The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #29: ABAPConf, SAPUI5, AlphaCode, Tech Layoffs, Newsletter Migration
Hi there,
This is the last Nerdletter of this calendar year! We sincerely hope we've fed just a little bit of knowledge and fun into your life.
You'll see a story about this below, but in sum: due to totally normal and not billionaire-playtime-acquisition reasons, we'll be moving off the shutting-down-soon Revue platform to Substack.
-Jelena and Paul
ABAPConf 2022
With TechEd being heavily dominated by SAP BTP sales pitches, ABAPConf is the perfect palate-cleansing event for SAP developers. Run by a group of enthusiasts in Europe, it offers many sessions in German but the rest of the world is also not forgotten. Here are my personal highlights from the English-spoken part of the event.
ABAP File Formats (AFF), presented by Albert Mink and Lars ‘The Legend’ Hvam. No, this is not about using ABAP code to upload and download files. It’s about storing ABAP code itself and providing the file format definitions of ABAP repository objects. As Lars points out, ABAP code is not stored in text files, as the code in many other languages. This presents challenges for the ABAP tools creators but fear not! Check out this project on GitHub for more info.
Tweaking ABAP, presented by George Manousaridis is a classic “tips and tricks” ABAP presentation. Absolutely loved it! It’s great to see a new generation of developers having fun with good old ABAP instead of complaining that it’s “not cool enough”.
RAP Troubleshooting - ABAP Cross trace introduction by Steffen Mattes and Dominik Eira Elias of SAP, a "must watch" if you’re using ABAP RAP (as you should). This will be an extremely useful tool and I wish it was down-ported to the earlier release because troubleshooting RAP stuff can be truly painful.
Overall, I really enjoyed watching almost the whole day of Channel 1 and only wish I could catch more of the event in real time to soak in some of that awesome community and camaraderie spirit. JP
SAPUI5 Keeps Truckin'
For someone who's written multiple books on SAPUI5, it's a real shame I don't devote more column space in this newsletter to it. I saw this piece pop up in SAP blogs, and got curious. Over the last year, here are some of the best things making their way into UI5 (or improving existing pieces):
"Edit on Github" process for improving the (already pretty good) UI5 documentation, as of 1.107.
A TypeScript demo app now available in the official demo apps. Someone should really write a short TypeScript for UI5 book. It does NOT need to be the length of the complete UI5 reference book - it only needs to hold your hand and push you through the main, opinionated pieces of bolting TypeScript onto a UI5 workflow. Everything that brings the rest of the modern web to UI5 will help its adoption.
OData v4 continues to get more and more love in every update. This just has to keep improving - OData v2 is long in the tooth and sort of an awkward weirdo in the OData world.
Accessibility is still thought through, and much appreciated as an enterprise-focused toolkit. For example, the Carousel focus change in 1.108.
IllustratedMessage is a cool new-ish control I haven't played around with enough - but looks snazzy.
SAPUI5 (or rather, its open-source counterpart OpenUI5) doesn't get much love outside of SAP circles, but it sure as heck isn't because it doesn't get love inside SAP. Sincere kudos to maintainers and designers. PM
The Great Migration
This Nerdletter will be moving to Substack beginning with the first 2023 issue. Unfortunately, Revue platform that we’ve used successfully for over a year, is being shutdown by its “corporate daddy” Twitter.
Even though switching to another newsletter platform seems nothing like moving from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, there are many similarities and “lessons learned” in both directions.
When the first signs of "Twitter trouble" emerged, we connected the dots and started preparations right away, long before the official announcement. It also pays to keep your ear to the SAP ground, so to speak, to be prepared for what’s coming (either good or bad).
Our migration is not wanted and not needed. We were very happy with Revue and had no plans to stop using it. I totally get how some SAP customers feel about their existing ECC systems: they work just fine, why change anything? But sometimes, there is just no choice anymore, so we must rush through the DABDA stages and move on.
There is also a silver lining and we look forward to the new features. For example, on Substack, we will be able to engage directly with you, the readers via comments. And there will be other post types that we might use. If only it was just as easy to discover tangible business benefits of SAP upgrade beyond the faster fiscal month closing, eh? JP
Tech Layoffs: Should We Care?
