them before.

00:45:44: So the first question would be,

00:45:46: if you could undo a technical trend from the last years, which trend would you undo?

00:45:55: It can be basically everything, right?

00:45:58: It doesn't have to do anything with our jobs or our environment.

00:46:01: It could be like an electric car or just...

00:46:04: I would undo smart devices in the home.

00:46:08: Things like the Alexas, the Googles, et cetera, et cetera.

00:46:12: Simply because it's not the devices per se,

00:46:18: it's the mistake we made 20 years ago.

00:46:21: And that mistake was that we will build services for free.

00:46:25: And in order to pay for those services,

00:46:27: we'll use advertising.

00:46:28: If at the very start of things,

00:46:31: whether it's Facebook, email, et cetera,

00:46:34: The whole model was, we're gonna give you email,

00:46:36: whether it's Yahoo, Gmail, whatever,

00:46:39: but you pay a dollar a month for that.

00:46:42: That's what you have to do.

00:46:44: There are no free services.

00:46:45: If you want a service, everything has to be paid for.

00:46:48: Then the concept of advertising

00:46:51: being the way that these things are paid for,

00:46:54: then this whole model would have disappeared.

00:46:58: But I think the quintessential version of that

00:47:00: is smart devices in the home,

00:47:03: because that bothers me in the sense that,

00:47:05: and maybe this is coming from a parent,

00:47:08: is I don't want my children being in a place

00:47:12: where what they say could perhaps have a material impact

00:47:16: on the way they live their lives later.

00:47:18: And people say it would never happen, et cetera,

00:47:21: but I don't want my children mucking around,

00:47:24: saying things that may be considered

00:47:28: almost downright illegal,

00:47:30: because children yelling around the house,

00:47:32: I'm gonna chop you up with an ax, whatever.

00:47:34: And then, 'cause the logical extension

00:47:36: of where we are today is that in 10 years time,

00:47:39: you know, one of my children's going for a job,

00:47:41: and they say, well, our records here indicate

00:47:43: that you're susceptible to aggressive behavior.

00:47:45: And we picked that up from our Alexa device

00:47:47: when you were 11 years old.

00:47:49: - You might have guessed that

00:47:50: because we just suggested axes on Amazon

00:47:53: the day after he told you that, right?

00:47:55: (laughing)

00:47:56: Right, great question.

00:47:57: So this is a new one for us.

00:47:59: So maybe Carol, do you have the next question?

00:48:03: Of course.

00:48:04: I would like to know something more personal.

00:48:08: Would you get embarrassed if you would show us

00:48:11: a screen time on your iPhone?

00:48:13: I don't have an iPhone.

00:48:14: I have an Android phone.

00:48:15: So you would not be embarrassed because Android doesn't

00:48:18: have that feature to have that--

00:48:21: That's why I have an Android.

00:48:23: I spend very little time on my phone, to be honest.

00:48:26: And when I say very little, I'm not saying a small amount

00:48:29: But I think that's because I'm old school.

00:48:32: At home, I sit in front of my computer most of the day.

00:48:35: And so whenever something comes up, it's on my screen.

00:48:38: It's not on my phone.

00:48:39: So yeah, that's probably a generational thing.

00:48:43: My children, their phone is super glued to their hand.

00:48:48: But yeah, I don't spend a lot of time on the phone

00:48:51: but simply because I'm at a convenience

00:48:53: in the sense that I'm sitting in front of my computer

00:48:54: most of the day.

00:48:56: My dining table is my work station.

00:48:58: So even when I go to my kitchen and get some food,

00:49:01: I come back and I start eating and oh,

00:49:02: there's the keyboard right there,

00:49:04: the mouse is right there

00:49:05: and the screen is right in front of me.

00:49:07: So in terms of screen time, yes, it's a lot.

00:49:12: I get up in the morning normally about six.

00:49:14: I'll probably walk the dog, feed the dog.

00:49:16: I'll sit down about seven in the morning

00:49:18: and the screen goes on.

00:49:19: And if I'm not careful,

00:49:22: I could easily not get up until mid afternoon

00:49:25: and then my hips and my knees remind me

00:49:26: that I should have got off about six hours ago.

00:49:29: My problem is I'm just addicted to the tech

00:49:35: and I would love to paint some pretty picture

00:49:37: in the fact that I spend the whole day

00:49:39: just solely looking at Oracle Database Tech.

