My SAP TechEd adventure – Thursday

To read what happened earlier, please check the prologue, Tuesday‘s and Wednesday‘s posts. For the TL;DR version click here.

I took it fairly slow on Thursday morning with breakfast and checking-out of the hotel. I made it to Hall 8 by around 8:30 as I didn‘t have any early sessions of interest for me in my agenda. The Showfloor didn‘t open until 9 o‘clock so I used the „free time“ to work on my blog posts.

When the doors opened to the Showfloor, I walked around for a bit and then checked in with Jerry Janda at his booth to let him know that I was there for my meet-up session „To talk climate science in order to end climate silence“ (inspired by my similarly named discussion in Coffee Corner). Although I had read Jerry’s blog post about these neat sessions, I hadn‘t been aware that they could be about (almost) any topic and didn‘t need to be technical in nature. While chatting with Jerry on Tuesday or Wednesday, he mentioned that I could do one related to climate change and with that he – obviously! – had me hooked and he could fill another slot on his whiteboard.

I didn‘t really know if anybody would show up for a climate chat at 9:30 in the morning, so I was relieved once the first people showed up and that we ended up with a full table of 8 to talk a bit about climate change, I started by explaining why I‘m deeply involved with the topic and we then touched on a couple of items In the 30 minutes we had available:

• SAP offsetting TechEd‘s CO2 emissions
• what the consensus among climate scientists is about
• why most people don‘t realize that the consensus is between 90 and 100 percent
• what individuals can do to help mitigate climate change
• resources like Skeptical Science or Project Drawdown where people can find trustworthy information

I‘m really glad, that Jerry made me do this session and that he snapped a picture of the meet-up:

Shortly after the meetup it was time for me to head to my third and final hands-on session, DevOps with ABAP in Action (CAA379) with Ulrich Auer and Patrick Schmidt. For this session, I again teamed up with Łukasz Pęgiel who had a lot more experience than myself with tools like GIT. The session was interesting and even though we didn‘t manage to get through all of the exercises, I think I now at least grasp what DevOps is all about – and that it‘s most likely not something we‘ll be using anytime soon in our complex development and system landscape!

After the session, Lukasz and I went up to the Showfloor and the SAP Community Influencer room in order to meet the other SAP Champions (still) in Barcelona for a group shot, something we had tried to arrange on short notice. Unfortunately not everybody got the message in time so some folks are missing:

Back row: Roland Knipp , Andreas Gautsch , Jakob Flaman , Katarina Fischer , myself, Florian Henninger , Damir Majer
In front: Jens Gleichmann , David Ruiz Badia , Łukasz Pęgiel , Johann Fößleitner (thanks to Paul Offner for snapping the photo and sharing it on Twitter)

It was time for lunch, so I looked for something to munch on which is usually not too difficult as at least some finger food was readily available almost all the time somewhere. I wasn‘t really lucky right then and there but eventually found a bite or two to eat before briefly joining the SAP Champions TechEd wrap-up meeting at half past two. Unfortunately, I couldn‘t stay long as I had to catch a taxi to the Barcelona Sants railway station in order to get on my train back to Malaga (didn‘t really want to risk a repeat of missing a train by 5 minutes as I did on Monday on my way to Barcelona!). So, I said my farewells at a quarter to three and waiting for the train to leave about an hour later.

After three eventful days in Barcelona, it was time to resume my vacation at the Costa del Sol – even if only for another day before heading home to Germany on Saturday and back to work on Monday. I‘ll then have quite some stuff to look at again in more detail and am happy for the reminders I have now „embedded“ in this series of blog posts.

Thanks to everybody who made this the memorable event it was for me!