A week in the life of SAP Developer Relations

Last week was one of those dream(-job)-comes-true for me as an evangelist working in SAP CTO’s Developer Relation.

After successful first CodeJam with a focus on data pipelines engineering using SAP Data Hub we started receiving requests from other locations too. Two of those requests – from Stuttgart, Germany and Grand Rapids, MI, USA fit nicely into one week. But what was more important: to combine with other activities too!

Monday

So, on Monday morning I flew to Frankfurt and then went to our HQ campus in Walldorf, aka SAP Mothership. It is always great to have these face-to-face discussions with product teams I am working with, so I had really good meetings with Eric Westenberger, Thomas Zurek (SAP Data Hub), Matthias Sessler (SAP Data Intelligence), David Stocker (SAP Analytics Cloud). Plus stopping by to say Hi! to our extended team: Svea Becker, Myles Fenlon, Ingolf Bayer and Tanja Schaettler. What was making the day there even more valuable are all the unexpected meetings and chats – with Jitendra Kansal or Krasimir Semerdzhiev.

It is great when social networks serve their purpose of connecting people – especially live. And this is what happened, when Phillip Parkinson caught me on Twitter. He saw I was in Walldorf and he was coming to Walldorf that day too. We knew each other only from emails/phones/twitter before, so it was really cool to have a dinner together!

Then it was time to continue my journey and to drive to Stuttgart.

Tuesday

Tuesday was the CodeJam day. We were really happy to have Jens Rannacher, Technical Product Manager for SAP Data Hub, joining us to do the overview of the product and to address questions from the audience.

SAP CodeJam events in Stuttgart are world-known for their lunch breaks with food coming right from the grill places on Bridging IT’s balcony. And chef Tobias Hofmann did his excellent work! Yummy.

It was not the only social activity that day. Thanks Martin Fischer for scheduling SAP Stammtisch Stuttgart for that evening too. Prost!

Wednesday

It was a travel day: Stuttgart-Frankfurt-Chicago-Grand Rapids… So, a chance to update the CodeJam content based on the feedback from Stuttgart event.

And to check Grand Valley State University — the location of the Thursday’s event.

I’d like to thanks Christopher Gillespie – SAP Systems Administrator at the uni – for his great work preparing the lab for the following day.

Thursday

It was ASUG Michigan Chapter Meeting, where I was invited to. My evangelist’s primary role is sharing knowledge, so I was glad to have both – speaking in the morning, and codejamming in the afternoon.

My talk was “Do you know SAP HANA Advanced Analytics?” with demos based on #GeospatialTuesday and #GraphThursday blogs.

And then it was time to get coding, but as well combine it with the discussion about data processing trends — data lakes, data pipelines, orchestration, DataOps etc — and how SAP Data Hub supports them. Kudos to

Again, thank you all participants for great time, including networking!

Friday

It was time to go back home, but it would be a waste of time to drive through Chicago without meeting Ivan Femia — one of our SAP Technology Ambassadors based there… and without trying deep-dish pizza.

Next stop: Bern in September

The next Data Hub CodeJam will take place in Bern on September 6. The registration is open: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sap-codejam-bern-registration-63368888050.

Conclusion

There was too much excitement last week. I had to take a week off after that to cool down. You can track the cooling progress at https://untappd.com/user/Sygyzmundovych ?

Greetings from Ukraine,

-Vitaliy (aka @Sygyzmundovych)