Lots of digital ink has been spilled over tech company layoffs in 2022. Check out crunchbase's tracker to see and search for more in-depth numbers - as of December 16, about 91,000 people in the tech sector have been impacted. As always, I get great context and thoughts from Bob Evans & crew, this time in the form of an episode of his podcast. Here are some thought highlights:
Lots of these people being laid off are actually from places that hired insanely fast. Hiring quickly has an effect on culture, and "growing very fast comes with its own challenges". Surely layoffs have a company culture impact, but surely also massive hiring sprees have cultural impact.
People underestimate the rate of change, even for massive companies. The tech world has to turn on a dime - even the behemoths.
If you, as a non-tech company, want to hire these folks, take a couple things into account. First, a large contingent of these people will likely have their own cultural norms and may dig into your own company's cultural norms (for better or worse!). Second, it may be a boon: if your company is stuck in old-school tech thinking, a crew of these newer-school engineers could be just the kick in the pants you need! Get into the latest CI/CD practices!
Bob's guest Wayne Sadin also wisely recommends that low-code/no-code, modern cloud approaches, and other things have made it easier than ever for self-service, especially for low complexity tech for non-tech companies.
Having worked in large enterprise IT as well as small, startup-ish product builds, I can say with confidence that there will be a culture gap wherever these new job seekers land. As a kind of sunny optimist, I can also say that over the long run, introducing new elements to company culture often serves to strengthen it. PM
Jelena’s Nice and Accurate Career Prophecies
As one year closes and a new one begins, we tend to reflect on our professional growth and make plans for the next career move. To help you with that, here are my Nice and Accurate Prophecies for the SAP professionals in 2023 and beyond.
Developers who are not good at management will continue making lousy managers. It’s a terrible misconception that the only way “up” for SAP professionals is the management roles. Instead, consider “spreading out”, many opportunities for that exist in the SAP ecosystem. Demand for Solution Architects who can handle complex projects spanning across different modules and systems will continue to grow.
We will see more unconventional, "create your own" roles, like “Vice president of product evangelism” emerge.
Cloud is The Next Big Thing in SAP world. Developers, learn how Cloud applications work. Functional consultants, learn how to help customers bridge the gaps between their wildest desires (within best practice limits) and SAP Cloud products.
Non-SAP tech is The Next Even Bigger Thing in SAP world. The bleary-eyed ABAPers and functional consultants will peek out of the warm and cozy SAP cave and wonder “hey, what else is out there?”
The next “hot skill” will be fixing what the previous hot skill chasers created.
And, of course, subscribing to this Nerdletter will bring you 7 years of good luck. Allegedly. Happy New Year! JP
AlphaNitPick
Back in issue #7, I wrote about AlphaCode. DeepMind has published more on AlphaCode's capabilities, including its ability to score in the top half of human submitters in competitive code contests.
Peter Norvig, legendary AI and Python expert, provides a nicely-written critique of some code generated by AlphaCode. It's a great expert-programmer writeup of some strange artifacts of the generation process, with thoughtful comments. In fact, it's like the best code review you've ever seen (how I wish some of my early-career code could have gotten this level of scrutiny!)
The whole thing spawns two simultaneous threads in my brain:
The capabilities of this, as well as ChatGPT and the supposedly forthcoming GPT-4, continue to astound.
The ways that these things can go wrong are equally astounding, absurd, and illustrative in their own way. At this point, many of the things that go wrong can be roughly attributed to the generation process losing its 'place' in context, or not knowing some factoid about the world.
What happens when the generation process keeps its context better, and when there is some sort of knowledge scaffolding of the world they can hang onto?
DeepMind, you have a chance here. Create the ultimate companion program to AlphaCode - call it AlphaCodeReview, or AlphaNitpick, or something. Train it on thousands of code reviews, and turn it loose on real-world code. Have AlphaNitpick do a code review on ChatGPT's output code! Maybe the best way to get the bots to learn about the world is to teach them shame. :) PM
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