John built his first APEX application in 2010 while working in Oracle’s Global Sales Engineering group. He was immediately struck by how easy it was to create fully functional applications without writing a single line of code. Since then, APEX has been a core part of every role he’s held at Oracle, always finding ways to integrate it into his work.Motivated by APEX’s simplicity, John pursued deeper development skills—learning JavaScript, PL/SQL, HTML, and CSS—to extend what he could build. In 2016, he joined Oracle’s Demo Engineering team, focusing entirely on building APEX extensions for Fusion HCM, ERP, and EPM demos. This work deepened his expertise with Fusion REST and SOAP APIs and demonstrated how seamlessly APEX integrates with Oracle Cloud SaaS.John is also a licensed CPA, which gives him a unique perspective when building SaaS extensions—especially those that touch finance, HR, and operations.
He’s passionate about creating tools that not only work technically, but also make real business sense.Over the years, John has built APEX tools for field solution engineers, scheduling apps for SE managers, and countless SaaS extensions used in demos around the world.In 2024, when the APEX team invited him to join as a North America Product Manager, he jumped at the chance. “Joel Kallman was a hero to me,” John says.
To be in a role doing even a fraction of what Joel did is the honor of my career. I’ve spent thousands of hours demoing great products—but to now evangelize APEX, something I truly love, is a dream job.
John Kolden, Principal Product Manager