At the end of 2008, I wound up a good sized engagement as its program manager, and went on vacation. When I showed up at work after that - I had an awesome oportunity waiting for me. A short term gig - A project that needs an extra pair of hands to work on some CRM planning application.
I started my career as an ABAPer, and then moved on to some functional areas, BI, SEM etc. All through - my weapon of choice when trouble hit me, was ABAP. Don't know how some functionality works in IMG - hey put a '/h' and debug it. Can't make allocations work with standard SEM functionality - code an exit function....you get the idea. But as time progressed, although I continued to keep tab of all design activities in my projects - I hardly got a chance to write any code myself.
Then along comes this new gig - and the moment I got the requirements, it has been flashing on my mind "the only way out is to code". Now, I do have expert programmers in this project, people whose skills are definitely more current and better than mine in the subject. However, I couldn't help trying out the coding by myself, albeit with a limited intention : to get a prototye working so that some one can build a good production application out of it later.
So with all the confidence in the world, I opened up the function builder and started to code. Now, I was a darn good ABAPer when it was my full time job. I used to pride myself that I can write a whole program without ever doing a syntax check (actually a naive game that we used to play in those days - with associated bragging rights as the prize). While I did expect my ABAP to be rusty - I sure did not expect to find that most of what I typed was declared OBSOLETE by the compiler. You know, when I left ABAP - it was legal to say "data itab like blahblah occurs 0 with header line"..and classes and methods were things that were only used by developers in SAP labs.
Any way, I did find how to write the code the "modern way", with lots of SDN help. I did not find much difficlty with the algorithm itself - guess it is like driving. Once you learn it - you probably can do it later, even if you have had a gap in between. In about a day's time - I could make the application work in BPS. It was amazing - the sheer joy of watching the final program compiling and executing flawlessly - it gave me a huge boost, the type I never get in my regular job these days.
When I was a full time programmer, I used to have this weird problem - Code will start showing up in my dreams, and I will single step through it - and sometimes it will go into infinite loops and I will panic and wake up from sleep. My family used to make a lot of fun of me. Thankfuly, I have not relapsed into that stage this time - at least not yet.
Well - that is it. I will offload the actual development to an expert this week. Hopefully he won't make much fun of me after seeing the code. This experience has set me thinking. A lot of people I know - briliiant configurators and programmers, are doing "management" roles now. Most of them excel in management and they seem to like it too. I am planning to ping them and see if they would ever like to go back to their "roots" one more time . I have a sure they will get a kick out of it - like I did.
I will most probably go back to my regular job as soon as I finish this assignment, but I have made a note to myself. I will definitely do some development myself in every assignment - something small at least. It is too good to miss out - and hey I don't want any compiler ever telling me that what I wrote is OBSOLETE. I am not THAT old.
