My first year as a RADAPEX DTS Degree Apprentice

Why I applied

Starting my DTS apprenticeship at RADAPEX, I didn’t know what to expect, I obviously knew what the company did from my research and the interview stages but this would be my first foray into the world of commercial IT and programming real world projects for real world clients. My previous programming experiences were all for small hobby projects that rarely saw the light of day, some however, I deployed into a production environment (a cheap £3 VPS) and managed to get some real users! This gave me a small window into the world of managing production systems, dealing with users and showed me how fun it was to make things for people that actually use them, I think these experiences together made up a significant part of why I wanted to jump headfirst into the IT industry and start working as soon as possible. Also, something that’s always worth mentioning when talking about degree apprenticeships is the lack of debt! All my university tuition is paid for, I get so much valuable experience, a degree and a full time salary!

My first few weeks

When I joined, I was given a new MacBook, a big change for a then devout Windows user and was taught the basics of Oracle APEX and PL/SQL. This was a new language and technology to me, only having done the very basics of SQL at college. I had used Java and Python before joining and this was hugely beneficial, the PL/SQL syntax seemed alien at first but it fundamentally works exactly the same as any other programming language and I found it relatively easy to pick up, especially with the support of my line manager and mentors. Of course, as with any language, it has its own quirks that you learn with time but it is a very powerful language that, for what it offers, is relatively simple to get a basic grasp of. I found both my mentors and the RADAPEX style guide extremely helpful when trying to learn how to write clear and readable PL/SQL and what I have learned directly translates into the other languages. 

Whilst learning about PL/SQL, I was also learning RADAPEX’s core application framework, Oracle APEX. This is a low-code application builder that allows you to make MVPs in hours and production ready applications in a much shorter time than with regular technologies. APEX is a fun, unique technology and I slowly grew in proficiency, eventually earning the Oracle APEX Developer Professional certification. Oracle APEX runs in the database and you build applications with it on top of your PL/SQL code, whilst it is a low-code solution making reliable, maintainable applications requires a variety of programming knowledge, whether that be just in the APEX builder or in the actual PL/SQL code that powers the applications, so don’t be put off by ‘low-code’ thinking you won’t write much code!

Starting university

I started university about 3 weeks after joining, this was an aspect of the degree apprenticeship I knew very little about, I had no idea on how the content would be delivered, how we evidenced things we did in the work place and or even what ‘off the job’ learning was. These were all explained to me clearly in the induction week. It was a great week organised by my university where I learned all about the course and what I would be doing for the next 4 years. I also met all of my fellow apprentices, all from a variety of different backgrounds and organisations. It was really interesting finding out how different apprentices were finding work, one key thing that kept being mentioned was working from home. I found this very surprising as I had already learned so much from my colleagues, line manager and mentor in the office as I could just turn and ask them a question. RADAPEX works primarily in the office and even today I find it incredibly useful. I hear stories from the other apprentices at different organisations who have to schedule meetings and block out time with people just to ask one really quick question.

Managing the assignments and work is sometimes a little stressful, especially as deadlines start to loom; however both my university and RADAPEX have been hugely supportive and I have never felt like it has been ‘too much’. Something I was nervous about starting an apprenticeship instead of going down the university route was the lack of social opportunities; however, I have been to my university's ‘Apprentice Society’ socials and they have been a really great way to unwind after a long week.

My first application

Once I had learned the basics of APEX and PL/SQL, I was given a realistic project, the ‘Holiday App’, to deliver as part of my learning. It taught me about the basics of project management, dealing with requirements from users (my line manager!) and working through individual tickets. I had regular check-ins with my line manager and mentor and I got to submit merge requests where they left invaluable feedback on my code, allowing me to iterate and make it better. This project also taught me the basics of accessibility and security, two topics which I have since taken a significant interest in! I was even given the opportunity to blog on application security, you can read it here. Eventually, we had a go-live date set and it was deployed without issues, the application was used in production by real employees for around 2 months, this gave me further valuable experience on how to maintain an app, provide support for it and even build in some user feature requests as additional updates. It was eventually decommissioned and replaced with a proper ERP system. Reflecting on the original code, it’s clear how much I have learned, some of the system and table design choices I made then, I would not have made now!

Starting client work and my first production deployment!

I am now about two months into my degree apprenticeship. I have started university, learned about how RADAPEX manages projects, learned about Oracle APEX, PL/SQL, how to write production ready code and created a production application used internally. I have now started to work on some client projects. Initially, I had some very basic feature tickets assigned to me, I did these alongside my line manager and once they were all working, they were formally tested, the pull request was reviewed and it went through all of our environments. This eventually led to my first ever proper client production deployment, I was definitely a little nervous but I had confidence as it has been thoroughly tested and reviewed, to my relief, it went smoothly marking my first of many production deployments successful!

Learning about infrastructure

After working on a few releases which all went equally as well, we were presented with one problem which required a change to the web servers that sit in front of Oracle APEX, I had only heard references to things like containers, Kubernetes, ORDS, nginx and web servers in passing at RADAPEX. I had used containers and nginx at home but never in a production environment, I had a great time learning these new technologies and once we understood the problem completely, we were able to implement an effective solution with minimal downtime. This was a great introduction to the world of infrastructure and web servers. A few months later a colleague and I created a one click production-ready Oracle APEX deployment in AWS that was powered by CDK, read more about that here. A few months after that I would go on to develop a fully automatic deployment of a web server stack using Ansible, fitting very bespoke client requirements, using previous work by a colleague as a starting point and reference.

AWS is a key technology that RADAPEX uses and they have been upskilling all employees in it, recently, I achieved both the Cloud Practitioner and AWS Solutions Architect associate certifications, RADAPEX purchased the exams for me and gave me enough time to study and experience with AWS to pass them. I also was given the time to study for some OCI exams, all of which I passed. I also got the opportunity to blog about these, you can read it here. All of this learning, I have been able to log as ‘off the job’ hours which are a key metric you have to maintain as an apprentice to keep government funding, at RADAPEX it has been very easy to hit the right amount of hours with the amount I have been learning.

RADPrint

Generating PDFs from a template is hard, this was something I found out fairly early on in my career, it can require expensive cloud based services and few templating libraries exist, very few for Oracle APEX. Some of our applications require printing, they currently use an expensive legacy solution which is going to be decommissioned. My colleagues and I were given a task; create a PDF generator system that runs in the cloud and is cheap. The solution we came up with ran both in AWS and natively in the browser, it used javascript and other AWS services and was overall a really fun project to get the opportunity to work on, it also was RADAPEX’s first open source project. You can read more about RADPrint here.

Final thoughts

Overall, my first year at RADAPEX has been an excellent and rewarding experience. I have been exposed to a wide range of opportunities and have developed significantly, technically, academically, and in general business acumen. I have gained valuable insight into how different projects are managed and delivered, which has helped broaden my understanding of the value our work brings. 

During this time, I have also witnessed the company’s substantial growth, with the team size tripling since I joined. I have been grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the company blog throughout the year, including posts like this one. We have many more articles covering Oracle APEX, RADAPEX, and related technologies, and I would highly recommend giving them a read.