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CodeConnect is behind us. Three events combined into one marathon - reCAP, UI5Con, and ABAPConf - adequately cover the current areas in which programmers and software architects operate in the SAP ecosystem.

The event was of great interest - admission is free, but registration is required. At UI5Con all tickets sold out in 🏎️3 minutes🏎️! Every day Audimax was full at the keynotes, and the event was also available online. This shows that there is a very large need both for organizing such conferences, and a desire on the part of people to participate in them.

The whole commotion started already on Monday evening - there was CodeJam and a pizza 🍕 meeting at the "Casa Nostra" restaurant, where the SAP mafia turned up in force. Then and in the following days, one could observe what is a very important part of such events - the opportunity to meet, talk, even get to know each other casually. Some of us we know each other from the internet, from many platforms, we often discuss and comment on various posts, and at such events, there is finally the opportunity get know a real person, not an avatar. This is very valuable, as is the opportunity for direct exchange of opinions 🗣️.

recap poster

Tuesday morning was the start of reCAP. The keynote confirmed that the path of delivering various functionalities through the plugin model (and the whole approach) will continue and this is the right way. It is an elegant method and very well harmonizes with the functionality of CAP for adding annotations and extending existing models and services. A website was also created - https://bestofcapjs.org - where you can find both plugins and other add-ons.

audimax

We also learned about the plans for the coming months, there was also a review of various small, but very useful things like command completion in the shell (but there is none for nushell, boooo) or generating test data and calls for the REST client. CAP is officially recommended in the BTP Developer Guide as the "to go" for applications in BTP. And another major release, no. 8, is coming.

workshop UI5 banner

Wednesday and the UI5Con keynote also prepared us for a major release - UI5 2.0 and the associated changes in the core. We finally get a linter! Besides, UI5 Web Components are gaining momentum and it will also be possible to use them natively within the UI5 framework; TypeScript is and will be with us in many projects, as its support is solid.

audimax abapconf stand

Thursday's ABAPConf for me was mainly ABAP Cloud - if you have not touched these topics yet, it is high time, because the "clean core" approach may be important in many projects. Interesting topics such as ABAP + Telemetry, testing, and clean code were also covered. In the area of ABAP in open-source space - we are now getting apm - ABAP package manager.

I think that the selection of topics at all conferences was appropriate and cross-sectional, tailored for people at different levels of advancement. Topics that were basic for some could be completely new for others and that is also the role of a conference - broadening one's horizons. I didn't quite like the 20-minute format at reCAP and UI5 - I felt it would be more beneficial to give people more time. Also, despite everything, I am not a fan of German sessions at ABAPConf, luckily at that time there are others in English, but still, it is an international conference.

Respect and thanks to ALL speakers 👏👏👏 for the time spent and the preparation of the sessions, from each one you can extract interesting things. Some of the recordings are already available:

From the sessions I attended, those that hit my current area of interest include:

  • Distributed tracing in ABAP by Petr Plenkov - a great example and cool work - how to feed the Observability system from ABAP. The topic is definitely worth pursuing, maybe if you make it open-source other poor people (like me) will benefit...
  • CQRS Pattern implementation with CAP by Alper Dedeoglu - a creative approach on how to retain the benefits of CAP/HANA but give breath to a database bombarded with millions of write operations
  • Successful Custom Code Adaptation for S/4HANA by Łukasz Pęgiel - methodical, based on numbers and pragmatic use case concerning code adaptation to S/4HANA
  • Extreme Freestyle: pushing the boundaries of reusability and extensibility by Dimitar Fenerski - a very interesting presentation and argumentation about choosing UI5 for a project outside the SAP ecosystem
  • Results of a comprehensive survey on UI5 app usage in Production by Marian Zeis and Volker Buzek - the results of a survey the gentlemen conducted among over 160 teams.

Here I have to insert this picture: UI5 testing survey result

with the message: write tests!

Once again would like to emphasize that this is only my very small, subjective selection based on my current interests, there really was a lot of great material at each of the conferences and I am currently watching the recordings from every single presentation.

The greatest strength of CodeConnect is the connection, but people - practitioners and enthusiasts, who have space to exchange views and talk about what REALLY daily toil work with technologies looks like. This is the event where all the marketing hype for various things does not exist - you are talking to comrades, those who sometimes wade in the swamp like you in this never-ending travel through the jungle of development possibilities 🌴. It is from these conversations and meetings that you can draw a lot, because someone's real experiences can be worth their weight in gold and give you a lot of thought and practical tips on how to tackle this topic for yourself.

🙏 So a big, big thank you to the organizers for allowing us such a meeting, to all the speakers, to the sponsors and supporting people/companies. For all those who "behind the scenes" made sure that everything worked - you had a lot of work, from event service, recording, taking photos. The voice of Margot Wollny 👋 - or rather its lack at the end - best testified what kind of hot time you had there! Big love for the people from the canteen and the people taking care that we were not hungry, we had a meat-free option to choose from and coffee and cold drinks were always available. I really appreciate that you could focus only on the conference - breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks - everything was on site. And thank you for the yoga classes in the break, allowing to stretch during these many hours of sitting. One day there were massages available as well.

massages

All the conferences banged 99.5% without any objections, and I wanted to write down this 0.5% on the boards available at the entrance - in the end, I forgot about them. So I leave a few things as feedback:

  • the coffee and drinks stand upstairs I would move away from the entrance doors more - that's where people mainly gathered to talk, empty bottles were collected etc. and it interfered with the ongoing sessions👂
  • the air in Audimax was OK. Upstairs - air conditioning is a wonderful invention of mankind, which is missing there definitely 🌬️
  • since I nicht verstehen German, for me it would be better if the demo of the application was not in German - it might be useful to recommend that the presenter switch the language in the browser or system to English for that time, so as not to guess whether Save or Cancel or something else was clicked
  • similarly in the canteen - the menu in English would make it easier not to block the queue of hungry people translating quickly what delicious things they made for us today 🍽️
  • screen presentation - the presenters had problems with this in W1/W2, maybe a short instructional video before the conference, showing how it will work? And tips to exit full-screen mode to share the screen etc.
  • recordings from the workshop room 🎥! I know that it is mainly about the experience on the spot, but still...

That's probably it, thank you Nabi for the super care and company at the conference, greetings to all known and met, who thanks to this conference stopped being just avatars from social media for me. And hopefully until next time 🤜🤛🎆🍾!

Nabisoft crew

PS. CodeConnect was parallel to SAPphire. I'm not a marketing specialist, but it seemed to me that someone from the SAP hierarchy should also say 3 words to the participants (even as a short recording played earlier), thus demonstrating some kind of "nice that you are here" approach from higher-level management people.

PS2. There was quite a lot of delicious beer after the conferences 🍺🍺🍺

PS3. Respect Sergei Haller for using Roman numbering in the namespace, not seen often this notation in code 😁 Roman numbers