The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

I’m Javier Delgado and this is how I work July 13, 2015

July’s entry in the ‘How I Work’ series is PeopleSoft Blogger Javier Delgado. Javier is a PeopleSoft consultant and manages the PeopleSoft Practice at BNB (Business Network Builders). Javier has been writing on his ‘Javier’s PeopleSoft blog‘ site since 2007, however it’s only in the last couple of years that he’s started posting really regularly. In fact his 24 posts in 2015 probably make him last year’s most prolific blogger. We often link to his posts from the PeopleSoft Weekly as he posts on great topics, including Cloud deployments, upgrading with zero downtime and doing cool things with Integration Broker. Javier can be followed on Twitter here: @javierdelgado

Name: Javier Delgado

Occupation: PeopleSoft Practice Manager at BNB
Location: Madrid, Spain
Current computer: MacBook Pro 13” (8GB RAM, 512GB SSD)
Current mobile devices: Samsung Galaxy S5, Apple iPad 2, Amazon Kindle
I work: as a consultant, or practice leader, or project manager. Whatever is needed within the circumstances. Although my main responsibility is being the leader of the PeopleSoft and Cloud practices at BNB, I still prefer the hands on work.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
I use PeopleBooks as a constant reference source, in particular the API and Language Reference books. I also refer to them when learning a new module or functionality (lately I’ve been playing a bit with REST services and P-Card features in Purchasing).

For issue resolution on non open parts of PeopleSoft, Google search and My Oracle Support are always of great information.

Lately, I’ve been using Feedly and Twitter lists as a source for research. I save any item that interests me in Pocket and future actions to be taken in Trello boards. Virtualization, and VirtualBox in particular is a great way to practice in a controlled sandbox environment.

Finally, I extensively use Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides and other plugin applications) to produce deliverables collaborating with the rest of the team. Earlier this year I uninstalled Microsoft Office from my machine. Will I survive?

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without?
It is not a gadget in all its forms, but I can’t live without books. When reading literature, I prefer printed books, while I normally read technical books using my Kindle. Don’t ask me why I make this distinction. It just happens.

What’s your workspace like?
Normally a mess. This has motivated me to get rid of paper as much as I can. In the last year or so, I always took notes using my Macbook Pro. This is the only way I can be sure of not losing my notes. On top of it, my workspace is much tidier.

What do you listen to while you work?
I very rarely listen to music while working, mostly when there is too much environmental noise. In such cases, I normally use a classical music playlist I have in Spotify.

What PeopleSoft-related productivity apps do you use?
My preferred tool is tracing. I’ve always found PeopleSoft traces very information and normally use it almost for every issue I need to diagnose. More importantly, it is very reliable: if it is not in the trace, it didn’t happen.

Lately I have been playing around with some custom Javascript within PeopleSoft pages. Google Chrome seems to have the best debugging console for web applications. I guess I will be using it more and more with the advent of the new Fluid user interface.

Do you have a 2-line tip that some others might not know?
Inspecting the HTML pages is a great way to identify fields and then map them to record fields, but this was also shared by others in this same space.

One thing I found particularly useful lately are the Query Access Services than enable third party access to queries through web services. Once you got the integration done for one query, it is very easy to extend to further ones. The potential for quickly delivering web services to third party applications is great.

What SQL/Code do you find yourself writing most often?
Definitely the Effective Date subquery. %EffDtCheck meta sql has helped a lot, but it still does not work as expected for the JOB table, as it would include EFFSEQ as a join in the subquery used to retrieve the maximum EFFDT.

On top of that, I use the database specific functionality to create working tables based on a query (CREATE TABLE AS in Oracle and SELECT INTO in SQL Server).

What would be the one item you’d add to PeopleSoft if you could?
Quite a few, mostly around Application Designer. From my point of view, this was a great IDE more than a decade ago, but it has not evolved as other IDEs used for Java and Javascript development. It is still a very productive tool, but there are a few features that would make it better.

One way would be to enable third party developers to produce plugins to complement Application Designer features. With thisability, it would not take too long before programming tools such as versioning, lint and refactoring were made available to the PeopleSoft community at no cost.

On the other hand, and although I think Fluid is a great step forward, it almost made the page design redundant. True, we still use pages with group boxes to set the responsive divs in our Fluid pages, but it seems to me a rather complex way of doing things. This is probably out of the bounds of this answer, but I see room for a new paradigm, pretty much a PeopleSoft 8 compared to previous versions. Unfortunately, I don’t think Oracle has the same plans in mind.

What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?
I have a quite broad knowledge of PeopleSoft architecture, development and functionality. This is purely based in that I always wanted to work with software. In other words, I love what I do, and I don’t think there is a better fuel than passion.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
From my literature teacher in my last year at high school. He was giving the grades of the previous exam to the final one. He first addressed the people who had passed the exam by inches, telling them to make a bigger effort for the final exam. Then, he told the ones having the best grades: “you should make an even bigger effort, as there is no shorter path for mediocrity than self complacency. Always believe in yourselves, but always doubt, as doubt will protect you from self complacency.” There is a bit lost in translation from Spanish, but I hope I made the idea clear.