Introduction
I’ve written only a handful of blogs over the years, not even getting into double digits, mainly because my workload for both my employer and in my personal life often does not allow it. I also try to subscribe to the quality over quantity approach (although some people seem to manage both!) nevermind suffering from the usual challenge of thinking no-one would be interested in what I have to say…
With all this in mind, lately I have been increasingly getting my thoughts together to write a mini blog series covering some key areas within SAP and wider technology: mobile, big data, cloud & in-memory computing. This blog serves as an introduction, some background and a placeholder for this series, and has allowed me to capture most of my thoughts off-line before posting properly to SCN, keeping it all as one big organic beast.
There are some links below that should (hopefully) be updated over time as I complete each blog but in the meantime, please go ahead and have a gander at the background to this.
Background – why this blog series?
I have been working with SAP products for nearly 15 years and indeed wider IT solutions in one shape or another for ~18 years now (pretty much since I stopped my education endeavours.) I have seen trends come and go, enough game-changers to kill all of the occupants of Battersea Cats home, and lots of monster successes and failures. In short, I have learned LOTS along the way and still find every day is a school day. I suspect many of us love our IT jobs partly because we have a craving for knowledge attainment but I digress…
Focusing a bit more on the SAP world in particular, I have witnessed many a new initiative or product, with SAP occasionally promising to change the world 1. No surprise, it’s still pretty much the same. Similar initiatives happen across the whole IT industry in various guises at one time or another. I believe in general it is mostly evolution rather than revolution but the funny thing with evolution is big things actually change, at least when you take a step back and look from a broader perspective.
In my head, as my experiences, abilities and exposure have matured along with the offerings available, I can see my understanding and opinions changing and being refined. As in any walk of life, often the more you do something the more you understand it (except explaining “computers” to my parents – nothing will ever make that better.) And I’m not just talking about enterprise IT solutions, or even just enterprise and consumer IT solutions – I’m talking about anything and everything that has some element of technology and plays a part in my day to day life, both as a consumer/user of solutions and someone who (tries to) implement them.
So, why this blog series? Well mainly because I wanted to have a sort of mental clear-out, a de-brief if you like of my current knowledge, understanding and experiences to date. Think of it as a mid-IT career crisis if you will. I wanted to take all of that and try to distil it down to where I think we currently are and where we are headed. There will be a lot of stuff that should come with YMMV and IMHO caveats so I’ll get them out of the way here and now!
Of course, deeply philosophical subjects such as “where we are” and “where we are headed” could cover a lot of ground so I’ve tried to keep the content mostly focused on SAP(ish) technology and solutions, or at least loosely related! Having said that, these won’t be very technical blogs by any means but there should be obvious alignment and similarities to SAP technology. Maybe “Random Ramblings” is a good enough description…
These are the blogs I have planned/in progress 2 :
- Random Ramblings from a Developer 3 (this one!)
- What is Mobile?
- What is Big Data?
- What is In-Memory Computing?
- What is Cloud?
- Put it all together and what have you got?
As I am sure you can see, they are pretty vague, abstract titles but hopefully as they are completed and published this will make sense. You will also notice that they are all (except this introduction) questions. This is key to my thinking and the general mood and thought process I have gone through (and am still going through) getting this content together. It’s about me capturing a lot of questions on top of my thoughts and understanding but not preaching or dictating what I think are the answers. To that end, I am hoping they generate a lot more discussion and hence more answers and knowledge to be shared. In reality, we all know there are usually more questions than answers.
Please, watch this space...
1 SAP at no point (to my knowledge) promised to change the world.
2 I have no idea when subsequent blogs will be completed but hopefully it won’t take me too long.
3 One of the hardest things was deciding where to post this introduction blog – I thought a business trends area might be suitable but actually, as I’m a developer at heart and most of the background and thinking to these blogs comes with a developer’s perspective I decided upon the SAP Developer Centre. Given this is the place to go for a lot of the newer technologies I hope this is the right decision and aligns with the content of my future blogs.
Updated on 07/03/2014 to add link to "What is Mobile?" posting.
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