Intro
For me, it was the first #sitnl I attended. Mind you, I’d been to SIT Bonn (feb 2010) and SIT Brussels (sep 2010), but in my home country, I couldn’t make it the first two years (shame on me!). So to make up for my absence, and because it’s a great and fun event, I offered to help with the organisation, host a session, and I even agreed to play operator during the day. So what became of all that, and how did the event go?
Organisation/preparations
We had a good team consisting of 6 people of 5 different companies (there is your community aka Dutch SAP Mafia), and while Twan van den Broek did by far most of the preparations (with assistance of his Ciber squad on Friday and Saturday), we all did play our part in it. During the wrap up at the end I was very happy to see Pim de Wit on stage to thank Twan for all the effort that he put into this third(!) SAP Inside Track NL. He even had to miss the championship game (soccer) of his son. Kudos to you Twan!
My own session on NetWeaver Gateway
Here I have some mixed feelings. I was/am still recovering from a cold, and my throat didn’t exactly behave the way I wanted. That already took me a lot of time (sleep) during the week before the event, and as a result I reverted to a plain TechEd recap presentation without any additional fun (aka demo). I also owe a big "Thank you" to Chris Whealy who kindly sent me the slides from his Expert Networking Session `Gateway for the uninformed’. So while it could certainly have been better, I think in the end the presentation went reasonably well, and I was for sure very glad to be able to finally contribute to an SAP Inside Track. In Bonn and Brussels I only came as a participant (leecher?). My feedback from this event: it’s even more fun if you contribute!
Playing operator
Well, to cut this one short: I didn’t. The guys who did the operating, Bernard Smits and Michael Hardenbol, didn’t mind at all to do it, they did a great job, and to be honest, I didn’t mind either ;-). So all I want to say is:
#sitnl in general
So, how was #sitnl in general? Well, it was a blast! One of the most important aspects of such an event is the networking, and I'm glad to say I managed to (re-)connect with a lot of people, ranging from former colleagues at customers till people I ‘only’ knew from Twitter.
Some sessions
In one word: excellent! I attended a good mix of TechEd recap and ‘off topic’ sessions and had a lot of fun!
- DJ Adams’ session about the Alternative Dispatcher Layer was not new to me, but still a great topic. Here's the nugget with his framework. Speaking about contributing to the community!
- Tobias Trapp told about his experience with the ABAP package concept from an ISV point of view, and how important it is to use it properly. I’m looking forward to the promised blog post about the subject (no pressure)!
- Jan Penninkhof had a hilarious session about other alternative (sic!) ways to create a mobile app. Watch this video about the overratedness of frameworks to grasp the atmosphere. He also called out to the SAP execs about SUP licensing and did some live coding on stage! A guy who wants to live dangerously ;-). Be sure to catch the replay!
- Twan van den Broek, otherwise very active as a photographer (apart from all the organizing) used some spare time(?) to host a good session about the convergence of BPM and PI aka Business Process Orchestration. To his own frustration he couldn’t connect to a 7.31 system for a live demo, but the movie shown certainly did make up for it. There were also some good questions from the audience. A very useful session IMO.
- Martijn Linssen, not from the SAP community, but an enterprise integration architect who is very active on twitter and as a blogger, held a thought-provoking session about core integration issues. Just one quote:
- Last but not least Matthias Steiner introduced us to the new java-PaaS from SAP, at the moment known as ‘project River’. It was a very interesting and also personal session, which I had attended at TechEd and liked very much. I’m glad he shared it with the Dutch SAP community too, one day after doing it remotely at SAP Inside Track Rio de Janeiro!
Demojam
After all the parallel sessions (I heard some complaints about that btw, people found it (too) hard to choose!) it was time for Rui Nogueira to host the #sitnl demojam. Again he did a fantastic job, and we could enjoy 5 compelling demos. Official winner: DJ Adams, after a close finish with Gregor Wolf! I’ll leave it to someone else to cover this in detail but IMO there were 6 winners: the 5 entries, and the audience!
Dinner
After demojam and the wrap up by Twan (and Pim) it was time for the highlight of the day, which was already eagerly anticipated by many: the #sitnl dinner, prepared by the now famous Mrs Penninkhof. And it was indeed delicious! As proved by this (example) tweet:
Was that all?
Well almost, if it wasn’t for a most enthusiastic supporter and attendant from India who watched the whole day. Thank you Kumud Singh for your enthusiasm and online presence! There were of course more people online but she really stood out.
Wrap up
With that I would like to finish this blog post which is getting too long already: again we’ve seen what’s possible if enough passionate people gather to discuss SAP-related stuff. This tweet of Darren Hague expresses it perfectly:
A big thank you to all participants, and I hope to see you all next year!
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