#34: ABAP2UI5, SAP CVA, Burnout, C2C, Shortwave
Hi there,
March is here and it means an avalanche of “women in IT” content is coming. Brace for the impact!
It’s a total coincidence that we’ve also recently chatted with Jamie Langskov, our returning guest, about the “lady issues” and technology. Don’t miss the video on YT and the Nerdcast episode 13 on your favorite podcast platform.
We also share a message from Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG. We talked about their recent research results, and had a chance to hear more from them. Sometime later this year, we’ll get ASUG folks on our podcast and go even deeper.
-Jelena and Paul
ABAP2UI52NERDLETTER
Twitter brought to my attention a super cool ABAP project: ABAP2UI5. It lets developers use ABAP as the programming language to create SAPUI5 apps - full, real SAPUI5 apps. Trust me on this; I went to the trouble (not much trouble at all) to install the package from abapGit and run it in my home base S/4 system. The delivered sample projects worked, and I did some quick tweaks that also worked.
If you love ABAP as a language, there's no better time to be in it than now. The open source ABAP space has activity (and has for a couple years now). abapGit, abaplint, and others are active and working. Even just the language itself is evolving in a way that pleases me. When I started learning ABAP roughly 2010, it had a wordy feel that I grew to enjoy. The later language updates have given it a slight Pythonic accent that I love even more. ABAP and Python, two of my favorite languages, have a spoken-word rhythm to them that matches my internal mental experience of programming.
Anyway, back to ABAP2UI5. I encourage ABAP folks who haven't yet developed deep UI5 chops to give it a try. Two caveats: first, this won't (yet) get you as far as full-on proficiency in UI5. In its current state, ABAP2UI5 is best suited to simpler UI5 experiences. Second, you still need to have a basic level of understanding of what's happening in UI5. If you read the sample code, you'll quickly see that you can't get away with just ABAP knowledge. You still have to understand aggregations and properties.
I don't know whether ABAP2UI5 will exist as a legitimate tool for business app developers. But I feel like this is a work of art and love. I don't care if it's useful. The care and love put into it are self-justifying. PM
Engineering Strategy You Didn’t Think You Need
As a “practicing developer”, I’m usually skeptical of anything that C-level folks write. This perception is colored by my IRL experience of being subjected to the results of very bad IT leadership. However, I found Will Larson’s article on engineering strategy quite enlightening and I think some of his points will resonate with SAP professionals as well.
The article defines strategy as: “diagnosis, guiding policies, and coherent actions”. Funny thing, I’ve never heard of this before but in the 2018 SAP TechEd presentation about technical debt I called out 3 steps to success: evaluation (diagnosis), plan, action. Skip one of these and you will have a bad time.
One of the mentioned strategic factors is a developer survey. I think the best source of information is always to just ask the people who are doing the work. Yet for some reason this is unheard of in most companies. I wonder why.
Announcing technical changes and inter-team communication: many companies, big and small, have the same issue of one department not knowing what another is doing. This should not be a secret.
Standard technology stack. SAP customers face different issues here than an average tech company. But nevertheless, “shadow IT”, mergers/acquisitions, and all the little pet projects can create a nightmare landscape to maintain. Will writes “I appreciate that this can feel draconian” but I feel this is where draconianism is warranted. JP
Free SAP CVA!
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I intend to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that SAP Code Vulnerability Analyzer (CVA) deserves to be freely available to all customers.
You might think, is code vulnerability in ABAP even real? Yes, it is. And no CIO will ever be caught answering “LOL, what?” about code vulnerability. Same goes for SAP partners. SAP customers hear all the buzz about “code vulnerability” and ask the consultants how to ensure their code is safe. Truth is, unless the client invests in CVA or another tool, it’s just a “pinky swear”.
CVA is not a separately installed add-on. In fact, it already lives in your ABAP system rent-free. They say possession is 9/10 of the law. How exactly is CVA different from other ABAP tools and reports? Isn’t it used to check SAP’s own code? Why can’t this be covered by the maintenance fee the customers are already paying?
SAP CVA revenue numbers are not publicly available but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is more expensive and less user-friendly than 3rd-party tools. Hence it’s unlikely CVA is a major cash cow. Making it widely available (open-source it!) would cost SAP little in lost revenue while providing positive PR and making customer systems safer.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, SAP customers deserve to be able to run code vulnerability checks for custom code using this standard tool free of charge. I rest my case. JP
C2C 4 GCP
Talking about ASUG surveys and remembering back to talking about SAP Community surveys got me thinking about enterprise/tech professional communities. My only real experience has been ASUG, so I’m going hunting to find out more.
