My SAP TechEd 2020 – What my Agenda will look like

SAP TechEd 2020 is coming closer and closer but this year is different than the years before. Like so many events, conferences and workshops, TechEd is going to be a different experience. A fully online and virtual event like SAP TechEd 2020 has a big upside: It’s going to be accessible and free to anyone out there!

If you’re visiting the SAP TechEd 2020 webpage you might feel yourself a bit overwhelmed with the huge selection of sessions and all the different tracks being available. For that reason we, the Developer Advocates, decided to give you a nice overview of what we’re going to attend in this years TechEd. But wait!, It’s not just what we as a team are going to watch, it’s rather what I as an individual Advocate am interested in. If you want to know what my dear colleagues have picked for themselves, please check out the My SAP TechEd 2020 – An Agenda From the Viewpoint of a Developer Manager Blog Post by Thomas Jung.

So let’s get started!

My Agenda

In order to give a bit of insight into what my, personal sessions are for this years TechEd I sat down and thought about what are the general topics I am interested in and where I see gaps in my knowledge base.

As most of you know the topics I mainly maintain and work on are mobile & iOS as well as Cloud Native & SAP Cloud Platform, Kyma Runtime. Not only have I picked quite a lot of sessions surrounding the above mentioned topics but also some additional sessions about Abap, UI Development and Machine Learning/AI.

With that I have structured the following list of sessions in exactly these categories with some explanation of why I’ve picked the session and a short summary on what it is about.

Developer Advocate Sessions

Some of my direct colleagues have some pretty interesting sessions planned this year which I want to mention and highly recommend to you folks:

• Beyond SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori Elements [IIS114] (a beginner breakout session by Marius Obert)
• Translytical Data Processing with SAP HANA Cloud [DAT108] (a beginner breakout session by Witalij Rudnicki)
• Build Data Pipelines with SAP Data Intelligence [INT105] (a beginner lecture by Witalij Rudnicki)
• Do-It-Yourself Machine Learning [INT200] (a beginner lecture by Witalij Rudnicki)
• Expert Q&A on Developing with ABAP in the Cloud [DEV928] (An Expert Q&A with Rich Heilman)
• Cloud-Native Development with SAP HANA [DAT160] (a two hour hands-on workshop with Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung)

Lastly, the Developer Keynote: All Developers Welcome [DK100] I am really proud of as our team had the chance to be part of the Developer Keynote for this years TechEd. What is really cool about this is that it is almost all code – and no slides at all! You will see developers walking through written code, sharing their architectural decisions and insights. It’s all code which is running, working and will be released to GitHub for all of you to check out! ?

Get ready for the Developer Keynote by reading about the back story in this short blog post: SAP TechEd Developer Keynote DK100 – The Story

Mobile & iOS

Interesting to me for this year in the mobile sector is definitely the SAP Mobile Development Kit and it’s new capabilities for iOS and Android

Build Cross-Platform Mobile Solutions for iOS and Android [DEV117](a breakout session by Jitendra Kansal)

To me the SAP Business Application Studio is fairly new and I’ve just recently started developing SAPUI5 web-applications with it. I found a nice session about building Desktop or Mobile SAP Fiori in that web-based IDE.

Build Desktop or Mobile SAP Fiori Apps with SAP Business Application Studio [DEV900](Expert Q&A Live session by Oliver Graeff & Keren Rotenberg)

Cloud Native

To learn more about Cloud Native and the amazing technologies behind it I’ve picked some very interesting sessions as I am fairly new to the topic myself. I am working (& still learning) a lot with/about Kubernetes, Containerisation and the SAP Cloud Platform, Kyma Runtime, so to me it was important to pick some nice and informative talks around these topics to get more insight about Cloud Native extensions for SAP solutions, general cloud native development in the SAP ecosystem and Kubernetes cluster scaling.

My list contains three different tracks covering exactly that:

Cloud-Native Development with SAP HANA [DAT160](a two hour hands-on workshop with Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung)

Universal Kubernetes Clusters at Scale with Project “Gardener” [DEV205] (An Advanced Lecture by Dirk Marwinski)

ABAP

ABAP is a technology I have very little experience with but as this is one of the most important technologies inside and outside of SAP I want to learn more about it.

First of all getting up-to-date with the updates to the technology itself

Major Updates on ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model [DEV102] (an Advanced lecture by Marcel Hermanns)

And what is really interesting to me is to see how to utilise the ABAP technology stack for development of modern SAP Fiori Apps. There is a nice two hour workshop available giving an introduction to the ABAP RESTful application programming model and how you can build SAP Fiori apps and REST APIs on premise as well as in the cloud! – Perfect for an ABAP noob as I am.

Build SAP Fiori Apps with the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model [DEV260] (a two hour hands-on workshop with Volker Drees & Carine Tchoutouo Djomo)

UI Development

Aside of mobile and pure native development SAP has SAPUI5 as one of the major web-technologies in the industry. SAPUI5 is a great framework to build beautiful and responsive web-apps in a fast and reliable way without being a JavaScript expert.

I just recently had the first experience building a simple SAPUI5 web-app using SAP Business Application Studio and Visual Studio Code. Both really nice IDEs to develop these kind of business applications. My first project was a SAPUI5 freestyle project to explore the full feature set of SAPUI5, followed by a simple SAP Fiori Elements and SAP Fiori Launchpad app (Thank you Marius Obert for the great tutorials in that area! ?)

As a nice introduction into the technology itself I’ve chosen

Developing Apps with SAPUI5 [DEV164] (a two-hour hands-on workshop with Martin Haeuser & Florian Vogt)

Then for all the OData freaks out there a really nice expert workshop about OData V4 and how it can simplify your Fiori app development

Simplify Development of SAP Fiori Apps with OData v4 [IIS360] (An Expert workshop by Christian Kolbows

And please don’t forget about Marius Obert nice session already mentioned above!

Machine Learning/AI

A topic which I personally like a lot is everything around Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and I gotta say we have quite a few sessions around that topic this year.

Data Classification with Python SDK and SAP AI Business Services [INT260] (a two-hour workshop with Michael Haas & Samuel Seah)

All the other beautiful things

Okay I gotta say my agenda for TechEd is packed already but I love these expert Q&A sessions with nice conversations and discussions. I just picked my two favourite ones for you:

We got a nice Expert Q&A on Open-Source projects around “Gardener” and “Kyma” which fit perfectly into the Cloud Native area. Learn about different Open-Source projects lead by SAP in the Cloud Native world, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my good friend Valentin Vieriu won’t explain on how you can be part of these projects as well. So tune in for:

Expert Q&A on Open-Source Projects from SAP: Projects “Gardener” and “Kyma” [DEV932] (Expert Q&A 20 min with Valentin Vieriu & Vasu Chandrasekhara)

Super interesting as well is going to be the expert Q&A around SAP S/4Hana with the

Expert Q&A on the SAP S/4HANA Strategy and Road Map [DT922] (Expert Q&A 20 min with Rudolf Hois)

Another topic which is very important to me and I bet to most of us as developers in the SAP community as well is: How do you keep up with all the latest and greatest innovation SAP is providing?!