The other day The specified item was not found. about how SAP had changed his life, some started to comment as did I and mine got kind of long, so I thought about years past here in the community and decided I'd try to revive an old tradition we had that started with "Fun Friday, What's in your bag?". In the past we used to share stories, I mean we are all still people and not just addicted to our jobs so with summer starting and many looking forward to their summer vacations I thought like Blag, it's time to reflect back on life a bit so here's your challenge - "share your story"!
"So...the big question is "What about you?" What you will be doing right now if you haven't get the chance to work using SAP?"- Alvaro May 7, 2009
Let's see programming for me started quite a long time ago, in fact I was 8 years old sitting on the living room floor (in yet another country to where I am now and not the US) typing in very large scrolls my father would bring home from various trips (military) onto a Commodore 64. After spending a particularly long time one day on a program and type the "run" command I was very disappointed at the outcome and thus began to change, alter and modify until it was showing me something I felt was more worth the hours I spent typing. From that point on I've been stuck last I counted I've worked in and developed applications in over 47 different programming languages the last I learned was actually BSP which was also my first introductions to the SAP world and that was just back in 2003.
At the time I was a "Web Applications Specialist", my job was all about integrating systems and other applications together into web environments on a global level for my company (automotive) - at one point the CIO came to me and told me they had a problem and needed someone to take on a project - the result was actually not my original choice (I actually said no thanks) I was sat in the group doing Basis Admin for all of the SAP servers in the company (typical 3 system landscape for 147 production servers - that was the right number or? hmmm) so I was of course miserable to be stuck doing basis and no longer programming.
Within a couple of weeks the manager asked me if I could build him something to help with the admin tasks - catch was to do so with SAP technologies - something called ABAP. I was lucky enough to have met also at this time a new hire in the company's Australia office (he now actually works for SAP) who was here on training and he introduced me to "NetWeaver" the actual system 6.10 since I had been to an event already I was kind of familiar with some capabilities (NetWeaver Tech Tour in Frankfurt) so together we installed the App server and took a look at SE80 and something called BSP.
From there I found SDN, a new site about to open from SAP so I registered.
For the next year or so I dove very deep into the BSP world and meet many great folks including Brian from SAP who encouraged me to continue to share my work as he called me the "Re: Problems with SDN RSS Feed - part 2" which was highly motivational! I won't go into all the details from here on unless someone just really wants to know but needless to say...
If not for SAP I'd still be doing global rollouts of e-commerce websites for Enterprise companies and probably living in Detroit right now instead of Germany having never written "Shameless Plug: The SAP Developer's Guide to PHP", never meet all the folks I have here and never having attended an SAP TechEd (that's sapteched05, sapteched06, sapteched07, sapteched08 and now coming up SAPTECHED09) nor SAP Sapphire (that's sapphire06, sapphire07, sapphire08 and the recent SAPPHIRE09) nor would I had a chance to be the host of the SAP DEMO JAM @ SAP TECHED.
I can't even come close to imagining what my life would have been like if not for the change to that "Basis group" so many years ago...
