#35 CodeComplete, SAP Learning and Innovation Awards, Google Glass
Hi there,
We’re fresh off of hosting the first annual Boring Enterprise Nerds X-TREME Innovation Awards! Bad news: we forgot to invite or nominate anyone. So now we’re just sitting in the green room, wondering what to do with all these cool nerd glasses sculptures.
While we figure out what to do, enjoy an issue with some code stories, some SAP stories, and some light complaining!
-Jelena and Paul
The Consequences of Code
The other day at work we had to use a custom transaction to do some testing in a client’s system. There were several experienced developers on the call. As we went along, we just kept noticing all the bits and pieces where a simple code change could’ve made experience much better. Providing a key value from memory in ABAP is barely a line of code. Optimizing ALV grid column width hardly needs any effort. This is not an issue with just one program or one client. Most, if not all SAP systems have stuff like this.
In my personal life, not a day goes by without thinking “dam’, I bet it’d take very little effort for a developer to make an improvement here”. Websites that promise to remember you but keep asking for credentials, confusing error messages, search that doesn’t – we all have seen it.
All these examples are small potatoes compared to a story that Tom Scott shares in his The Consequences of Your Code video. But there is the same thread: our code has consequences. On the receiving end of our work is not just the product but also a human being. And sometimes, that human is you. Next time you code, think about it. JP
SAP Learning Check-in
SAP’s “new and improved” Learning website was announced in TechEd 2021 keynote. My original assessment was “looks cool but where is the content?” What does it look like 16 months later? Let’s find out.
If you get past the “how do you do, fellow kids” video, Student Zone has some decent content. The main attraction there is Introducing End-to-End Business Processes for the Intelligent Enterprise. It’s a very long journey but to be fair, it also covers a lot of ground.
Certification section is rather disappointing. Information is presented very nicely but this section mostly serves as a gateway to Learning Hub with its paid subscriptions. And I still don’t understand why certification materials aren't just free for everyone. (Psst, they are if this loophole is still open.)
The rest of it is a mixed bag of “learning journeys”. There are 56 of them, which sounds like a lot but it’s a drop in a bucket for the vast SAP universe. I was excited to find Manage Production Orders in SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing but it left me with many “huh?” moments even though I’m already somewhat familiar with the subject. Some parts triggered my “mandatory corporate HR training” PTSD. Yikes.
Also, the journeys are structured by “product”, which is the concept not well understood outside of Waldorf proper. Would you know which “product” does ABAP belong to, for example?
When it comes to content, SAP is its own enemy sometimes. The learning journeys reminded me of SAP Help: very long (Manufacturing piece is 12 hours), convoluted, boring. And while it’s OK for Help to be boring, it doesn’t have to be the case for the learning content. It is not clear though what exactly is the purpose of learning-dot-sap-dot-com. Is it a subsidiary of the marketing division or is it meant for regular people to learn something useful efficiently? So far, the latter doesn’t seem to be the case, sadly. JP
Innovation Awards Strike Back
There's a new set of SAP Innovation Awards nominees and finalists. I enjoy going over the submissions for these kinds of awards, because you can learn a lot about how vendors want customers and partners to be talking about their products. They can also, frankly, run the gamut from dull to weird to interesting. Here's my take on a few interesting submissions.
Emergency Response: Contributing to Humanitarian Aid for Ukraine: User-friendly interface with a focus on disaster relief and humanitarian aid. 114 humanitarian aid distribution points located in 53 cities, with an application launched within six weeks. There's a positive testimonial from an actual human seeking aid - that's all I need.
Laying the Foundation for Scaling the Employee Experience Globally: "Laying the foundation" doesn't strike me as a phrase you'd use to describe a particularly innovative thing. Reading more closely, this submission seems more like just a description of a relatively standard project. Someone please let me know if I'm missing something.
BrightPrice Suite: I know they're out there, but I don't hear tons of stories about SaaS built on SAP BTP. They say BrightPrice unlocks the power of pricing by "deploying data-driven, winning pricing strategies whilst creating transparency." I'm not a finance/pricing expert, but if the numbers they give in their pitch deck are remotely true, I would absolutely give this a look.
