Jeff Smith (left) and Jim Grisanzio (right).

I’m most interested in how people with technical skills solve difficult problems and create new opportunities; it always seems like magic! But they don’t just do this alone. They create leverage. They use advanced tools to help extend their ideas and implement their solutions. And they also collaborate in teams internally at the company and with developers in software communities globally.

Jeff Smith is one of those people. He’s a distinguished product manager on the Oracle Database team, and he’s been working with database technology for 20 years. He’s experienced many things along the way, and I check in with him occasionally to see what’s going on. I’m never disappointed.

In this conversation, we talked about some interesting features that have been emerging in the Oracle Database recently, such as a fully integrated development environment right in the console for rapidly building RESTful web services. With just a few clicks, developers can be coding SQL or uploading JSON documents with predefined, editable schemas, so developers can have the best of both worlds.

But it goes beyond technology. Smith, like his colleagues on the database team, is fully embedded in the community and has been so for decades. I’ve always told members of the Oracle community that it’s important for them to realize that they play a critical role in how the technology advances. Smith agrees and says the influence of the community for Oracle Database is huge. In this podcast, he tells the story of how he’s seen code that was directly influenced by interactions with the community integrated into GitHub repositories.

We talked about many more items, of course. Give a listen below and let us know what you think. And for more, follow the links below. Cheers.