No Country for Old ABAPers (TechEd 2016 Prep)

Folks,

Here we go again, it is a pre-TechEd week and I have to clone myself to get ready for the event while also taking care of all the problems people just have to pile up on you when they hear you will be gone for a few days.

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of the TechEds but somehow it does not quite feel celebratory. For example, instead of being located on the glamorous main level of the Sands Expo Center, this year the showfloor moved to the basement that is politely called “low level”. And it’s not one of those cool “geek chic” underground establishments but just a regular basement that used to house the regional nuts and bolts sales conferences while TechEd was partying upstairs. (I guess nuts and bolts people got fed up by the noise.)

Then on Thursday instead of a concert there is, essentially, a karaoke party in a bar across the street. I’m actually quite happy about this because I’ll have to leave on Thursday afternoon and won’t feel sad about missing some epic concert. Finally some good thinking on the SAP side.

Anyways, we are not going to the event to party (cough-cough). If you are attending TechEd in Vegas and somehow missed the awesome Mentor prep session on Monday, I highly recommend watching it or at least reading Tammy Powlas‘s summary.

This year there will also be a special treat (did I say it was not celebratory enough? OK, scratch that) in form of a networking session lead by yours truly at 4.30 pm on Wednesday. One lucky attendee will receive a free copy of my book and all other lucky attendees will get a discount coupon for the same book on Amazon. Mark your calendars, folks!

Also somewhere in the dark TechEd corridors there might be a poster with my picture as one of the “developer heroes”. Usually about a dozen of those posters are scattered around and you might even get a rare opportunity to take a double picture with both poster and live person. It’s like the TechEd Pokémon (mine is called Speakachu).

As I noted in the last year’s blog, ABAP is as good as gone from the TechEd agenda. This year, one of the very few ABAP related sessions actually sounds like a eulogy: “ABAP contributions to SAP S/4HANA”. So long and thanks for all the fish, err, contributions. ABAP might not be dead yet but it has definitely already moved to Florida and is sitting on a front porch yelling at the kids to get off the lawn.

So it’s only natural that my agenda below reflects the mindset of an average ABAPer who goes to TechEd these days not as much to learn how to ABAP better but to find what else can he/she learn to catch an early lifeboat from the ABAP Titanic.

I had hard time choosing a session to fill in the 3 pm time slot on Wednesday since there are three potentially good networking sessions running concurrently:

• NET38746 The Impact of In-Memory Databases on Modern Enterprise Systems – the presenter is a student at Hasso Plattner Institute, looking forward to hearing somewhat neutral and scientific point of view instead of a HANA sales pitch.
• NET38819 DevOps for SAP HANA Extended Application Services – the presenter is Paul Aschmann fellow SAP Mentor and North Carolinian, former Demo Jam finalist who, unfortunately, lately has been lured to the dark side (by cookies, I presume).
• NET38787 What You Need to Know About SAP Penetration Testing – I mean come on, it has “penetration” in the name! Needless to say more.

Next week I suspect Matt Fraser might provide some event blogging competition. (And I’m already one blog ahead, nya-nya-nya-nya-nya!) From me you can expect the usual stuff like complaining about the keynotes, session highlights and “cutest swag of the day”. Now I just need to re-read the last year’s blogs to make sure not to repeat the same jokes. That would be awkward.