Yesterday I attended this event. It was in Darmstadt (Germany) where I have already worked for 2 clients in the past and had a permanent job in the region for several years. I was arriving in the city by train from Munich the evening before and stayed in a hotel.
The event started at 10:00 and was held in the facilities of Deutsche Telekom. Three days before we were given instructions about installing prerequisites and the day before late afternoon these instructions were given in more detail. This was a little bit late but I could install most of the prerequisites in time. The last of them in the night before the event. So it was necessary that we had SMP 3.0 SP4 SDK on our laptops, Java Development Kit, Eclipse (which I already had) and Android SDK. For development with Cordova (which I did not) additional software would have been required. The CodeJam started with some theory given by two employees of SAP. The a stick with exercises and solutions was given out and handed to the participants (they have forgotten to send it to us by email earlier). It was also necessary to load additional components for the Android SDK which took some time. Then it was already lunch-time and we were provided with Pizza and drinks by our hosts. I take this opportunity to mention that the infrarstructure provided by our hosts was good (maybe the resolution of the beamer was a little bit low which handicapped the instructors when showing complex screens). After that we continued with the exercise but in my case I still had to download Android SDK components. When this was finished I managed with the help of the instructors to run the solution of the exercise in a smartphone-emulator on my laptop. At the end we were given another theory session about SAP Mobile. And at 16:00 the event ended.
All in all I am quite happy with the event. SAP Mobile is still new to me. I have developed with ABAP/OO in CRM and BW and Visual Basic.Net in the SAP Mobile Sales (on laptop) solution in the last 15 years and have no experience to develop smartphone apps. I only have taken an openSAP online training about SAP Mobile development, even including the certificate. So I have learned somthing new during this event even as I did not understand everything. I still have to put some more effort into this topic. Especially as the development environment is very different to the SE80 in SAPGUI and as I have to install a whole bunch of components on my laptop before. This is something which I regard as basis work and which I did not do anymore after I stopped working with SAP Mobile Sales (on laptops).
I will look out for future SAP CodeJams and will try to attend them if work allows and if they are not too far away.
