Getting My Geek On

Much of the work I'm doing these days involves business process reengineering. I like BPR and it's probably one of the things I do best. But this particular project doesn't give me much of an opportunity to get my hands dirty with technology...drawing swimlane charts in Visio is about as technical as this stuff gets.

So, as kind of a side project to fill my need for tech, I'm getting my geek on in a big way. The plan is to start by installing the Vision instance of EBS 12.1.1 in the Linux VM on my iMac. Once that's done, I'm hoping to bring up APEX and interface with EBS (it's a bigger trick in R12 than it was in 11i, because R12 requires APEX to run on a different server).

The inspiration for this project was two-fold: 1) my shop is launching an upgrade to 12.1.1 early next year - we are heavy pl/sql users and have yet to figure out what we're doing about the elimination of pl/sql in R12; and 2) OracleNerd is posting a series of articles on installing EBS 12.1.1 on a Linux VM (thanks to Jake for pointing this out) - John Piowar is guest-writing the articles; John is also posting companion pieces on his own blog - they're making it sound like fun to me, so I thought I'd give it a go. As I work my way through the geek project, I'll post my own additional experiences here.

One of the things I think I've figured out even prior to setting forth on this project: if you're really going to do this work for any length of time, you really need to like it. I'm kicking off this little project because I really like doing this type of work and I think I'll learn new things. Most of the more successful people I know in this field do the same thing and have the same near-obsession with one or more areas of technology. Those that don't have the same passion drift off into other fields. IT is just too tough of a gig to work in the field unless you really, really...no, I mean REALLY...like it.

I'm off to get my geek on.