#45: ABAP SDKs, SAP Events, Flying Buttresses

Hi there,

It’s September! The kids are all back in school, the leaves will start turning colors soon, and your boss is sure to give you that huge raise you’ve earned any day now. We daresay you deserve to enjoy some Boring Enterprise Nerdery, instead of cleaning up the giant mess your inbox has become.

So why don’t you check out our newest Boring Nerdings: The Boring AI Nerdletter? It’s got all the best AI happenings, but keeps the snarky irreverence of the O.G. Nerdletter.

-Jelena and Paul

ABAP SDKs: The Plague Is Spreading

Image credit Microsoft AI SDK for ABAP page. Enthusiasm of this magnitude not guaranteed.

There are ABAP SDKs all over the place. I took note of the official ABAP SDK for Google Cloud from this blog, and it triggered memories of other SDKs I'd seen recently from Azure, a Microsoft AI flavor, AWS, and even IBM Watson. It seems like you can't swing a dereferenced pointer without hitting an SDK!

This is why, love it or hate it, ABAP's not dead. (Especially if you're this guy, who got a comment thread beatdown from the SAP fan club.) These SDKs, coupled with continuing cloud understanding from developers all over, indicate that ABAP remains the deep glue joining back-office SAP to really powerful general-purpose platforms. That’s even more true when you consider there is a small but hyper-active open-source community making freaking cool tools all over the ABAP map. 

Another thing these SDKs show you is a level of seriousness about SAP/ABAP that those companies didn't have in the past. Seeing something you've been a part of for more than a decade grow and evolve is the coolest feeling. I'm legitimately proud of the ABAP folks driving this awesome stuff. PM

Sneaky SAP Events

(Collage image sources: Twitter posts from the past events)

We all know the big SAP events: TechEd, SAPPHIRE, user group conferences. SAP Devtoberfest and ABAPConf also don’t need an introduction anymore. But there is so much more going on beyond those. Here is the scoop.

1. SAP Event Finder is where one would expect to find all the event information but of course it’s not the case. Here you can peruse an eclectic collection of SAP Insider jamborees, small in-person gatherings, and big-ticket conferences.

2. Events group on SAP Community has some “overlap” with p. 1 but also includes webinars and community events like SAP Stammtisch and Code Jam.

3. SAP User Groups event list has nothing to do with big user groups like ASUG or DSAG. I’ve never seen it actively advertised but there is some very interesting technical content (see SAP Garage for example).

4. Smaller in-person community events seem to be more popular in Europe but anyone can organize those (that’s the beauty of it!). Good examples are SAP Inside Track and ABAP Community events.

Do you know of any other SAP events not mentioned here? Please share in the comments! JP

A Composition on Composable ERP

Sonnet 4.6c

Jelena wrote about MACH a few issues ago, and now Phil Wainewright has a continued conversation with enterprises "bringing ERP into a composable architecture to speed up delivery of business requirements". I've been seeing somewhat more willingness to slice and dice ERP systems away from HUGE MONOLITH UNTOUCHABLE LEVIATHAN status (my boss James Wood is a 7th level Enlightened Ninja Master at architecting this). 

Wainewright emphasizes the real-time data demand and I concur. I'm seeing a lot of cases where the back-office is slowing down the front-office these days. Will there be a change in appetite for balancing stability and opportunity? I think the speed-to-innovation discussion hits hard, because the traditional ERP systems (and the people and processes that run them) are built around the idea that stability is king above pretty much everything else. 

There's a nuance here that I can see potential for: MACH as API-focused in composable ERP doesn't prevent, say, a legacy ERP system from serving as the endpoint of several services. It's just that the ERP system itself isn't the focus. I'm an SAP person and I understand both sides of the equation when other teams complain about the relative slow speed of SAP changes, and when SAP teams face change processes designed to slow them. Is composable an answer? PM

Problem-Solving for Developers

We frequently see questions from aspiring software developers: “what programming language should I learn?” or “what certification should I get?”. But any developer who’s good at what they do will tell you that our job is really not about knowing specific syntax. It’s mostly about problem-solving.

One quality is, sadly, seen quite a bit among the ABAP developer hopefuls: the inability to look at a complex task and split it into smaller, achievable steps. For example, one of the typical requirements in ABAP is to get some information and send it by email as an Excel spreadsheet attachment.

What some folks do is just drop a question on SAP Community, then sit back and relax while waiting for someone to share the full program. But those developers who you’d want to have in your team will at least try the DIY route. 

The separate tasks are already clear in this case: get the data into Excel spreadsheet, generate email, attach spreadsheet, profit. Generating an email seems like a good starting point. Even if you fail with attachment, heck, at least you have an email. And surely, sending email from an ABAP program is a common task for which some kind of API should already exist (spoiler: it totally does!). At this point, you will also realize that Excel spreadsheet does not need to be saved as a file anywhere (typical rookie mistake), so it’s a slam dunk from here.

Most importantly, you will learn many useful things along the way: using global classes, handling exceptions, binary format, etc. You might even discover ABAP2XLSX and find many more uses for it. All of this would not be possible when taking the “sit back and relax” route.

If you want to be a successful developer, first and foremost learn how to solve problems. In fact, this great skill will help you in any profession and personal life. 10 out of 10 would recommend. JP

Y2038

Here is an interesting water cooler conversation subject for you: apparently, there is a problem with Unix systems that in 2038 could cause the time counter to roll back to 1901. (Most ABAP developers probably won’t notice the difference! [Ba doom tss] ) It is somewhat similar to the famous Y2K problem caused by someone thinking it’s a good idea to save space by using YY instead of YYYY format for the year.

Y2K was quite a cash cow for IT consulting, so I expect the late 2030s will be fruitful years as well. Especially considering that 2038 will soon be followed by SAP’s own Y2040 problem. Ca-ching! JP

Flying Buttresses Of Skills

ABAP isn’t boring, but it makes the meme funnier

Jelena and I are speaking at ASUG Tech Connect on how to adapt and thrive in the SAP tech ecosystem (search "Perfiljeva" or "Modderman" in the agenda). I've been thinking about how to approach this topic, and I've hit on a metaphor that I think conveys part of it. So, dear readers, you get a preview.

View your techie career work as a cathedral. As you go through your day, you're adding to the interior of the cathedral: statues, altars, hymnals, and the like. These are the biz/tech knowledge items you need to complete the work you currently do. At some point, you've added so many stone mosaics and gargoyles that the walls begin to buckle. If you're asked to think about an outside process, you can't - all the windows are blocked by your internal clutter. 

You need to build flying buttresses on the outer walls of your cathedral. If your career cathedral is the Holy Church of SAPUI5, build flying buttresses like understanding service workers, IndexedDB, and serverless architecture. You get at least two huge benefits:

• The buttresses allow you to have heavier walls and bigger ceilings. More things make sense if you broaden your context. 

• Buttresses allow walls to incorporate larger windows. If you build the techie buttresses of related-but-not-too-close skills, you will be able to see outside the walls of your cathedral. Maybe the Church of Cloud Engineering is a better doctrinal fit. 

I think this is so powerful that it almost doesn't matter what buttresses you choose to build. It will make it easy to add as many gargoyles as you want. PM

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