I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the Blogger Program at SAP TechEd && d-code last week. I had a busy week of meetings and meet-ups, keynotes, briefings, etc. and I also did a couple of presentations on SAPUI5.
Several times I found myself trying to explain to people why this web development stuff is so hard.
My pitch went something like this.
"This SAPUI5, Javascript, oData, Gateway stuff is not as easy as some people make out. It is not just opening up the manual and doing a bit of reading. Neither is it taking a few OpenSAP courses or doing a few tutorials and you will have it covered. Learning the syntax of Javascript is not enough. Learning all the SAPUI5 controls off by heart is not enough. Knowing how to use transaction SEGW to model your Gateway service and then falling back onto good old ABAP to do the heavy lifting is not good enough either."
"All this stuff takes time to learn, time to get experienced with, and requires time to fail. You will not get this right the first time - or the second - or the third. As you learn more you will come up with new, and better, techniques to achieve what you want to achieve. Sometimes these new techniques will be developed because you realise you could have done something better. Sometimes a colleague will share his techniques and you will find pieces of them better than yours. Sometimes you will learn from others sharing via SCN or Stackoverflow."
"Also the underlying technology will change - and you will need to change to adapt to it. For example, the whole way that SAPUI5 does in-app navigation changed in release 1.16 and, while the previous techniques will still work, the new way needs to be absorbed and understood."
"It is all about experience. And the only way to get experience is to do it. Then do it again, and again, and again. Refactor old code to adopt new techniques. Share and learn from others. Always be looking for better ways. Rely on proven design patterns rather than create your own."
You get the idea I hope.
So, I am in this meeting with sam.yen. Sam is the Global Head of Design and User Experience at SAP. He is largely responsible for SAP’s focus on design, and design thinking, and the end-user. He is a designer - I am a techie. Sam listens to me struggling for several minutes to describe how important I think experience will become with SAPUI5 developers and he sums it up in two words.
“It’s golf”.
Don’t you hate that?
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