Getting Technical

I love recruiters. I really do. It really comes down to different skill sets for different roles. With over  a decade in this software game now I have learnt a few skills that makes my time salable to the highest bidder. Over time I have taken some skills off my cv as it generates false hits for roles that I have no interest in doing.

Having said all that I am always happy to talk to a recruiter or read their emails. Sometimes they start with ‘ Sorry if this is not right for you… ‘ you get the idea. I would rather build the relationship with them when I don’t need them than have to try and sell myself and my skill-set to someone who has no idea who I am when I do desperately need a new client.

I have a handful of recruiters that I work with I guess, but every now and then I get a call that even makes me chuckle. The guy was running through the specification for a new role that had ‘just come in’. It was all sounding pretty good until he read out “Must have ‘Double Zero’ skills”. For a moment I thought I was going to be required to save the world from some evil dictator.

“I think you mean Oh-Oh”, I said.

“No it says ‘Double Zero’”.

“It actually says Oh-Oh. It stands for Object Oriented. They are looking for object oriented skills.” I was being patient with him.

“Well you learn something every day.” He gave a little embarressed laugh.

And while we have a little chuckle over this incident I really hope he does learn something every day because I certainly am. There is so much happening in the wonderful world of software development not to be. I am currently  working on my Flex 3, WDA, ABAP, ABAP OO, PHP, Python, Dojo and one or two other things for good measure.

Darren Hague and I had a odd idea last year.

“Why not run an unconference for SAP developers and consultants in London.”

SAP Inside Track London 2009

We had both been to SAP Community Days and thought we could pull something off. So we hustled together a venue and a wiki page to handle the signups and sessions.

It was a lot of fun. So much so that this year we are repeating the whole process.

This year we have managed to secure IBM Southbank as a venue. Thanks to a lot of help from Zoe Slattery. 

The date is April 4 and there is a small charge of £10 to cover the lunch. (Signup quickly in March for the early bird rate. In April it will rocket to £15!)

There are several SAP Mentors coming to the event from Europe so it is a great chance to hear from them and particularly the ESME team.

Ant Phillips from IBM will be presenting a session on connecting SAP up with Project Zero, the community version of Websphere sMash. The other sessions planned for the day are on the SDN Wiki.

One of the  sessions is a discussion on certification. This has been a hot topic in the SAP community lately. New Mentor Michael Koch is currently running a survey on how certification relates to contractors. You can complete this survey here and it would be great to see some good results from that survey at the unconference.

You can follow the fun in twitter at @SAPInsideTrack.

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

If you would like to come along to meet the mentors, participate in the sessions, run a session for yourself there is still time to signup.

… you get on the front page of SDN

So I did a hasty screen grab.

SDN Frontpage

Thanks to @welshcathy for letting me know!

I didn’t expect to take this long to announce the winner of the caption competition. Thanks to all those who took part.

Congratulations to Johan who came up with the winner.  SFLIGHT is the be all and end all. What else would you need? I am sure that the SAP Airline Industry solution is build on the solid foundation of SFLIGHT. (For all of you who don’t know the SFLIGHT is a simple database model that many introductory ABAP courses use as a learning tool.)

I’m convinced now! SFLIGHT is better than their current system.

Thanks for playing along and next time I am sharing aproximate space time coordinates with Johan there’s I’ll get the first round.

The rise and rise of ESME is something I have watched with interest in just the past couple of weeks. At the SAP London Community Day, Darren Hague showed off Scala and Lift and push messaging. It looked pretty cool. A few weeks later he puts this page up on the SDN Wiki and then showed a couple of SAP Mentors the initial progress he had made with Scala.

Well in the last couple of weeks ESME has gone a little nuts. All sorts of guys have come to the party to produce the demo that is below and entered it into Demo Jam – the annual SAP contest to find innovation from within the ecosystem. I think they are the first in the history of the jam to publish their submission video before the competition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1dPAV8C0Tw]

At last weeks nanomonk there was several of the core team present. Giving demos and explaining the proposition.

My original concern was that what does this add that you can’t get from enterprise instant messaging?

The immediate response on twitter was:

With IM you have to know whom to ask and requires mutual adding to contactlists. #esme works like Twitter #

@njames #esme tag clouds, group concept, integration of different corp. back-ends, etc.  #

So it’s all about getting what you want without having to know where to get it from. It’s about breaking open information silos and sharing information with colleagues to create solutions quicker and get the job done.

I am very much looking forward to what these guys, who I am happy to count as friends, pull together. The thought that in about 5 years time I might be using a ESME like tool is exciting. I am saying 5 years as some of the large enterprisey type clients can be a little slow on the uptake. I would love it to be Q1 09!

For other information about ESME check out the following series of posts:

• Abesh on SDN
• Richard Hirsh on SDN
• Yojibee
• Yojibee taking it to the next level
• Dennis Howlett on SDN
• Dennis Howlett on AccMan
• Hashtags
• Summize (Twitter search)
• Roebot (MindTouch) and again
• Ustream

As always the London PHP meetup last night went off.

I met a whole buncha new people. Some of whom were from bluhalo.com and others were from iBuildings.

Ian Christian presented a great talk on doctrine (rhymes with whine not win apparently but I guess that depends on what school you went to or what country you were born in)

Doctrine is a ORM tool for mapping your classes into databases tables. His presentation went well even with offline google docs!

