Celebration party for an award

When you win you need to celebrate. This was the line of thinking when I found out that I was part of a group that won the Oracle SOA Community Country Award.

Well - thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACE's and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that's what makes you an ACE).

After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen.

Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACE's are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was great - although I expected some more folks :-( . This was mainly due to some illness and work overload.

Luckily the mini-party got going, (alcoholic) beverages were consumed, food was appreciated, a decent picture was made (see below) and all had a good chat and hopefully a good time.

(Above from left to right: Eric Elzinga, Andreas Chatziantoniou, Mike van Aalst, Edwin Biemond)

The only minor disappointment of the day was that the organizer of the SOA Community was not capable of joining. Neither directly nor via a Skype video feed. Apparently there were some adverse weather conditions near his home office that required his attention - and the use of a kite ;-)
Jürgen - with you we would have had even more fun. 

All in all a nice evening and certainly a "meeting" which can be repeated.