Learning with the SAP Community and Beyond, 2018 Bangalore

I have been quite fortunate within SAP Community this 2018 in few ways and I cannot thank enough the SAP community for it.

One of them was meeting DJ Adams (my developer hero) and sharing stage with him for SAP TechEd Live.

(Yes, I was nervous as i started the talk and then time just flew by. First time on live camera and my third longest conversation with DJ.)

In the Interview I shared some details on SAP Mentors Treasure Hunt and also about SAP TechEd 2018 Tutorial Mission contest .

These events have changed my learning experience completely.

People say SAP TechEd will help you learn about the latest and greatest in the SAP world.
But for me it was also a quick recap of my entire journey with SAP till now.

Meeting my Developer Heroes

I would like to take you on a small trip down my memory lane and share how i met my developer heroes, following whom has helped me evolve.

DECEMBER 2009:

I was a newbie into SAP, just couple of years into ABAP, and I came across a requirement to extend an existing development.

The application was a simple REST based development which looked something like below and was coded in a Handler Class of bespoke SICF Internet Service.(In a ECC 5.0 which had ITS installed.)

  METHOD if_http_extension~handle_request.

*--- Macros
    DEFINE set_header_field.
      call method server->response->set_header_field( name = &1 value = &2 ).
    END-OF-DEFINITION.

    DEFINE set_status.
      call method server->response->set_status( code = &1 reason = &2 ).
    END-OF-DEFINITION.

    DEFINE set_payload.
      call method server->response->set_cdata( data = &1 ).
    END-OF-DEFINITION.

    ...

*------------ Check: "Are you allowed to access the specific resource?" ----------------*
*------------------------- Check: "Is the method Allowed ?" ----------------------------*

*--- What is the resource?
    lw_resource = server->request->get_header_field( '~script_name' ).

*--- What is the method?
    lw_method = server->request->get_header_field( '~request_method' ).

    ...

*---------------------- Process input data ---------------------------------------------*
*--- Get combo data from pathinfo
    lw_path = server->request->get_header_field( '~path_info' ).

    ...

I had no damn clue what this was all about.

And the build was done by none other than DJ Adams .

My then team lead was helpful to setup a call with DJ and that 10 min LiveMeeting session changed my perspective of ABAP use cases completely.

A whole new world of web development with ABAP integration opened up for me.

>>> Fast forward 6 years (the time when i was still trying to get my head around web dynpro)

MAY 2013:

The first openSAP course was held from May 27 through July 15, 2013, by Thomas Jung.
It was through Social media that I came to know about this website and the course.

I was one of the 9,383(Wikipedia) people who cleared the final exam.

We used the SAP software hosted onto AWS (Amazon Web Services – personal accounts) to do hands on.

Four months later i was already working on product development using Fiori. It was all scratch builds then, just using the SAPUI5 libraries and coding JS view and container logic.

I got to work alongside my other developer hero Nabheet Madan during this time.

Continuous Learning

This 2018, I realized how Twitter is amazing for SAP consultants. I started to completely disconnect from other social media and turned my Twitter account into SAP learning hub.

Not just Twitter, the learning resources are so many now compared to what we had a decade ago.
To name a few, we have SAP Coffee Corner Radio Podcasts by  Simon Kemp.
DJ even started recording his Monday morning thoughts as podcasts which is a nice initiative i feel. And ofcourse we have OpenSAP.

Through these channels, I came to know about the various events that were happening like ui5con, mentors treasure hunt, TechEd tutorial mission contest etc..

Winning them was just a bonus, but the habits like reading blogs daily or practicing tutorials using SAP CP will carry us a long way.

Our learning journey will be a long and repetitive process.
We need to accept this fact and not just start learning but also start sharing.

#LearnShareRepeat