00:49:40: That's not true, but I do my job.

00:49:43: I do some Ask Tom.

00:49:45: I'll watch a couple of YouTube videos often

00:49:47: to see what the successful creators are doing

00:49:49: to come up with techniques to make my own videos.

00:49:53: But then I'll read the news, et cetera,

00:49:55: but it's always done all on screen.

00:49:57: And so, yeah, it's a problem I have in the sense that

00:50:01: I could easily go from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

00:50:04: with minimal get ups, and then I'll go to bed going,

00:50:08: this was a mistake.

00:50:09: Yeah, this is why your eyes are hurting.

00:50:11: This is why your partner's looking at you going,

00:50:13: have you been crying?

00:50:14: No, no, no, I just forgot to blink for the last 12 hours.

00:50:17: So in my defense, I'll say yes,

00:50:19: my phone screen time is very, very small.

00:50:21: My monitor time is way, way too much.

00:50:24: So you were saying that this is a problem for you to extend this question.

00:50:27: Did you try to do something to avoid that?

00:50:32: Do you have some time on your table to say,

00:50:33: just stand up and use a standing table, for example, or maybe just walk?

00:50:37: I've often entertained the idea of a standing table

00:50:39: or all sorts of techniques to get me away from the desk.

00:50:44: Most of them have been unsuccessful due to a just total lack of self-discipline.

00:50:48: One of the best things I did, and this wasn't the intention,

00:50:51: but one of the best things I did when COVID came along

00:50:53: was I got a dog.

00:50:55: And I got a dog because my travel obviously dropped to zero.

00:50:58: And I thought this was a good time to get a dog

00:51:00: because I always worried about if I was traveling so much,

00:51:02: how would I deal with having a dog be very unfair to a dog

00:51:05: to have it boarding or going to a kennel, et cetera.

00:51:09: So I bought a dog to keep me company during COVID.

00:51:12: And it sounds weird,

00:51:13: but it was perhaps the biggest productivity boost I got

00:51:16: for some time, because dogs don't understand technology.

00:51:22: So every hour my dog comes to the table and says,

00:51:25: I would like some attention.

00:51:27: And just gives you a little nudge,

00:51:28: wants a snack, wants a pat, wants a cuddle.

00:51:31: Or maybe twice a day it says,

00:51:33: look, I'm fed up with this, I wanna walk.

00:51:35: And originally when that started happening,

00:51:39: I was like, oh, this is a pain.

00:51:40: You know, I'm 30 minutes in the morning walking my dog,

00:51:42: 30 minutes in the afternoon walking my dog.

00:51:44: This is costing me an hour of my job time.

00:51:48: But what I found was it actually made me

00:51:49: far better at my job.

00:51:51: because it clears your mind,

00:51:53: it forces you to stop what you're doing,

00:51:55: and you come back much more,

00:51:57: rather than just tapping away slowly on the keyboard

00:51:59: and sort of just going through the drudgery of the day,

00:52:02: you come back and you're like, okay, let's get going,

00:52:04: and you're into the next thing,

00:52:05: whether it's Ask Tom or making a video or whatever.

00:52:09: So thankfully my dog doesn't understand English

00:52:11: and doesn't realize that I should thank him a lot

00:52:13: for being present.

00:52:15: But yeah, it was a surprise,

00:52:17: but he's been a very good productivity boost.

00:52:20: I'd recommend a dog for anyone.

00:52:22: So for every listener without a dog,

00:52:24: you can walk 30 minutes in the morning outside without a dog.

00:52:27: It works.

00:52:28: I tried that for a couple of days.

00:52:29: And that's the joy of a dog. A dog forces you.

00:52:32: It's not an option.

00:52:33: It's not like you can't just go, well, we're not doing it today.

00:52:35: Yeah. So you have to clean your house if you don't do it.

00:52:38: Right.

00:52:39: All right.

00:52:41: So another private question would be,

00:52:45: Are you surrounded by geeks, like private, your private surroundings?

00:52:52: Are there many people addicted to tech?

00:52:55: Not addicted, maybe.

00:52:57: Yeah,

00:52:58: I because I work from home, I spend most of the time alone.

00:53:02: Obviously, my community, when I travel, are all geeks.

00:53:05: We're all here at this conference and generally we're all IT geeks.

