Monday, July 19, 2010

My Son, Eli, Takes on APEX

My youngest son, Eli (23), has spent the last several years honing his skills as a guitarist and composer. He's very talented, but it's hard to make a living as a musician, especially in the current economy.

Much to my delight, Eli has decided that he would like to try his hand at being a software developer. He has a basic foundation of mathematics, but no programming experience. He has, on the other hand, well-developed powers of abstraction, used to conceptualize and organize music and songs. He is excited about diving into the world of software.

I've decided to have him learn Oracle fundamentals and APEX 4, as the quickest path to making him productive. I have lots of work to be done in APEX for my various projects.

I will also take this opportunity to deepen my familiarity with APEX; it certainly makes sense given that PL/SQL is the foundation technology. I've just been hard-pressed to date to make time for learning a new technology. So we will learn together.

Having said that, it will be very helpful for Eli to have some mentors in the APEX world, someone who knows the product well and would be willing and able to provide some advice.

So if anyone reading this knows APEX well (I doubt he will be utilizing APEX 4 features for quite a while) and would be willing and able to answer the occasional question from Eli, please send me a note at steven@stevenfeuerstein.com. I would be most grateful, as would Eli.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I know of several top notch software developers who have a background in music, so maybe there's really a correlation.

Anyway, don't you think it would be nice for him to learn something object oriented?

This book from Zed Shaw is a great introduction to Python:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index

But maybe something like Java would be a better fit, since it has better interoperability with Oracle db et al.