A New Look

A New Start…

Quite a lot has changed since I last posted on this website. I had just left Oracle to join Google… A year and a half later I returned to Oracle. I had loads of fun at Google, but I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to return to Oracle and work on a database that I’ve spent my entire working life using and contributing to.

So now I’m back at Oracle and had some time to settle back in, I decided to improve a few things. One was my website dominicgiles.com. It had got a little tired and I struggled with the tool I used to create it. Somewhat annoyingly, it has corrupted the website’s source and that meant I could no longer make any changes. Not a big deal; I had been planning to look at other solutions. The corruption spurred me on, forcing me to look at alternatives. The old web site, even when I could update it, had a number of problems. It was built for viewing on a desktop and not a mobile device. Publishing content was also more complex than it needed to be as I had to convert content written in Markdown back into the format used the old tool. The rendering of example code, particularly XML, was problematic. So a change was needed but what?

I spent some time looking at tools that simplify the management and creation of static websites. I looked at WordPress and thought it was a massive overkill over what I needed. What I wanted was something that allowed me to work in Markdown and leveraged Git. After I had settled on those two criteria, the decision was simple. After some friendly nudging from my friend and colleague Jeff Smith I started looking at the static web site generation tool Jekyll. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its simplicity and obvious mode of operation. At least to me. The move to Jekyll has resulted in a new website that makes it simpler for me to update and publish content in a fashion that I feel comfortable with.

You should be reading this blog on the new website. I’ll be pushing out some new content (and old updated content) in the coming days, including a couple of blogs I’ve been working on. I’ll try and keep as much of the old content available as possible but it’s likely that some of it is no longer relevant of just will be to hard to migrate. So stick with me as the transition takes place.

So that’s it. I’m back working for Oracle, and as the saying goes. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

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