00:53:08: But in terms of around me, interesting,

00:53:11: both my children don't have a strong fascination with tech.

00:53:14: They use their phones like every other teenager does,

00:53:18: but they don't have an interest in getting into technology.

00:53:22: One of my boys is a gamer,

00:53:23: so he would live on the computer if I allowed him to,

00:53:28: but unfortunately he's got a father who's IT literate,

00:53:31: which obviously means things like

00:53:32: the router automatically disables his access

00:53:35: after a certain amount of time and stuff like that.

00:53:36: So he's not happy that I'm in IT.

00:53:39: He would much rather it be me being a dumb IT person.

00:53:43: My partner Genevieve is a business intelligence analyst.

00:53:48: So she's familiar with SQL, familiar with Oracle database.

00:53:52: I always know how her SQL is going.

00:53:55: If I get a phone call late in the afternoon,

00:53:57: you know, when she's leaving work,

00:53:58: I was like, I'm leaving work now, I'm on my way home.

00:54:01: There better be a gin and tonic waiting for me

00:54:03: when I get there.

00:54:04: That's when I know her SQL hasn't worked out so well

00:54:07: during the day.

00:54:08: But other than that, yeah, like there's not a lot of tech

00:54:10: around me besides my partner Genevieve.

00:54:12: but it's very close to you, so there are not many topics

00:54:15: to talk about after work and drinking gin tonic.

00:54:17: There may be some secret statements in your talks, right?

00:54:21: - It's funny, like every person that uses a database

00:54:24: of any technology, whether it's Oracle or otherwise,

00:54:27: the customers of the product often have some frustrations,

00:54:31: and so it's sometimes my job to just sit back

00:54:35: and allow those frustrations to be vented,

00:54:37: and I just absorb them, and then it's not my job to go,

00:54:41: well, it sounds like you did it wrong.

00:54:43: I never go with that.

00:54:44: I always just go, yes, that's right.

00:54:46: It's the product that's the problem.

00:54:47: It's definitely out, definitely out.

00:54:50: That's the safe way.

00:54:51: - All right.

00:54:52: I will write that down.

00:54:54: All right, so the following question.

00:54:56: - Yeah, I would like to ask a question

00:54:59: about how you consume media, for example.

00:55:04: How do you handle the growing materials,

00:55:08: like YouTube videos, Twitter posts, blog posts,

00:55:12: et cetera, et cetera.

00:55:13: - I consider myself lucky in the sense

00:55:15: that part of that is my job,

00:55:17: and as a result, I can come up with some ideas

00:55:21: for scheduling that.

00:55:22: And it's a tactic I wish my children would learn

00:55:27: because they would simply surf their phones all day long

00:55:31: and look at nonsense.

00:55:32: And it's an easy trap to fall into.

00:55:34: When I started producing content for TikTok,

00:55:37: my first thing was, well, I'll have a look at TikTok

00:55:39: and see what people are putting on TikTok.

00:55:42: And maybe it's just my age,

00:55:43: but I was just so saddened by the fact that

00:55:46: a lot of it is just so trivial and of no consequence.

00:55:53: But by the same token,

00:55:55: I could find myself easily scrolling through it.

00:55:59: And because none of it,

00:56:00: none of it, it grabs just enough of your attention

00:56:03: to hold your attention,

00:56:04: but there's absolutely no long lasting impact

00:56:07: from it.

00:56:08: You know, if you, the moment you scroll forward,

00:56:10: someone says, what did you just look at?

00:56:11: You have no idea.

00:56:13: And it's funny how you could see the, you know,

00:56:16: it's so easy.

00:56:16: You can think, I have no interest in this.

00:56:19: And yet an hour could go by.

00:56:21: And that's one of the things I find interesting,

00:56:24: but because it's part of my job,

00:56:26: what do I do is in the morning,

00:56:28: I'll normally spend the first part of my morning

00:56:30: saying, okay, maybe an hour.

00:56:33: An hour will be looking at YouTube,

00:56:35: looking at Twitter, TikTok, Instagram,

00:56:39: for things that will be related to my job.

00:56:41: So Twitter's easy 'cause the people that you follow

00:56:44: are obviously generally in the technical community.

00:56:46: There's a few others,

00:56:47: but generally it's technical community.

