When the APEX Gaming Competition 2015 was announced by Vincent Morneau from Insum at the ODTUG Kscope15 conference this past year, I was very suspect. I've seen many contests over the years that always seemed to have very few participants, and only one or two people would really put forth effort. Why would this "Gaming Competition" be any different? Who has time for games, right? Well...I could not have been more wrong.
I was given the honor of being a judge for the APEX Gaming Competition 2015, and not only did I get to see the front-end of these games, I also was able to see them behind the scenes as well - how they were constructed, how much of the database they used, how much of declarative APEX did they use, etc. I was completely blown away by the creativity and quality of these games. There were 15 games submitted, in all, and as I explained to the other judges, it was clear that people really put their heart and soul into these games. I saw excellent programming practices, extraordinarily smart use of APEX, SQL and PL/SQL, and an unbelievable amount of creativity and inventiveness.
I hated having to pick "winners", because these were all simply a magnificent collection of modern Web development and Oracle Database programming. If you haven't seen the actual games and the code behind them, I encourage you to take a look at any one of them.
I truly don't know how these people found the time to work on these games. It takes time and effort to produce such high quality. These are people who have day jobs and families and responsibilities and no time. In an effort to simply acknowledge and offer our praise to these contributors, I'd like to list them all here (sorted by last name descending, just to be different):
Scott Wesley
Maxime Tremblay
Douglas Rofes
Anderson Rodrigues
Pavel
Matt Mulvaney
Jari Laine
Daniel Hochleitner
Marc Hassan
Nihad Hasković
Lev Erusalimskiy
Gabriel Dragoi
Nick Buytaert
Marcelo Burgos
Thanks to each of you for being such a great champion for the global #orclapex community. You're all proud members of the #LetsWreckThisTogether club!
P.S. Thanks to ODTUG for sponsoring this event and Vincent Morneau for orchestrating the whole contest.
Yay, last name descending! I get to be on the top of a list ;p
ReplyDeleteThanks for your words, Joel. It was the first APEX competition I participated in and I learned quite a few new things, in particular the Supporting Objects area. I'm forming up a presentation to deconstruct the process I went through.
I look forward to getting a chance to see what other people have done & how, particularly after reading this.
Joel, thanks so much for being a part of this. Also thanks to the dev team for APEX, and to Vincent and the team for organizing this contest. I'm only sorry I did not find out about it earlier.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was "what type of game can i build in apex, it'n not really meant for that". But then I had that "eureka" moment I had many times before when buiding APEX apps - it actually is possible, and very exciting, too.
I'm also pleasantly surprised about the other games the other competitors built. I'm actually a bit jealous I did not think of some of them :D
Al in all, it was a great idea, And looking forward to many more.
Best regards
Gabriel Dragoi