oracle

The end of the year is coming and before that happens I’d like to shortly recap the year of 2025. In tech for me personally it was mostly about a large migration of a customers’ environment from on premises Exadata X9 to Exadata X11 @ Azure including loads of surrounding systems. Since I didn’t do much with basic infrastructure in Azure in the past the learning curve was quite steep at the beginning. But in the end the differences between all the big cloud solutions out there aren’t that large so we were quite successful in doing that migration.

That was the major reason I was not able to blog in the amount I liked to. On the other hand I had the honor to speak about several topics at the two main Oracle related conferences in Germany. At DOAG conference in Nürnberg I was on stage for 3 times which was new to me as I normally only get one slot per conference. If you’re interested at what I spoke about have a look at my appearances page.

From other talks at the aforementioned meetups you could see a general shift in interest to the so called “AI” hype which is something I don’t give much about (yet). In it’s current state I doubt that it can be helpful outside of some corner cases and it outshines more important things like data sovereignity and security. So two of my talks were about the latter topic and how to improve it in OCI. Not only particularly in this area but also in general I think it’s not a good idea to give up thinking yourself and letting that do some random algorithm that pretends to be an “intelligence”.

tools

Apart from that I changed a bit of my working environment and switched editors. The whole electron debacle after the release of macOS Tahoe was a good starting point to ditch VSCode which lately became more and more “AI” focused with nothing new for non-vibe old school users like me. So I first tried out helix which is quite a fresh way of editing in a terminal emulator. It has some advantages compared to (n)vim and the biggest one is that you don’t need a package manager or thousands of plugins. But there’s a learning curve for aged vi(m) users since helix uses a different motion/action-scheme. But that wasn’t the reason I went on and tried more.

Since I often develop/edit on remote servers I like the approach of having my IDE handle the session management for me. Apart from VScode there’s another editor that does this to my needs and that is Zed. That one is now my main editor and this blog post is the first one I’m writing using it. Zed is written in rust and so fast you don’t notice any delays on Apple devices with Apple Silicon. It also has nearly everything included and in the rare case it doesn’t, you probably find a good extension.

Apart from editors I also tried a new terminal app that meets my desire for as native as possible apps. Ghostty is written in zig – omg, another new programming languaage – but has a native SwitfUI interface on macOS. It has a really nice included split view and a pleasing UI that doesn’t get in your way. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, you should give it a try. If there’s some feature to be requested that would be a graphical settings dialogue. If you’re interested in my config, see at the end of this page.

biking

Apart from all that computer stuff this year also happened some nice private and hobby things. The first time in my life I was in Norway and it was the greatest vacation I had so far. It is a very lovely country and apart from a very respectful society it’s nature is really stunning. Stunning was also my second ride at the Dreiländergiro with my road bike and my first ride up the Stelvio in Italy. Apart from a hard fight against altitude and heat it was an overwhelming experience with a great crowd and beautiful Alps. Of course I said ’never again’ after the ride ;-).

That’s all for now. In the next months I’ll write more about Oracle related topics again since every project that hinders this comes to an end. Like this year, cheers folks.

appendix: my ghostty config

font-family = "Source Code Pro"
font-size = 11
window-width = 160
window-height = 40
cursor-style = block
cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor, ssh-env, no-ssh-terminfo
theme = Catppuccin Macchiato
keybind = global:cmd+.=toggle_quick_terminal
window-padding-x = 8
window-padding-y = 2
window-padding-balance = true
window-padding-color = extend
background-opacity = 0.90
background-opacity-cells = true
background-blur = true
macos-icon = xray
macos-titlebar-proxy-icon = hidden
bell-features = no-attention, no-title