00:56:48: It's much harder on things like YouTube and TikTok

00:56:51: because it's just a smorgasbord of stuff.

00:56:54: But often I'll just search for particular hashtags

00:56:56: on TikTok, et cetera, just to see what's out there

00:56:58: and maybe see what's missing.

00:57:00: Especially TikTok being the most current one,

00:57:04: There's not a lot of tech content on TikTok.

00:57:06: Yet when I speak to people who are younger than me,

00:57:11: they say that they are already veering.

00:57:13: They're moving away from YouTube.

00:57:15: YouTube is seen as too lengthy.

00:57:17: They're moving away from YouTube to TikTok.

00:57:20: They're moving away from YouTube to YouTube Shorts.

00:57:22: They're moving away from Instagram to,

00:57:25: was it Stories or Reels?

00:57:26: One of the two.

00:57:27: They're moving to these contents

00:57:29: where it's all about short and sharp.

00:57:31: And so I think as technical people who produce content,

00:57:35: we have to move with them.

00:57:36: So as many, I've done just over 500 videos,

00:57:40: I think on my YouTube channel.

00:57:41: But the reality is, I know that ultimately

00:57:44: all of them will become obsolete over time,

00:57:46: because most of them are over five minutes.

00:57:48: - So we might see you dancing on TikTok

00:57:50: and explaining like an outer join,

00:57:53: like dancing on your living room.

00:57:55: - It's funny you should say that,

00:57:56: one of the things I have noticed is,

00:57:58: all content creators in the technical space

00:58:01: will need to come up with innovative ways

00:58:03: to pass on good information.

00:58:06: And I make no claim to be a master of that.

00:58:08: I'm still trying to learn the trade.

00:58:11: But for example, my most recent TikTok

00:58:13: was how to get back a dropped table,

00:58:16: but it was done with a musical score

00:58:19: and my movements were done in time to the music

00:58:22: because that's the TikTok way.

00:58:24: But the whole time I was making it, I felt like an idiot.

00:58:28: But the reality is that that is how we need to,

00:58:31: we have to react to the way

00:58:33: that people wanna consume content.

00:58:34: We don't get to decide as much as we'd like to.

00:58:38: - So are the TikTok, the short videos on TikTok

00:58:40: consuming more of your time

00:58:42: than big productions on YouTube?

00:58:44: I call them big production because I be sad

00:58:46: compared to the TikTok videos.

00:58:48: - It's funny how at the moment,

00:58:49: I think because I'm unskilled at it, they take longer.

00:58:53: It's easy to produce YouTube video

00:58:55: because it's closer to what I do

00:58:56: for a living outside YouTube.

00:58:59: It's talking to a camera, here's some slides,

00:59:02: here's some demos.

00:59:03: So it's really just a mirror of what I would do

00:59:05: at a conference, but just in a more compact form.

00:59:07: TikTok's different.

00:59:08: TikTok for starters, it's portrait mode.

00:59:12: So the video has to be different.

00:59:13: It's compact.

00:59:14: Most people are gonna consume TikTok on their phone.

00:59:17: So you can't put a screen up.

00:59:19: You can't put detailed stuff

00:59:21: because none of that is gonna be readable on a phone.

00:59:23: you've got to come up with ways of teaching people

00:59:26: complex technical topics

00:59:30: with things that might be just a sentence or two.

00:59:33: And so I'm by no means skilled at that yet.

00:59:37: And I'm trying to teach myself,

00:59:38: which is why I watch occasional TikToks on technology

00:59:41: to see what people are doing.

00:59:43: But yeah, we'll have to adapt.

00:59:45: - We will see it, put it in our show notes,

00:59:46: and then we pump up your followers on TikTok again.

00:59:51: - But I'll give you an example.

00:59:52: I did a YouTube video recently, a YouTube shorts video.

00:59:55: I can't remember what it was on,

00:59:56: but I put it out and after a week on my YouTube channel,

00:59:59: it had, I'm making these numbers up,

01:00:02: so don't quote me on them, but it's for relativeness.

01:00:06: On the YouTube after a week, it had 500 views.

01:00:08: The exact same video on TikTok

01:00:10: after a week had 5,000 views.

01:00:12: And so that's the way the world is going.

01:00:15: Is that a good thing?

01:00:18: Who knows, but it's funny how TikTok already

01:00:20: has that much bigger reach.

