Get up, stand up, set up your IDE – week 1

[hofmann]

The course: Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Running from October 28, 2013 to December 9 - 16, 2013 (final exam)

tl;dr Participate in the course, it is worth your time!

While I was still occupied with the open SAP MOOC course “Introduction to Mobile Solution Development” the course “Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud Platform” started. To keep the stress level high, this meant to sit for the final exam and afterwards starting with the HCP course. There is another course running in parallel to this one, indicating a high demand and server load. While that aren’t good indications that I’ll be able to download the course material and to go through it without getting server errors, up to now I get unpreceded speed and stability from open.sap.com: downloading the videos is fast and just works.

So, how was week 1? Boring. Downloading software, setting it up, entering x times my user name and password, import sample projects into Eclipse, deploying, checking, debugging. The usual stuff you do when setting up your IDE and SDK for the 1^st time. To keep things simple, the standard SDK sample applications are used. The benefit here is: these are also documented in the Hana help page and even when you miss(ed) the course, they are still available. While this is boring by definition, it is more than necessary to know the basics about a platform and how to use it. While this step can be cumbersome, doing it right pays off in the end. Therefore, this week for sure is important. Maybe more important than you may think.

While the course material wasn't made specifically for the course (up to now), Rui is dedicated. He is publishing a blog for every week to help students learn better, to be better prepared for the week. Short: he is trying to share more knowledge. The discussion forum provided for the course is full of question, but I won’t be surprised if this will stay only for the first few weeks, afterwards the number of interactions will go down.

The number of inscriptions as of writing of this blog is 17146. Not much, but considering that many people in the SAP ecosystem treat Java as it were a plague, not bad. I guess the number will be around 22.000 at the end of the course.

Why is the deadline for homework Monday? I liked that the deadline for the weekly homework was on Tuesday for the mobility course. #stress