Intelligent Firefighting: Neat and impactful: "Providing digital maps and a mobile application to precisely track and locate fires, plus the possibility to digitally record the damages…" Not just making an app go - making the data and process impact the Earth. Kudos.
HCLTech RISE Journey: I think there's a difference between solid work and innovative work. Getting HCLTech up and going with RISE might be a complicated endeavor, but I don't really think that makes it "innovative" - the pitch deck just lists out a bunch of standard RISE stuff.
I recommend going out and taking a look. Interesting/weird/dull stuff all over the place. PM
Google Glass: Shattered
At least your tears won't fog up the lens: Google Glass for Enterprise is end-of-life. For me, when it was announced Glass was the harbinger of ok-yeah-this-might-work augmented reality. I recall thinking that it was only a matter of a couple years before we'd be swimming in a digital sea with magic glasses anytime we wanted.
(Let's all remember the even harder hype around Magic Leap. I think it's probably telling that both Glass and Magic Leap started as consumer devices and made their way to "enterprise" editions.)
In 2014, I published a Google Sheets add-on that allowed people to use OData services from SAP systems to populate online spreadsheets and manage their enterprise data from that familiar spreadsheet UI. While I was excited to publish software that I'd personally written to the world, I was nearly equally excited to enter the add-on into an SAP-sponsored Google/SAP mashup contest being held during TechEd that year, where the prize was: a Google Glass device! Here's an object lesson in software developer humility: not only did we not win, that add-on is now no longer available in the Google Sheets add-on store.
For Glass, death comes swiftly. March 15 is the announcement of no more sales of this device, and September 15 is the end of support. Which means you could've placed an order March 14 and had a device that would only reliably last for six months. That is very un-enterprise. PM
SAP Desktop Office integration
SAP Community blog How to enable the SAP Desktop Office Integration for SAP GUI for HTML and SAP GUI for Java is one of those posts that make you check the calendar nervously: what year is this? No worries, folks, we are still in 2023. And yes, SAP GUI and SAP DOI are still the thing.
ABAP veterans must remember the good old OLE technology that we could use to build much desired SAP/Excel integrations. While OLE went out of fashion, turns out integrations continued to live on.
I haven’t done anything with DOI myself in a long time and was surprised to learn that not only there is current Office integration using a class but now also a replacement for it in CL_SOVY_CONTAINER_CONTROL. SAP just sneaks in these classes and doesn’t tell anyone, huh.
In any case, Excel remains a hugely popular tool among business users (recurring blog posts on this subject are a stark evidence) and I think it’s nice that SAP keeps this in mind even amidst all the BTP and Cloud brouhaha. One cannot possibly have too many Excel tools. JP
CodeComplete: Enterprise Copilot
I've been thinking about this ever since I saw GitHub Copilot: what about those enterprises that will, for whatever security or IP reason, never ever ever let their teams use a tool like that?
I guess some nerds were snooping around in my thoughts, because I saw a piece on Hacker News about CodeComplete. A tool like Copilot, but fine-tuned to a particular company's codebase, and running on that company's internal infrastructure. So enterprise developers who are strictly curbed from any outside tools can still make use of the super-powers of GPT-like AIs.
Their demo videos give the impression that the experience is very similar to Copilot itself, which is a great thing…the Copilot experience is somewhere between really good Intellisense and plain ol' wizardry. Seeing the code editor light up with the code you meant to use (or the code you were trying to figure out how to use), and hitting the tab key to autocomplete it is a profound feeling. Sometimes it feels like it's finishing my sentence, occasionally it feels like the tool didn't understand where I was going…and sometimes the tool goes to a more correct place than I'd have first thought. The barrier between idea and implementation is crumbling.
I hadn't known about the ability for companies to privately fine-tune code helper LLMs to their benefit, but apparently CodeComplete isn't alone in this space. So, fellow nerds at more-restrictive companies, just know that you aren't alone in the world anymore. You can have superpowers too. PM
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