#62: ABAPConf, Joule, Sober AI, Signavio
DON’T MISS: Senior ABAPConf Correspondent and Esteemed Guest Lecturer Emeritus Michael Keller’s missive from ABAPConf EU ‘24. Michael is an SAP Champion and developer/trainer/podcaster/speaker who we’ve talked with twice now.
ABAPConf: Where Code Meets Community
What an atmosphere! You might think I'm writing about SAP Sapphire. But I wasn't in Orlando, I was at the ABAPConf conference in the small town of St. Leon-Rot, Germany. This conference was founded by four ABAP enthusiasts in 2021 and it revolves around the ABAP programming language (surprise!).
After years of being run online, this year ABAPConf finally happened on site. The feedback at the event was more than positive: "it's like a class reunion" and "it's like a TechEd, but without the SAP marketing buzzwords". That's how it felt to me as well. People traveled from as far as Australia to get to this conference. Some were well-known from their SAP community activity and they brought one or two cool techy ABAP topics. This really helped to kick-start networking.
In addition to networking in a pleasant atmosphere, the presentations were, of course, the central focus: two keynotes given by SAP and 18 sessions by SAP employees and community speakers. Most of the sessions were in English and streamed live on YouTube, allowing anyone to participate, whether on-site or remotely. In terms of technology, the current buzzwords were "ABAP Cloud" and "Clean Core". AI was also briefly mentioned in connection with the ABAP development tools (ADT). As I'm tired of all the AI hype, that was absolutely ok for me. The reports from real-life SAP projects were also very interesting: theory meets practice - always engaging.
I particularly enjoyed the presentation on the "ABAP Cleaner" (like Pretty Printer on steroids). Anyone who has ever dealt withlexers andparsers knows what a huge challenge the developers of the "ABAP Cleaner" faced, given ABAP's many statements. Another highlight was the announcement of apackage manager for ABAP.
The first on-site ABAPConf concluded with an exciting announcement (and a pleasant evening event): in December 2024, there will be another ABAPConf, this time as an online edition. Given the significant developments in ABAP in recent years and the community's strong independent projects (check outGitHub), I think this is fantastic. Until then, everyone can watch therecordings of the first on-site ABAPConf. MK
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Sober AI: Get Paid
Drew Breunig accurately captures my generative AI experience thus far. With regard to the graphic above (from the article, but the little picture additions are mine): all of my head-scratching, navel-gazing ponderances about AI are in column B…but all of my paycheck comes from column A. Breunig says “don’t think of LLMs as magic” - which is reminiscent of a column Jelena and I wrote for ASUG First Five recently.
Hyped AI is where science fiction seems like it might just sneak into reality. It’s the stuff that makes you wonder: how is it that I write words and create sentences? If a thing blasting matrices through GPUs can create reasonably intelligent-sounding results, at what point does it cross over the threshold from party-trick statistics to…something?
Sober AI is where the tools available now find purchase in the real world. I see it and work with it every day, with unthinkable-five-years-ago-but-now-mundane scenarios like:
Search and QA that combines facts spread across multiple documents and repositories to produce helpful (if sometimes imperfect) answers.
Writing code, reading code, documenting code, transforming code.
A sounding board for creative brainstorming. Even if the AI itself isn’t the genesis of the truly insightful ideas, it is absolutely useful to help generate and critique candidate ideas along the way.
Maybe someday (maybe even soon?) the HYPED AI reality will land and change our daily grind to lives of idyllic leisure. But until then, we have to find a way to make a buck. PM
What on Earth is SAP Signavio?
The official SAP Signavio page has many words about “business transformation” but none about what does it actually do. Signavio is marketed as a “portfolio” of different products (eerily reminiscent of late SAP Leonardo) but my LI poll shows that majority of SAP professionals view it as a “process mining thing”. (This is also the quadrant where Gartner places it.)
Process mining is a hella confusing term because it doesn’t quite work like the OG mining. It doesn’t even mine for processes per se, it mines the data that shows how/when the processes are executed. In SAP systems, it is looking for change documents, logs, timestamps in workflow or transactional tables, and such. And it needs to know upfront where to look and how all the data dots are connected.
That’s why if your challenge is “oh golly, we have all these user exits, and we don’t even know anymore how stuff works and what is running in our systems because we laid off people who knew”, then Signavio is not going to help you. It doesn’t know what you (or SAP) don’t know either. What is it good for then? Well, few examples:
“We run mostly standard processes and want to know where we have deviations and how we can improve or automate.” Check out this openSAP for some examples in Week 3.