Even though I deal with Azure professionally most often, I have a special place in my heart for Google Cloud Platform. GCP is where I first touched cloud software development, and has some of the coolest capabilities among the big players. (Seriously, if anybody wants to hate on one of the OGs of serverless, App Engine, then you’ll have to answer to these delicate developer fists of fury.)
C2C is a Google Cloud community organization. I poked around on their site and observed a few things. When you look at SAP groups, you find many things are looked at through a business lens. With C2C, it’s very nearly the opposite. In an ASUG gathering picked at random, I’d probably be the nerdiest person in the room. At C2C, not so much. That right there is refreshing to me: less chance of getting beat up and having my lunch money stolen.
It’s also clear that enterprise is only one of their dimensions. I found a couple groups for startups that look really interesting, and an SAP on Google Cloud group that scratches that particular itch. I also noticed that, even if C2C has a bigger nerd ratio, their community thinks about the same things as ASUG and SAP communities: skilling up for the cloud. PM
Shortwave
Recent update in the Shortwave app introduces “AI-powered summaries” straight into your Inbox. And it can be any Inbox, as long as it’s Gmail.
For full disclosure, I’ve been using MS Outlook with Gmail-based work email. There is something soothing and business-like about Outlook’s ascetic UI and I’m not afraid to admit it.
My first reaction when opening “new and improved Inbox” in Shortwave was… I hated it. It’s one of those things where I begin to wonder if I’m just getting too old. So many apps these days look like someone swallowed and vomited a box of crayons. For some reason, Shortwave also displays a logo on each email (e.g. an email from SAP Support portal will spot an SAP logo) and this is not optional. My Inbox is not a billboard, thank you very much.
I liked the option to select “favorites” and randomly group emails. But the workflow features didn’t seem superior to my patented method of marking an email as unread.
Finally, the coveted AI summarization. It seems to summarize well-written pieces (like newsletters) equally well, but the rest can be as [un]reliable as an average ChatGPT response. For example, when analyzing an email sent by our head of HR it presumed that all the content was from that person, even though it clearly was an update from many departments (result looked hilarious though). In other cases, it missed the important points.
My verdict: it’s a nice effort and can be useful if your Gmail Inbox is getting out of control. But I guess we will just have to keep reading our emails for a while. JP
On Burnout
I was taking a time-out to reflect recently, and the subject of burnout crept into my thoughts. Then I spoke with a colleague and it popped up in the course of discussion. Surely coming up twice in a short time means I should write about it?
Burnout is work-related stress that's piled up to a point of significantly altering your physical or emotional health. Everyone reacts to stress differently, so it's hard to point to one definitive sign of burnout - but if you have a sense that the stress of work has had a meaningful impact on you, you're probably there. You were probably there before you had that sense.
I've been in a burned-out state twice in my professional life, so I've got a few scars. Here are a couple of signs to watch for. If I'd taken note of just these two things, I'd have avoided some pretty harmful behaviors.
A change in personality, for the worse. Both times I got to burnout, I heard myself say things that I immediately recognized as out of character. I was a jerk, I knew I was a jerk, and I didn't care.
Sleep is elusive. You either skip out on it to work on your to-do list, or you find that you can't sleep because you're obsessing on your to-do list.
Things you can do to combat burnout:
Work to decouple your personal value from your work productivity. Career success is not indicative of your personal worth.
Seek and trust the advice of loved ones on your mental state. If your spouse tells you you're not acting like yourself - you're not. They know.
Do the things you enjoy. For a little while I convinced myself that video games weren't the grown-up thing to do. Now I think that doing "grown-up" things sucks. Play some freaking Mario Kart!
If a work project eats up into your personal life, seek out compensatory personal time off after the project is done.
Don't sacrifice your personal awesomeness for your job. PM
Special Message from ASUG’s Geoff Scott
I’m an active member of the Minnesota chapter of ASUG. I get really good value from that membership. Until a few years ago, I didn’t understand the benefits of professional networking and continuing education. I originally joined ASUG through Mindset Consulting, met great people and learned a lot, and since then I’ve made it to every chapter meeting I could.
Jelena and I connected with them and we’re happy to publish a full message from CEO Geoff Scott (visit that link for a great picture) about the benefits of joining. We aren’t being paid for this - we genuinely find ASUG positive and useful in our professional lives, and we think you will too if you’re in the SAP ecosystem. PM
A shout-out to ASUG Carolinas chapter, which I’d argue is the most awesome chapter because it includes not just one but two Carolinas (North and South). Please come meet me in person and see for yourself on March 24th at our chapter meeting in Raleigh, NC. JP
No, actually Minnesota is the best chapter. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this newsletter is too small to contain. PM
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