From 2017 to 2020 I traveled to conferences around the world and streamed hundreds of interviews with developers from Oracle and the FOSS community. There were several of us on the developer marketing team back then who had full streaming kits and we were all crazy busy all the time. Nothing I’ve done recently compares to the challenges I faced during that five year period and I grew significantly as a result. Pain is a remarkably efficient teacher.

We couldn’t stream from some countries, like China, so in those cases we just recorded and posted the videos later. And in other countries we had poor Internet connections (1 mbps in India was hardly enough), so we’d just record there too. We didn’t ship our stuff professionally, either. Instead, each of us on the video team traveled with our own kit, which included cameras, microphones, audio mixers, streaming boxes, and a variety of other stuff. We didn’t usually have lights because the kit just got too big and heavy to keep in one case and it became too difficult to drag everything through airports. We needed our cloths, too, of course. So for the larger events, we had the local events team provide lights, which itself was interesting since each local team offered vastly different lighting setups. I remember once in China the team enthusiastically showed up with two massive lights perfectly appropriate for a baseball stadium. Yeah, that didn’t work.

Each of us on the team usually worked alone in that we didn’t have any producers to schedule things and run and fix the equipment on site. And we were pretty much on our own to book our own meetings and improvise our way through every interview and manage all the video or audio issues in real time. And there were many issues to troubleshoot, I can assure you! We weren’t experts in AV production so we did the best we could and we learned live along the way. The setup took hours to get everything working because things never worked initially. Sometimes you’d have power but no Internet. Sometimes you’d have power and Internet but no stage! And it went on from there. Looking back on it all now, though, I think we did pretty well even when the sound wasn’t perfect or the video was too dark and out of sync with the voices. It was a little hacky and handmade, but honestly, that sort of feel fit well with the developer culture we were embracing. Everyone we spoke with appreciated our efforts and that really meant a lot to us. I say that because I’ve come across some people I know recently who have criticized our work to the point of laughter. That hurt deeply initially, I must admit. But then when all these years later I see those very same people working with superior equipment and significant financial and staff support without the insane pressure of streaming at events, which is a uniquely challenging experience. And I have to ask, when we were doing this work way back then, what were they doing? But ultimately for me that behavior on their part is helpful for weeding my network.

Anyway, in the images below we are at Oracle Code in San Francisco in the fall of 2019. That Oracle Code event was actually part of a developer series we did with about 20 events per year around the world. We on the team shared responsibilities for those events, obviously, based on where we lived and our own schedules. I have hundreds of such images like the ones below of us setting up the stage and doing the interviews. I’ll post some more over time as I tell more of this story. I loved doing this stage streaming work, though. It was really challenging doing things live and getting all the gear to work properly while at the same time attempting to facilitate interesting conversations on a razor thin schedule — and doing it alone! I started out really rough initially in 2017, but over time I learned the gear and got better at interviewing people live, which for me was challenging given that I couldn’t speak fluently until my mid 30s since I stuttered profoundly for most of my life. The experience of the stuttering lingers but I’m largely over it now. And then as I was really getting the hang of the steaming projects, everything blew up in 2020 with everyone’s favorite little virus. And then after that the team blew up three times so it no longer exists at all. I was bounced around to several teams in the process as well. So, I’m disappointed I can’t do this work anymore — I even miss dragging the kit through the airports and getting detained many times along the way! The airport officials with guns in India and China who separated me from my stuff for hours at midnight was a nice touch, for example. Getting yelled at was cool too! They went through everything and made quite a mess of things. Oh, the memories. Maybe some new opportunities will come up at some point. 2020 isn’t over, after all. You’ve noticed that, right? Change is the order of the day. Be hopeful. Keep working it, baby! That’s my position, anyway.

During this event in 2019 my three colleagues and I streamed more than 50 interviews over three days with developers talking about a variety of technologies touching the Oracle ecosystem including Java, Database, Cloud, Applications Development, Linux, and Open Source. We spoke with some partners, customers, and Oracle executives too. And we also hosted and streamed live the Java Duke Awards Ceremony from our stage that day (as we did the previous year). It was all day every day! I miss it.

Jim Grisanzio (left) interviews Chris Thalinger (right) and Christian Wimmer (right) at Oracle Code 2019 in San Francisco.