SCN Blog Digest – January 2017
Folks,
Political protests seem to be all the rage these days (quite literally) and SCN is not an exception. Earlier this month I made a decision to stop answering questions on SCN in protest against a bug that can cause an answer to be lost instead of submitting it. Too bad for “my client has a requirement” demographics (or not?) but lucky for you since this gave me tons of free time to read the blogs and to write about them. Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on crème de la crème of the SCN bloggery for January 2017.
General
- If you would prefer not to rely on the kindness of strangers to find good blogs on SCN, read Never Miss a Blog Post Again by Jason Cao. I used his suggestion myself and set up an RSS feed of the SCN blogs with great degree of success.
- In her blog Returning to Work After Loss the fellow SAP Mentor Colleen Hebbert shares a humanizing personal story of loss, grief, survival, and hope. If your eyes don’t well up reading you might be a robot.
- I was a bit skeptical about Paul Taylor’s blog Empathy to Action: the Importance of Listening because the “e-word” tends to be exploited by the view-count-hungry authors. But I was glad I read it and believe it’s something we can all relate to.
- If you are tired of the SAP employees droning on about the “digital core innovation solutions providing best-of-breed customer experience in the connected environment with IoT and Big Data” on SCN then this obscure Public Sector blog To Provide: One of the Most Important Tasks of Every Government by Wolfgang Schaper may seem refreshing.
- Do you know a language other than English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean? Do you crave fame and eternal gratitude? Then why not help out SAP HANA Academy to translate the subtitles? More details in this blog by Denys van Kempen.
HR
- Quick – a performance review or a root canal? Which one would you pick? For many corporate employees the choice is not so apparent. Enjoy reading about the method to the performance management madness in the 3-part blog by SAP’s Stephan Amling (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
- OK, I know it is starting to look like a blog featuring blog featuring blog but this collection by a fellow Mentor Jarret Pazahanick deserves recognition.
ABAP
- A “threefer” (one, two, and three) about the visitor design pattern in ABAP. Boring? Not if Paul Hardy writes about it.
- Marco Hernandez came out of nowhere with not just one but two manifestos: Make Great Software and And Now for Something Completely Different. A must read for the ABAPers, especially at the career crossroads.
- Do you know the Catmull Rom? The Catmull Rom? The Catmull Rom! Well, François Henrotte does.
UI
- Neat blog by Mauricio Lauffer on adding vibration to SAPUI5 apps
- Mike Doyle explains what favicon is and how to add it to your UI5 apps
- So, you created a great UI5 app with vibration, favicon and all. Now what? Head to this blog to find out about a secret underground UI5 app competition for the coveted… [what was the prize again? what? there is no prize? seriously? blimey] … eternal community recognition!
HANA
- An informative summary by Alper Somuncu Choosing the right HANA Database Architecture
- Join Thomas Grassl on an “intellectual journey” in Why NOT to Use an In-Memory Database. Spoiler alert: he will try to convince you otherwise.
Honorable Mention
The one and only SCN blog posted on January 1st deserves a special prize (like a copy of my award-non-winning book with autograph). While the whole world was partying SAP’s own DC CHUANG was sharing BI Admin tips. @DC CHUANG – please contact me to claim the prize.
Happy reading and thank you to all the great SCN authors!
Hi Jelena,
very nice summary.
I was doing such a summary of Basis related blogs in the past, but in the end couldn't keep up with it because of other pressures.
Happy new year !
Andy.
Andy, I remember that. It is hard work and, as mentioned, I could only do it because I didn't spend my "SCN time quota" on Q&A. And I thought that such blogs on New SCN would be even more valuable because so many blogs get lost. But the irony is that then no one sees our summaries either now. Catch 22. 🙁
For the forum members, who use RSS, there is a way: tag all your digests with the same user tag - blog digest. It is possible to subscribe to a user tag and receive the monthly digest.
"For the forum members, who use RSS" - yeah, that's the keyword. 🙂 Not sure many do. I started using it [again] after reading Jason's blog but the Chrome addon doesn't have a lot of features, unfortunately. It basically can serve only as a notification that something got posted and an easier access point. But that's the whole other subject.
You probably need to dig into the settings or look for a different add-on.
I am not a Chrome user, so I can't recommend a good alternative.
In Pale Moon I use Bamboo - it is possible to read the complete blog from there - depends on how you set it up (it is very cool from SAP that they configured the site to supply the full content via RSS). In Firefox ESR I use Brief, which also has this option.
It turns out, that reading the blogs from RSS offers a better experience (at least for me), because you can override fonts and colors to some extent and solves the problem with some unfortunate font choices:
Original:
RSS:
Yes, it does look much better than original. I didn't find any better extensions for Chrome but will check the app Joachim mentioned. Thanks!
Didn't know there's a feed on user-tags as well, good to know!
(I, too, was motivated by Jasons Blog and now really like RSS (using RSSOwl as a client)
I have been long time lurker in the community, it was about time to take action.
Many thanks for taking the time and summarize what has been happening, excellent work 🙂
Well done, Marco, looking forward to future posts!
Nice! Forwarded the blog about the favicon to a colleague, because we're trying to pimp up our lauchpad and UI5 apps.
I would have missed that one, thanks Jelena. 🙂
Regards,
Steffi.
Glad I could help, Steffi! I learned the word "favicon" from it and can now stop calling it "that thingy" 🙂
I already new the term, because I have changed it for our portal and wiki. ^^ The blog (and your plug) made me check our launchpad, though, and I'm always for more shiny cool icons if possible.
[Edit: 2017-02-06: the “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”-Bug got me again! I found out and appoved it just now...]
Hey Jelena,
thanks a lot! I counted 8 “grey links” for me in it, so I allready knew SOME of them, but others are new to me.
Btw.: I found your Blog via the RSS-Feed on the Mentors-Tag (https://blogs.sap.com/tags/865254337794871183385756863647856/feed )
And I’ll give https://blogs.sap.com/tag/blog-digest/feed a try, but don’t think it will catch up, so far yours is the only one there.
best
Joachim
Great collection, Jelena, thank you! Quite a few I can't wait to read, and am disappointed I missed to begin with.