The SAP eco-system is in a very exciting period of time where there is a rapid accumulation of industry technologies and community-based paradigms are driving the way forward.
In Australia - for a developer like myself, the reinvigorated appetites of the ‘enterprise’ towards investment in technology is a also welcome phenomenon. This is after an overall caution related to the Global Financial Crisis in the last half decade.
Recently, something much bigger has occurred. 3 days ago, the arrival of twins has rocked my world. I have taken leave from a project that will see a major Dairy company undertake a 4 year journey towards SAP integration. I miss that pace too and I will come back to that in a week’s time.
This is how day 3 went by.
7:00 AM: wake up make breakfast and lunch.
7:45 AM: catch up on SDN. Read up on Adobe AIR. Hey what’s this Adobe to HTML5 from smokescreen? Ha! It’s interesting but it is infancy stage technology – definitely watch this space.
8 AM : Dress-up my 4 year old. Argue about clothes. I wonder if his mum argue with him everyday? He wins this. It’s important to let your “team members” win some. I go pack mum’s clothes and decide to leave.
8:30 AM: hunt for 00000 sized clothes for the bubs.
10:30 AM : Go back to the house as dumb dad forgot the breastpump and the charger for the ipad. Those leaders who do not make mistakes have never made decisions. 🙂
11:45 AM: in the hospital. My wife and the Lola (Grandma) are not in. Lady comes in with the food. I grab the cheese and head for the NICU where the mum is feeding the twins.
1:30 PM: Back in the room. Login to the hospital wifi. Login to Code Exchange for the first time. ABAP2XLSX? Nice. It would be nice for SAP to develop native ABAP support for Excel ... in the same way as Adobe Forms. I guess, the community has to do it. I wonder if I can build a business case to use this in my current client. Will have define the use-case for BI and ECC-based Excel. Snooze.
Fill in the Australian Baby Bonus and Government-subsidized Paid Parental leave form for the wife. With Babies in Australia – you can have one or the other. But since we have twins Google says it’s probably best that we have 1 of each. “You can have baby bonus if your family income is less than 75,000$ for the next six months”. Talk to the accountant. Yes! We’re under for the next 6 month. We can have that.
3:00 PM: Feeding time. Help the mum walk to NICU.
3:20 PM In NICU. Bubs have lost weight but paediatrician says they’ve stabilized. Still in isolette (baby heating chambers) to prevent them from losing calories by trying to maintain their own temperature. I have head images of a manufacturing control chart while Baby 2 took 25 minutes to feed.
4:30 PM: Back in the room. Get all the dirty clothes. Eat lunch. Fill in newborn registration. Our Doctor came by. She’s glad that the mum can walk now. But the babies will have to stay in NICU. My head space was balancing tactical(today) requirements with medium-term(weekly) strategic implications.
4:59 PM: Go down to the reception to try to discuss arrangements for use of the NICU after the mum gets discharged. Missed it. Acceptable setback.
6:00 PM Opened up Adobe. Air, Flex, Flash? What’s the difference? As a SAP Developer do I need to understand Air intimately? I don’t think this HTML5 conversion for Adobe is viable for SAP apps at this stage. Need to reread the Sybase architecture how it will fit mobility.
6:30 PM Food comes in. Mum’s not in. I know the mum does not like the goulash so I eat that one. I stole some of the beans from her meat-pie dish though.
7:00 PM Disaster. 4 year old forgot he’s not wearing nappy. Called mum. Backup in 5 minutes. No spare pants –but we found a nappy. Yey! Disasters happen... you have to think you've put in enough investment on vision such that people around you take up and join the fight.
7:30 PM Visit the babies in the NICU. Kiss the mum. "Mano" from Lola Grandma (Mano - a Filipino gesture of blessing from grandparents and elder people. This is made by touching your forehead to the back of the elder's hand). Head home.
8:30 PM Home. Settle down the 4 year old as apparently he wanted to stay with mum and didn’t want to go home. 2 minute time-out. Settles with promise of putting wall stickers.
9:00 PM Dinner. Spam. Go to Coles. Buy some fruits for the mum.
10:00 PM have reread the Sybase 2011 Mobility Guide. Think about creating a Mobility Strategy document for my client as a personal project. The ITSMobile paper I wrote a few months back for the Warehouse need some attention. It really feels odd that the Warehouse Solution is a Dynpro screen-scraping technology and set apart from everything else on the mobility solution-path.
11 :00 PM: Write this blog. While watching Tour de France. Catch up on email from work. Some queries of specifications from the Philippine Development Center, W2D colleagues wanted to make adjustments to developments in unit testing, Sharepoint went down... redirected email traffic and sent some info to get people going in the right direction.
Tomorrow will have different things to do – but just as exciting. I do get reminded of basic organizational behaviour from the family. Business School probably prepared me for it. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’ll have a spare 2 hours in the evening. 🙂
