Saturday just after lunchtime when I managed to get through SAP Labs security to join InnoJam I was a lot skeptical whether a functional consultant with minimal hands-on coding experience could survive the challenge. Fast forward to Sunday night I think this was one of my most intense but very interesting weekend thanks to InnoJam. It was fun at the same time lot of learning - not just theory but very importantly put in practice. Of course there was Networking (met a bunch of new and very smart, passionate people) thrown into along with strong dose of new technologies from SAP.
After a quick round of introduction and overview of the event by Anne Hardy, Tech experts from Gateway (Yaad Oren) , SUP (Venugopal N) and HANA (Arvind Devalla) gave teasers of the new technology in TechFire round. Catch Marilyn's blog post from Reporting Almost “Real-Time” From SAP Innojam Bangalore 2011.
During BizFire I presented a common everyday problem - car pooling or from a different perspective hitchhiking goes mobile. As it turned out much to my surprise there were few folks (Anup, Nitin and Reshma) from the crowd who were interested in investing next 30 hours trying to convert this concept to a working prototype. The only problem was this motely group did not have much technical skillset. But there was no less enthusiasm and we could tie up with an ABAP expert (Satish) and Embedded Tech Geek (Jyothin) and form Team 10. Next two hours went over deliberating on the data model, process flow, logic conceptualisation and identification of the technical components required to build the prototype.
I started fooling around with SAP HANA once data model and logic was clear to the team and they got cracking in respective areas. Satish with Nitin and Reshma focused on understanding Netweaver Gateway and how business logic and data model setup in ECC can be exposed to apps outside of SAP using OData. No one any clue but searching on SDN got us two How To Guide articles and e-Learning. Likewise Jyothin paired up with Anup to look into SUP and Android SDK to build the mobile app.
Even though I left the venue late evening for meeting family commitments, the urge of dabbling with technology and the challenge to create a working solution kept me awake till late night going through video tutorials in experiencesaphana.com, pocket guidebook, examples, articles on HANA, blogs by experts etc.
Day 2 morning soon after waking up (late in the mroning) landed up back at the venue. Team was all charged up and started development struggling sometimes but with help at hand never letting down. Even in the last minutes we had tense moments when the Andriod-based App on Simulator refused to connect to backend and became unresponsive. But finally we made it to 6 minutes of presentation in front of judges. We did not have a tough time convincing the use-case as they could relate to the simple problem we tried to bring in a solution for. The highlight was even Yaad mentioned our Life Please! app has got him thinking in sharing his daily one hour commute with others interested especially if a light-weight mobile app is present.
Finally we had few seconds of fame when mistakenly our team was called out as second prize winners before being corrected by the organiser. No hard feelings 😄 All in the team unanimously felt we had won anyway, whole team came together at InnoJam and not with prior exposure to the technologies - learning so much and really making putting to use theory made us winners. Of course personally I felt even better when couple of other team members came up at the parking asking for a lift - our idea already saw action albeit the completed Mobile App.
Oh and before I forget - no I did not finish building a complete data model in HANA but got a fair idea of what could e developed using HANA and the Mobile platform for the app solution in mind. Not to mention learnt, picked up number of tips from Arvind, Shreyas and even got Andy (VP ) to help out sort through issues faced. All in all I feel comfortable ditching Basic Data Model Hands-on Session that I reserved earlier for Advanced Data Model session at TechEd in coming week.
Ideas, teams, solutions developed by 10 teams at #Innojamblr are now pout up here in SCN Wiki. We were Team in presentation sequence 7. Congratulations to the winners and definitely Mob Riders will get a shout-out at Demo Jam on Wednesday.
PS: Innojam Winners went on to become Runners-up at DemoJam
InnoJam Bangalore - from participant perspective | View Webi reports & Xcelsius dashboard in Java web portal | TechEd Bangalore Day 1 | TechEd Bangalore Day 2 | TechEd Bangalore Day 3
