I need to get this writing thing on!

For weeks I am trying to put things on ‘paper’ but the words are just not coming. I have a lot of thoughts in my head that want OUT but I have not even touched a pen, notepad, Evernote, etc. Now is the time to end this procrastination!

Why do I even want to write?

I feel like I owe it to the SAP community which has kindly given me so much over the past years without asking anything in return. In all honesty I can say that I think I have knowledge in particular areas that are worth sharing with an audience other than my company and the occasional SAP Inside Track. So therefore I am pushing myself into writing this all down. Problem is that I get distracted a lot (insert funny joke that distracts me at this instance) and this lack of ability to focus is driving me crazy at times and makes me want to pull out my hairs (as you can see I have this issue for quite some time now). If people have tips to overcome that: please share!!

Another reason why I want to write is that I want to be able to write. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone but it’s definitely a skill I’d like to learn. I’m also hoping for good feedback which could increase the quality of my blogs and/or be inspirational for future blog posts.

In any case if my blogs are helpful to 1 or more persons than this mission is already succeeded 🙂

So what are the topics that I would like to be writing about?

Last year I have been busy with product development. We created a solution to mobilize the SAP CRM Webclient. The process of how it got to the point where it is actually live at a customer is very interesting and I think it could help a lot of people in doing that same thing (I fear for some puppy’s life if I call it innovation so let’s call it product development).

Another thing I have been working on was a mobility project in Oslo, Norway where we implemented the Sybase Unwired Platform 2.2, Retail Execution 3.0  app for Android and a custom app that we built 2 years ago for time writing. This project comes with some good lessons learned which could also aid others. I will speak about this on the SAP Inside Track in Hamburg on June 1st and a blog post will probably follow after that.

Another topic that is close to me is ABAP development and the present and future of it. This week SAP NetWeaver 7.4 was made Generally Available (GA) and it comes with tons of cool stuff for ABAP developers like better integration with SAP HANA and some other language improvements that I need to check out myself as well. Also the ABAP Development Tools (aka ABAP in Eclipse) are more matured which is also very exciting (including WDA abilities).

When I play around with new ABAP features I noticed that some ABAP developers had a hard time grasping these changes. Even worse: a lot of them are still weary of ABAP Objects. I used to have a strong opinion about these people (something like: if you are too ignorant to adopt object orientation in ABAP then you’re useless to your employer/client) but it is more complicated than that and I don’t want to look down upon these people who are my peers (or any people really). Instead I’d rather find ways to help them. Deep down they do know that they’re lagging behind and no one wants to be a laggard. Whether they actually want my help or not is up to them. All I can do is offer it and they can use it to their advantage or discard it. My first step in that was a presentation at the SAP Inside Track in The Netherlands (slides here), The Netherlands last year. Not quite the target audience as these people gave up a free Saturday to spend a (great) day of sharing SAP knowledge but it was a first step and the nice discussion we had afterwards proved that the subject was a good one. There are some plans brewing on how to move forward with this so hopefully you will see some results of it anytime soon.

Apart from all that I would love to dive deeper into HANA and share my knowledge around that. And since I am one of the new SAP Mentors I am also excited what doors the SAP Mentor program might open. In any case I am looking forward to collaborating on fun stuff and hopefully you will see a lot more of me this year.

If you have read this post then please let me know by means of a (brief) comment. If you see me at an event, please don’t be a stranger and do say hello. As much as I like social media there is nothing like meeting people you interact with in real life.

See you soon!