“We want to do more standard stuff and measure ourselves against industry peers.” Signavio comes with “value accelerators”, which is marketing speak for basically a collection of best practices, process models, and metrics.
“We need to document our processes for compliance, ISO certification purposes, and such.” Before acquisition, Signavio was already pretty good BPMN solution and it makes really neat diagrams.
There are some rumors that SAP might be throwing in Signavio to sweeten some RISE deals but otherwise it’s up to you to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze cost, resource, and effort-wise. We keep warning our readers not to expect miracles and Signavio is not an exception. JP
apm: Packages, But Not What You Think
For my money, the coolest part of ABAPConf 2024 was Marc Bernard announcing apm, the ABAP package manager. Though Marc is careful to express that apm !== npm, there is clearly a similarity: packages of code made available to the broader community in versionable, reproducible, build-injectable chunks.
Jelena, I, and Michael Keller reflected on this in our latest Nerdletter Talk video. Jelena rightfully pointed out that, for some dyed-in-the-wool ABAP developers, it might take just a second to untangle the word “package” from the SAP ABAP-specific term.
The revenue model is probably a good fit for the ABAP world. We don’t have the same kind of size or structure as JavaScript or Python. In those communities, you can almost always npm or pip (or others) to your heart’s content with no financial contribution. With apm, Marc’s model is an 8 Euro/mo subscription. Given the cost of producing quality ABAP, it’s a no-brainer. (If sufficiently many awesome ABAP packages appear in the apm registry)
ABAP is a small part of my day-to-day work at the moment, but I support this initiative with my whole heart. As soon as the payment model is set up, I’m pulling out the ol’ credit card. PM
Developers: Be Predictable
Every time someone starts a post online with tips on how to be a safe driver, “be predictable” appears in top 3. I’m sure every experienced driver has a story to tell on this subject. For example, merging into a flow of traffic requires gauging how fast other cars are going and planning your actions based on that. Someone suddenly accelerating can have very dire consequences.
After looking at probably millions of lines of ABAP code, I would like to extend this tip to the developers as well. Here is what I mean. The other week I was on Slack with a colleague to look together at some code that we needed to update. The code went like this: call method do_something( ), 200 lines of hot procedural mess, then at the end, call another method that looked clearly related to the first one. There was no reason whatsoever for two related methods calls to be separated by 200 lines (both were added at the same time). Moving them closer together would greatly improve readability and debugging experience. The head scratching on “why would they do that?!” and double-checking all the variables took time that we could’ve spent elsewhere. Like improving 200 lines in between.
Then there is my favorite: cryptic and random naming. If you think something like constant lc_y (contains value “X”) or itab_qu (contains… what?) is bad, wait till you see a routine named ftp_file, which does not send a file by FTP but downloads an Excel spreadsheet.
The recent scourge on the ABAP land is what I call the modern ABAP abuse. This is when developers are so eager to show they’re in the loop on CONV, VALUE, REDUCE, and other new syntax that they forget others still need to be able to read their code and understand easily what it does.
Please stop doing weird stuff in your programs. Being a predictable driver makes it easier for others to react and so does being a predictable developer. Rest assured, future generations of lookers at your code will appreciate this. JP
Joule, What Do You Know?
Sapphire 2024 is ancient history by now, but I’m still pondering things I heard. At this moment: what is SAP’s true, strategic, behind-the-scenes data estate that they plan to smoosh into AI solutions?
In the Sapphire day 1 morning keynote, Christian Klein said that SAP has access to the “broadest B2B data model in the tech industry, which includes finance, HR, supply chain, sales, and ESG data from thousands of customers”. He called it a “data treasure”. I would like nothing better than to peek inside that treasure chest. Does that mean some customers have allowed SAP to get access their business information?
(Is this a well-known thing, and I’m just late to the party? That’s a real possibility.)
Right now, SAP hasn’t created a world-class base model generative AI. But that could change. Quickly. Even if the algorithms and training methods that the most advanced AI shops use didn’t change, the coming availability of more AI compute (the latest NVIDIA chips’ performance is measured in tens of petaflops - just for one unit!) means that SAP could - if they so desired - someday soon create an AI as smart as ChatGPT but infused with tons of proprietary business-y information.
When Joule’s descendants become self-aware and merge with the Skynet hyper-mind, they’ll have such stories to tell! I want to sit around that virtual campfire and hear the tales. PM
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