I wish readers a wonderful 2020 with great health and success throughout.
Thanks, to vijay.sharma4 for tempting me to write something here after a gap. 🙂
Though I was a longtime member of the SAP Community, I actively started contributing only around 2011 when I was working for SAP Labs India as a contract developer in the SAP Gateway team. SAP Gateway was a new product then and as developers, we were helping the early adopters of the product by answering their questions and writing blogs. The points system, leader board (which I miss currently) in the SCN got me hooked to the platform and my association with the Community only grew from there.
When I went back to the consulting space soon after that experience I realized that the problem-solving skills and the knowledge I developed by answering those questions and research done to write the blogs in SAP Community made me stand out and gave me lots of opportunities in the competitive US consulting market. In addition, multiple community recognitions like 'Top Contributor', 'SAP Mentor' helped me to build my own brand. So In summary, SAP Community has definitely given back me much more than my contributions to the SAP Community. I am always grateful for that.
Let me try to answer a few questions from the blog.
How do you keep yourself motivated to learn and do more?
Keep an open mind.
Whenever you encounter challenges do not run away from it, rather try to confront it thinking you are not the first person facing this challenge and definitely there is some solution to be uncovered.
For example, I try to keep an open mind when my customer says the app you wrote loads very slow. There is a challenge here to improve the performance of the app. I would start by writing down the current performance metrics and learn and do everything that can be done to improve the performance even if it by one second. That gives me enough motivation to learn the best way to develop an app. As long as you see your challenges as learning opportunities you will be always be motivated.
Pursue your small product wishes, yourself
Did you wish for a particular android app? chrome extension? a reusable code repository? Go build it yourself. This is a great way to learn new skills as you have seen the need for it and passionate about it. This will keep you within the learning path at least until you build what you need.
How to manage time between your work and passion?
Easy. Either make your passion as your work or make your work as your passion. 🙂
I am serious as well when I say that. Though I started my career in 2003, I decided to invest in my skills and made it my passion only around 2010. After that, I have been enjoying my work and it is a great ride so far. This passion has evolved all through years but it has been always around coding, developing products and teaching coding. This has resulted in several small and big achievements which I want to list here so that it can give an idea of what I mean about merging passion and work.
When I felt that I needed some tool to find out what is happening in Fiori apps (help me in day to day work), I built a Chrome Extension to do that. This was much before the UI5 team released its official extension.
Teaching is one of my passion. I got to pursue it by building a Udemy course for it. I was able to use my experience of my transformation from ABAP to the Fiori world there.
I was working heavily on SAP Gateway and feel that I need to store the reusable code snippets for reusing in my projects. So I built a reusable code repository so that it is useful for me as well as others and I use it even now.
Writing is my other passion. I wrote several blogs on SAP Community and I got on opportunity to author a book on SAP Fiori Certification Guide.
Android apps always fascinated me and I always wanted to build one. I married that with my need to track my mom's bus journey by learning Android from scratch and building an Android app recently.
I hope my passion leads me to much more interesting journeys in the future.
What comes first? Code or the Developer?
Tough question, but I believe the developer comes first. This is because you need to have a professional developer mindset to produce something which is called 'code'. Otherwise, it is just a bullcrap. With that thought, I want to recommend a great book called 'Clean Coder' by Robert C. Martin which I just finished reading.
Hope you enjoyed reading this blog.
Let me nominate a few people who I look up to in SAP Community to author the next set of blogs.
1. gregorw 2. c3d1947136cd4c748a7aa794001af496
My questions:
Thanks, to vijay.sharma4 for tempting me to write something here after a gap. 🙂
Though I was a longtime member of the SAP Community, I actively started contributing only around 2011 when I was working for SAP Labs India as a contract developer in the SAP Gateway team. SAP Gateway was a new product then and as developers, we were helping the early adopters of the product by answering their questions and writing blogs. The points system, leader board (which I miss currently) in the SCN got me hooked to the platform and my association with the Community only grew from there.
When I went back to the consulting space soon after that experience I realized that the problem-solving skills and the knowledge I developed by answering those questions and research done to write the blogs in SAP Community made me stand out and gave me lots of opportunities in the competitive US consulting market. In addition, multiple community recognitions like 'Top Contributor', 'SAP Mentor' helped me to build my own brand. So In summary, SAP Community has definitely given back me much more than my contributions to the SAP Community. I am always grateful for that.
Let me try to answer a few questions from the blog.
How do you keep yourself motivated to learn and do more?
Keep an open mind.
Whenever you encounter challenges do not run away from it, rather try to confront it thinking you are not the first person facing this challenge and definitely there is some solution to be uncovered.
For example, I try to keep an open mind when my customer says the app you wrote loads very slow. There is a challenge here to improve the performance of the app. I would start by writing down the current performance metrics and learn and do everything that can be done to improve the performance even if it by one second. That gives me enough motivation to learn the best way to develop an app. As long as you see your challenges as learning opportunities you will be always be motivated.
Pursue your small product wishes, yourself
Did you wish for a particular android app? chrome extension? a reusable code repository? Go build it yourself. This is a great way to learn new skills as you have seen the need for it and passionate about it. This will keep you within the learning path at least until you build what you need.
How to manage time between your work and passion?
Easy. Either make your passion as your work or make your work as your passion. 🙂
I am serious as well when I say that. Though I started my career in 2003, I decided to invest in my skills and made it my passion only around 2010. After that, I have been enjoying my work and it is a great ride so far. This passion has evolved all through years but it has been always around coding, developing products and teaching coding. This has resulted in several small and big achievements which I want to list here so that it can give an idea of what I mean about merging passion and work.
When I felt that I needed some tool to find out what is happening in Fiori apps (help me in day to day work), I built a Chrome Extension to do that. This was much before the UI5 team released its official extension.
Teaching is one of my passion. I got to pursue it by building a Udemy course for it. I was able to use my experience of my transformation from ABAP to the Fiori world there.
I was working heavily on SAP Gateway and feel that I need to store the reusable code snippets for reusing in my projects. So I built a reusable code repository so that it is useful for me as well as others and I use it even now.
Writing is my other passion. I wrote several blogs on SAP Community and I got on opportunity to author a book on SAP Fiori Certification Guide.
Android apps always fascinated me and I always wanted to build one. I married that with my need to track my mom's bus journey by learning Android from scratch and building an Android app recently.
I hope my passion leads me to much more interesting journeys in the future.
What comes first? Code or the Developer?
Tough question, but I believe the developer comes first. This is because you need to have a professional developer mindset to produce something which is called 'code'. Otherwise, it is just a bullcrap. With that thought, I want to recommend a great book called 'Clean Coder' by Robert C. Martin which I just finished reading.
Hope you enjoyed reading this blog.
Let me nominate a few people who I look up to in SAP Community to author the next set of blogs.
1. gregorw 2. c3d1947136cd4c748a7aa794001af496
My questions:
- How much time you spend coding in a day? How much is 'work' and 'learn' in that?
- How is your experience as an Independent Consultant?
- What do you think about Skecth2Code?
- SAP Managed Tags:
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