Interview with Maksim Rashchynski, UI Developer
Maksim Rashchynski
Senior UI Developer
Mindset Consulting | mindsetconsulting.com
You are well-respected in the SCN community for your UI/UX best practices and expertise in SAP UI5 and Fiori.
What steps could an analyst take to learn more about UI5?
SAP made a huge effort to communicate new technologies to customers and partners and to make sure there is enough training and educational materials available to learn them.
For SAPUI5 I can definitely recommend the following: SDK that includes Developers guide, Tutorials (!!!) and Explored app.
I heard a story that in the 90s, at the end of the Perl book, for beginners in programming, there was an advertisement: “If you finished this book from cover to cover, please contact us by this email and we will give you a job.” Same with dev guide on SDK, if you read it all and make exercises from tutorial, you would most probably have a solid understanding of SAPUI5 – and get a UI developer job 😉 .
Additionally, there is a SCN community with blogs and discussions. I would also recommend Openui5 tumblr, which has a lot of advanced topics covered in blogs. And if you really want to become an expert – dig into the code. Most of the answers to discussion forum questions I find there. You don’t have know everything, as Helvétius (pictured at right) said – knowledge of some principles easily compensates the lack of knowledge of some facts. Explore the code and you will get those “principles,” so you will get general “facts” for solution implementations in future much easier.
SAPUI5 usually comes in conjunction with Fiori, useful everyday resources for UI/UI developer I would recommend are:
Fiori Design Guidelines and Fiori App library. And of course OpenSAP courses: Introduction to SAP Fiori UX and Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud
Again, nowadays there are tons of resources, learn something new and practice everyday and you will become an expert.
What types of things do you think would be important for an analyst to learn to be a good partner on a UI5 project?
SAPUI5 is pretty sharp turn from “mainstream” SAP, Javascript is the part where a lot of abapers having troubles. Unfortunately there is no shortcut, only practical experience and good understanding of Javascript, web technologies and frameworks will make a consultant/developer a valuable part of the project team. UX side of the project is a different story, that requires a kind of a bridge between technology and business. Consultant/partner who can act as a mediator/translator is a rare “beast” but value of those is tremendous.
The challenge for technical people is IMHO that those kind of activities require more soft skills rather than hard skills. My favorite way of
“talking” to business has actually no verbal part and I call it “let me be your shadow.” As you may guess the method is simple – I become a persons “shadow” for day or two, asking no questions, making no comments – shadows don’t make comments, you know 😉
Do you see many companies adopting agile methodologies on your projects?
The trend started for me ~3 years ago and since then it was a mix of waterfall and Agile. I definitely see value in Agile methodology especially in Fiori implementations (due to the fact that “core” functionality is delivered by SAP and functionality is added incrementally). the toughest part in agile methodology for me is that balance between quickly changing requirements and a desire to build a solid application/framework. Sometime to spark a conversation and interest in end user, developers have to create an “inflatable tanks”, which look like real tanks but don’t run and don’t shoot (what is technically a main purpose of tanks). But by the time “tank” starts to run, business needs a tank which should swim or even fly.
Tell us your secret sauce – where do you go to learn more about the latest technologies?
That’s a tough question, my Feedly subscription list is around 1.5K feeds and most of them are technical.
What was the last book that you read?
Technical: Introduction to R by William N. Venables and David M. Smith
Definitely would recommend this book to anyone interested in statistic/large data manipulation.
Non-technical: A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson A good book especially if you have kids who ask (or will start asking soon) about “everything” in the world.
Maksim’s interview was originally released in Ace in your Inbox monthly newsletter.