John Flack

Short Bio

I am a Database Administrator, Architect and Developer experienced in all phases of software design, system implementation, and database conversions. In recent years, I've been acting as an internal consultant on projects at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). I also do work for a few other clients in both the U.S. government and other organizations.

I just passed the 30th anniversary of my first day on the job in an IT shop. On July 24th, 1978, I started working on contract with NASA Headquarters. I've even got a commemorative coin that was given to all NASA employees and contractors to celebrate NASA's 25th birthday, and they pass their 50th this year. I've been working with Oracle since 1987, and before that I worked with IBM's SQL/DS for VM - an ancestor of DB2. I've been writing and presenting papers since 1988, when I presented at International Oracle User Week (a predecessor of Collaborate) in Orlando. About the only year since then that I haven't presented was 1994.

I've been using JDeveloper and ADF for 3 years. There was an aborted effort to do a Struts application when I first started with JDeveloper. I just went live with Version 2 of my first ADF application, and I'm working on two other applications now - one in late beta test, one in early beta test. One of these is a locator application, which I described in my ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 Editors Choice winning paper, "Google Maps, ADF Faces, and Oracle Locator: A Backstage Tour of the New Treatment Locator." Almost everything I do is a one man project. I'm the lead developer of a team of four (sometimes augmented with two others) developers, but each of us works on something different. Our applications do tend to feed each other data through well defined interfaces. So, I'm always concerned about enough structure, but not too much structure.

I copied a few photos from Kaleidoscope 2008. See the entire photo collection on ODTUG's Flickr site.

Visit my new blog: JJFlash's Oracle Development Journal

E-Mail: JohnF@smdi.com