ABAPosaurus Anonymous comes to Vegas

Folks,

If you are attending SAP TechEd in Las Vegas this year, I hope you happen to have time around 11.45 am on Thursday. Because that’s when I will be presenting session with the secret code CNA408 in glamorous Toscana 3601.

One might wonder what even makes me eligible to talk at TechEd, much less about the merits of continuous learning for ABAPers? After all I’m an honorary member of Team Procedural and don’t like ABAP Unit Test (boo, boo!) or even fancy shmancy 7.4 syntax that makes a program look like a message exchange between the CIA agents. As a matter of fact, some people who know me in real life and have seen my code might just burst spraying coffee out of their mouth if they heard I’m talking at TechEd.

But my session’s target audience includes both ABAPosauruses and those who might need to deal with the “technical debt” leftover by their fossilized predecessors. And who is more eligible to speak about this than another ABAPosaurus? After all, the AA meetings are not led by the people who never drank. (This joke was wildly popular at a conference in Australia and I’m totally recycling it at TechEd.)

ABAP team hard at work on HANA migration (image credit)

Of course, there will be many sessions at TechEd that will tell you how to make your ABAP code ready for HANA or how to do a user exit in The Cloud, “what’s new in release X” and such. What I hope my session supplements is knowledge that you can apply right away, regardless of your SAP version.

I’ve been to several TechEds since 2013 and the energy at the event can be amazing. Everything is so new and shiny and cutting edge and magically solves the problems you didn’t know existed. But then you go home, back to your ECC 6.0 EHP1 and all you can feel is a major crash and burn from the “TechEd high”.

No more, folks, no more. While I can’t promise a magical button that will transform “legacy code” to HANA compliant OOP with unit tests I can certainly promise this: in my session, you will learn at least one new thing and you’ll be able to apply those learnings without waiting for an SAP upgrade.

What will we talk about more specifically?

• Technical debt and how to start and continue digging yourself and/or your clients out of it
• How to find motivation, inspiration, and time for continuous improvement
• Tools and resources available for ABAPers “who can’t code good and want to do other stuff good too”
• Bonus material: self-indulgent stories, unrelated anecdotes, and Russian proverbs

Who should attend the session?

• ABAPosauruses and friends
• IT managers
• Non-ABAPers who think their work is hard
• Anyone who literally can’t even hear HANA/Leonardo/SAP Cloud Platform a single time anymore

Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity (seriously, I’m not doing this again) to hear some folksy wisdom from an award-winning SCN member. See you in Vegas!