Monday, March 22, 2010

Scott Spadafore

Nearly 10 years ago, Scott and I worked on a Consulting project in Chicago, enthusiastically writing J2EE applications, extending the Oracle E-Business Suite, and headed for near certain project failure, when our team got introduced to some obscure group of Sales Consultants out of Oracle Government, Education and Healthcare. They showed us a web development framework called “Oracle Platform”, which was based on PL/SQL of all languages. Surely this couldn’t be any good, so un-cool, so last century, so not Java. Yet given the mess our project was in, we had no alternatives, had to give it a try and actually managed to bring this project to a successful close.

We were so much older then, ….

Web Bid & Compliance Team, July 2001

A few months later, Scott and I joined the “Oracle Platform” team, which today is better known as the APEX team – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Scott passed away last night. I truly enjoyed working with him over all these years and hanging out with him, whenever we had a chance to meet. I don’t think APEX and the APEX community would be what they are today without his many contributions. Thank you Scott!