Blog It Forward – Vinod Kumar

This blog is part of Blog It Forward Community Challenge initiated by xMoshe Naveh (Old Acct)

I was tagged by Kumud Singh in her Blog It Forward post.  This is my first blog in SCN and what an interesting topic to start with  !!!

About me

     I am Vinod Kumar , working as a lead ABAP consultant with NIIT Technologies, India & moderator in SCN ABAP Development space.  I was born and brought up in Kerala , a tiny state of India which is referred to “God’s own country“ by the state government as a slogan to promote tourism. I’m currently staying in Mumbai with my wife and 4 year old son.  I completed my graduation in Mathematics, PG Diploma in Computer Science and Masters in Computer Applications.  I am into programming since last 14 years, worked in  COBOL,  FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic & Oracle D2K before moving to ABAP  around 6 years back. 🙂 🙂 .

     My entry into ABAP development was not preplanned, but (in fact) unexpected. We (around a team of 35 Oracle programmers) were working on a legacy support project during client’s switch over from Oracle applications to SAP.  Our organization was handling both SAP implementation as well as legacy support during the clients change over period.  Post SAP go-live, for internal resourcing of SAP/JAVA projects, we were offered 3 week class room training on either JAVA or ABAP.  We few opted for ABAP, and after 6 years I am happy for my selection.

      My journey with SCN started in early 2010,  mostly with ABAP development forums & wiki space.  Exactly after one year, it was a big surprise when I received a mail from xMoshe Naveh (Old Acct) intimating my selection as a moderator in ABAP development space.   I felt privileged to be part moderators team of Thomas Zloch , Rob Burbank, Matthew Billingham .

My wife Dhanya & son Aarav during our vacation in Manali, Himachal Pradesh

Snow filled mountains of Manali.

Three Questions

1) Latest books you have read and would suggest community members to read as well?

I am not an avid reader, so its better to stay away from recommending a book to community members 😉 .   My recent read is “It happened in India” – a success story of biggest retain chain in India (also my first SAP Project client).

2) Had you not been into software at all, where would you have been?

Most probably a teacher. IT career was not in my mind till I completed graduation.  Post-graduation in Mathematics was the goal, so started my pre-graduation & graduation with Mathematics as a main subject.  But eventually, could not get admission to Post graduation (less seats, many with more marks than me 😛 ).  So next option was to wait for one year & try for B.Ed – Bachelor of education (Mandatory for teacher’s job in Kerala).  But my dad suggested, why only B.Ed ? why don’t you try for Computer science & here I am now…  🙂

3) Biggest challenge as a Mentor / Moderator?

I became moderator of ABAP development space in April’2011.  As beginner in moderators team, the biggest challenge was to guide users to follow “Rules of Engagement” of forum (No link farming, No copy & paste answers) and moving the forum posts with basic questions to apprentice/beginner’s forum ( We are still awaiting for that functionality in new SCN 🙁 )  .  But with experienced moderators – Thomas, Matt, Rob & Julius it was fun and exciting.  Another challenge is communication with the author /poster.  A simple sign of aggression is considered as mis-utilization of moderator power. I feel, choosing the right words in communication/comments is one of the essential quality a moderator should have.   In ABAP development space, we follow certain standard comments while moderating the discussions (thanks to Thomas Zloch for his guidance).

With New SCN, moderation is not only restricted to discussions.  Biggest challenge in new SCN,  is to stop the users from posting the discussions as documents/blogs. In such cases, I recommend the author/poster to read Jeanne Carboni‘s blog – Be Careful How You Post .

Blogging It Forward

I would like to Blog It Forward to Kesavadas Thekkillath, Suhas Saha and Ravi Sankar Venna and would be happy to see their answers for

1) Recommend resources of information that helped you in your work

2) If you could be a super hero (or are in your spare time) who would you be?

3)  What do you most enjoy on SCN?

I wanted to “Blog It forward” Thomas Zloch too , but now I noticed Jelena Perfiljeva had already tagged him.  Looking forward to see his BIF post.

Thanks for reading my blog, looking forward to see more “Blog it Forward”s from the community members.  If you missed out any blog in BIF series, have a look at Blog It Forward Chain.