I later got into all sorts of conversations with the afore mentioned new iBuildings guys and aparently the are an international company now because they are in two countries. Well judging by the nationality of them they are a global company! Other people drifed into the conversation and I mentioned I was a SAP consultant by day and someone (not the iBuildings guys FTR) had decided that SAP was all proprietory and was not into open standards blah blah blah. I tried to press him for evidence for his assertions but none came and someone else conventiently came along to rescue him.

I could go on here about how you could connect with SAP dozens of ways including SOAP, REST, Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby with connectors some official and some open source (how’s Zend Core for SAP coming along guys hint hint ) but if you have decided that SAP is not open then I guess your mind is in a similar state.

A small group of Symfony guys found a table and started doing the symfony thing and I managed to see Ian was getting prepared for the Agavi presentation next month. (Backstory here)

At the end of the evening I saw Marcus giving a one-on-one with someone so I came over to see what was happening and ended up getting a personal tour through simpletest and intro to TDD.

Thanks Marcus.

Thomas Jung has been working on some amazing stuff. I love the power of adobe flash interface to produce slick looking graphs. He twittered yesterday that he was making some new screen casts of what is coming soon to the Netweaver Stack. Although my current gig is not running that sort of rig and I twittered back that I wouldn’t likely get near it until 2011, I was interested to see what was going on. Tom kindly sent a preview of the cast and this screen shot is of a flash graphs generated from within Web Dynpro for ABAP.

I am a big fan of visualising these kinds. Flash is a great way to deliver this sort of data as they make data more usable. This kind of innovation is what keeps me excited about what SAP is doing in the market place even though I may not get to work on them for a while.

These screen casts are going to have voice overs attached and appear in the eLearning section of SDN soon.

Bonus Link: If you have not heard, James Governor is running an Adobe SAP Nanoconference on July the 11th Adobe’s new offices in Regent’s Park, London.

In my reader this morning popped a great article from Martin Ceronio, an ABAPer from South Africa.

He provides two great tips for ABAP.

The first while strictly not ABAP but more SAP GUI related is related to removing the quick lookup entries from a drop down box. As Martin says:

I found out that in the SAP GUI, you can delete entries in the “recent values” dropdown of a field … by selecting it with the arrow keys and pressing delete.

This is very useful for getting rid of passwords typed in the username box.

As I shared this with one of my co-workers on my current project, she said “Oh yeah, you can do that anywhere, ie, anywhere”

So I confirmed that this tip also works in IE and mostly the browser of your choice too.

The other tip was all about backtics and single quotes in ABAP. Martin details how they can be used. I have found that the best part about backtics is enclosing single quotes which is critical for building javascript on the server to be executed on the client.

What follows is the text stream as I listened to the keynote from Leo Apotheke Co-CEO SAP from his keynote this morning. You can find the webcast here.

World in flatter and faster.

Business networks are the answer.

Business network creates barriers to entry, creates competitive advantage.

Operation excellence is the entry point to the network.

Network will expel the weakest link.

John Clarke – CIO of Nokia

Growth constrained by IT. Profitability constrained by IT

384 million devices last year made by Nokia

Nokia has the world’s best supply chain say AMR.

Moving to be a mobile services company.

Connect you to what matters most

No longer one size fits all – different devices for different markets.

Increase in research to market products that capture the imagine of customers.

4000 active concurrent users on the Nokia system

Global single instance

Near real time visibility of information.

Quick financial closing.

Strict enforcement on policies.

Technology enabler in phones and in network esp SAP

Lesson from Tesco – “Better Simpler Cheeper”

Paul McGarry – CIO EMEA Colgate-Palmolive

$13B sales last year

Long time SAP Customers.

99% of business is on SAP in over 100 Countries.

Streamlining order processing, taking out complexity of the system.

Profitability increased as SAP was rolled out across the business.

Leo

Moving to small and midsize companies (SME)

All in One and ByDesign share key points with the Business Suite.

Supply chain demo by Ian Kimball.

Scenario with a business network

Forecasting or demand demand based production.

This would look great if you were a supply chain organisation.

Business all in One

New pre-configured, pre-tested. All in One by IBM and HP

Selecting the right data to mine is critical BI + BO have the tools.

Broadband, data storage, processing all cheep – bring better analytics to managers without a Phd in Statistics.

Co-Innovation – SAP’s own network.

SAP + RIM

Jeff McDowall from RIM

“The future of enterprise mobility software”

Lot of overlap with RIM and SAP.

Think what blackberry did to email. Trying to now do the same with enterprise software.

Demo-ing with Blackberry Bold 3G “IPhone Killer”

Start with calendar

One click to account.

One hand and two clicks to get to amount.

One click to map with directions.

Log phone call with call notes and updates live to CRM.

Access to data is quick.

Jeff presents Leo a BlackBerry Bold as a gift.

Leo

Enterprise Support

Trying to make it easier for you.

SAP Enterprise Support – only one thing to do call SAP.

A quick update from the first totally community organised London Community Day. The general consensus was it was a huge success. A full post will be up on SCN later.

We had about 20 or so there for the day and we had some great sessions on the ICF (Internet Communication Framework), Enterprise Services with .NET, Workflow, Dynamic personalisation and landing pages in Enterprise Portal, a session on the Universal worklist and a few others.

The best part of these days is the networking. It was great to meet new people and catch up with many that I have worked with over the years. If you missed out on this day we are planning others. Watch this space.

You can catch up with some of the happenings at the eventtrack feed. Photos and video will be posted “soon”.

If anyone knows about AVCHD M2TS video files and has some tips get in touch. Though google has a few answers it seems.