01:00:23: And if you'd asked me or I would have thought

01:00:26: if you'd asked anyone who uses TikTok regularly,

01:00:28: do you go to TikTok for technical learning content?

01:00:32: They would laugh you out of the house.

01:00:34: But if there's 5,000 people viewing it,

01:00:36: then obviously it's being consumed by some people.

01:00:39: - Do you get the insight if they watch the video

01:00:42: to its end, in the back end?

01:00:44: So if it's just swiping, see, oh, Connor.

01:00:47: Swiping.

01:00:48: - I have no idea yet.

01:00:49: And that's, as I said, I'm still new to TikTok.

01:00:51: I'll have to start doing some research

01:00:53: because much like the other platforms,

01:00:55: I think there are various tiers and stuff

01:00:58: that you might need to get into

01:00:59: in terms of picking up the full analytics.

01:01:02: - Yeah.

01:01:04: So last but not least,

01:01:06: the closing question of this podcast episode, time flies.

01:01:09: So yeah, if there's one thing you're taking back

01:01:13: to Australia from this conference,

01:01:16: like not in a physical way or material way.

01:01:19: I'm taking the beer.

01:01:20: You're taking the beer, right?

01:01:21: And then you and break sausages.

01:01:24: Even if it's the first day of the conference, is there anything you might have in your mind

01:01:29: when you're traveling back to Australia?

01:01:32: For me, and I make no intention to demean this conference, but I view it as the same

01:01:38: as any event I've been to in the last couple of months, is the joy of face-to-face community.

01:01:46: And I think I said at the very start of this podcast,

01:01:50: I said, "You don't realize what you've lost

01:01:52: until someone takes it away from you."

01:01:54: And for so many of us,

01:01:55: we took being face-to-face at technical events for granted.

01:02:00: And we can use the cliche of networking and stuff like that,

01:02:03: but ultimately it's just, you know,

01:02:05: humans are a social animal.

01:02:07: And I think we didn't realize that strongly enough

01:02:10: until we could no longer be social animals.

01:02:13: And let's face it, we probably spend, what?

01:02:16: a third of our life in the workplace or working on our jobs,

01:02:19: a third of our life sleeping,

01:02:21: a third of our life doing other things.

01:02:22: But so to not interact with the community

01:02:25: about the things you work with

01:02:27: is to not be a social animal for 30% of your life.

01:02:30: That seems a tragedy.

01:02:32: So for me, even people I've not met yet

01:02:36: because they're not speaking till tomorrow,

01:02:38: I have a euphoria and a joy thinking

01:02:40: I cannot wait to see these people again

01:02:42: 'cause I haven't seen them for years.

01:02:43: and I know them well and we've kept in regular touch,

01:02:46: but even so, it's not the same

01:02:48: as being with them face-to-face.

01:02:49: And I know for a fact,

01:02:52: I've always been a big fan of user groups,

01:02:53: even though I work now for Oracle.

01:02:55: Before that, I was always generally

01:02:57: either a committee member on user groups

01:02:59: or help doing some volunteer and stuff.

01:03:01: Always been a huge fan of user groups.

01:03:02: And I know that for the last couple of years,

01:03:04: user groups have done it extraordinarily hard.

01:03:06: And so the thing I wanna take back to Australia

01:03:10: is I'll be in touch with our Australian user group,

01:03:13: telling them of the success of this event,

01:03:15: that user groups can come back from the brink

01:03:18: and they can be successful.

01:03:20: And so most of the user group events I've seen this year

01:03:23: have been running at about 50%

01:03:25: of what their normal capacity would be,

01:03:27: but I view that as a win because it was zero.

01:03:30: And so anyone that can get 50% capacity this year

01:03:33: is well on the way to having 100% capacity next year.

01:03:37: And as I mentioned earlier,

01:03:38: to bring back more things in the podcast,

01:03:40: the fact that the younger generation

01:03:41: are building their communities,

01:03:44: even though they don't intend to,

01:03:46: that's gonna be the next tapping audience

01:03:47: for making our user groups bigger and stronger

01:03:49: than they ever were before.

01:03:51: - Great words to close this podcast.

01:03:54: Thank you very much, Connor.

01:03:55: Thank you, Carol.

01:03:56: - It's been a pleasure.

01:03:57: - Thank you.

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