The Boring Enterprise Nerdcast: Recent Episodes
Paul Modderman, Jelena Perfiljeva
As part of the Boring Enterprise Nerds media empire, Jelena Perfiljeva and Paul Modderman talk to interesting people about enterprise tech, various professional things, and probably some SAP here and there.
Jelena and Paul bring Jamie Langskov back into the virtual studio to discuss LADY ISSUES. Hear all the feisty commentary here, or check out the video at https://youtu.be/p1P4KEjO2d8.
Jelena and Paul take a look at and react to results of the ASUG Pulse of the Customer Survey 2023. Tons of good information to chow down on here, and lots of SPICY HOT TAKES Watch the video reaction here: https://youtu.be/2XAtjMgj_4MCheck out the results for yourself here: https://asug.postclickmarketing.com/Pulse-SAP-Customer-2023
Jelena and Paul have a great time chatting with Dmitrii Naumov, Solution Architect at Acumatica. We swapped wisdom about SAP and Acumatica and played a rousing game of F/marry/kill in enterprise software at the end. A blast!
Jelena and Paul catch up with Jon Reed of diginomica about SAP TechEd 2022. Jon is always informative and fun to talk to! Be sure to check out the accompanying video for this one at https://youtu.be/XtFtrN5pTRg
Jelena and Paul hound James Olcott for his knowledge, wisdom, and insight on all manner of things slightly-less-technical than they're typically engaged with. Pull up a chair with us and get great thoughts on a career in consulting and a whole lot more!
Don't miss James' book, Sales and Distribution with SAP S/4HANA: Business User Guide, available now!
Sure, Jelena and Paul talk about ABAP in the cloud and all things RAP and CAP - but you should really stick around for the end of the episode where we play a rousing game of "Two Truths And A Lie"!
We dive deep into results and chat about the SAP Developer Survey 2022, and have some deep thoughts and giggles about the developer demographics. You might also want to view the visual-enabled version of this episode at https://youtu.be/8yQHXYTKsVA.
Paul and Jelena talk to Graham Robinson - or Robbo, to those in the know - about a plethora of interesting subjects. Community keeps coming back up, like it did with Jamie Langskov, but we also dove into APIs, how to be rebels, and the impact of Antarctic journeys on one's soul.
Jelena and Paul talk to Jamie Langskov, well-versed in all things community, community-building, and other areas of general-purpose nerding. Jamie is Senior Director of Community at Unusual Ventures, where - short and sweet - she gets to build "the future of tech communities". Pretty awesome, if you ask us.
Paul M: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody, welcome back to the boring enterprise nerdcast, where we are really boring and we talk about boring things and it's really boring and nobody cares.
And so with that in our heads today we have myself and Jelena. Say “hi” Jelena!
Jelena: Hello.
Paul M: Say hi, cause we're on video and audio. So you can say and wave hi. Today we have with us to talk about like just a plethora of things like a wide variety of inside SAP, inside SAP tech, nerd things.
We have the amazing, I'm a big fan. I have been a big fan for years. We have the amazing Paul Hardy. Paul say hi, give us a quick how you doing whatever intro if you want, but please. Yeah. We're lucky to have you on. It's great to have you.
Paul H: Okay, I'll give you the, I'll give you the 30-second biography.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: I'm Paul Hardy as has been said, I'm originally from the UK, but I've lived in Australia for the last 20 years, author of seven [00:01:00] SAP books, thus far,
Jelena: Wow.
Paul H: SAP mentor, and do lots of talks at public events. And that’s about the size of it really.
Paul M: yeah. And that's like, so seven books. That's incredible seven SAP books. That's incredible. That's awesome. When did you, because you guys, so just again, the inside SAP thing, I just became an SAP mentor. And within the last year or so, and you guys are, I think are like long time, like, you know I don't know if you're still a mentor or not Paul, but it's been a while since you were first brought in.
Right. It's been been years since you've been there.
Paul H: Yeah, I suppose it's time goes by like a rocket, but maybe 2015, 2016. I can't remember exactly
Paul M: And then Jelena you were even, I think a little before that, right?
Jelena: Yeah, it was a 2014, I think, until like 2018, 19, something like that. Yeah. We overlapped quite a bit with Paul’s a [00:02:00] mentorship. So we have ultimate mentor power. So they, in this podcast,
Paul M: Yeah, like, do we need to, maybe we should sign some NDAs just for fun. I don't know. But really what we came on here to talk about is like lots of different things, SAP development wise. And I think one thing that would be great to do is because we're all mentors, we're all authors. We're all deep SAP nerds.
Is, we should really start to give our perspective. I think, from the, from the like author mentor level of what's the, what's the current state of SAP development, like as developers who out there, like getting stuff done for our customers, our, our, our companies, what's the state of that. What's the, what's the state of play in the universe for that.
Jelena: I think, I think I can start and then pass to Paul because the books that I have published most recently, it's an introduction book. So it's a, it's a book for about [00:03:00] beginners and we who brought it together with me, we intentionally try to place it as sort of a prequel to really excellent Paul's book ABAP to the future.
So ours gives a developers or any, anyone who is curious to learn about above some ground knowledge. That Paul's book and they have, I think it's a, it's a first edition here for our URS on YouTube. And Paul published many more additions after that. So our introduction books book is not just introduction so above, but it's also kind of introduction to.
Paul's book series that allow everyone to explore much, much Forrester. So yeah. Paul, Paul, over to you. What's. So what's, what's, what's your view on back to the future and state of future of our buff, if you will.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: I have to say it does evolve very, very quickly and there's always loads of new things coming out. [00:04:00] But from my observation, it's rather like the, the Amish in in America people would like to stay like a hundred years behind as it were, which is why procedural programming is not going anywhere in a hurry.
And why the SAP GUI is not doing any. a, in a hurry. And I have to say from doing interviews lately, there is a gigantic skill shortage out there, which is why your books, like the introduction to ABAP are actually absolutely needed because I was doing interviews the other day and of the candidates, only one had even the slightest idea of what an inline declaration was. For
Paul M: Yeah. Yeah.
Paul H: even this very Friday, Got a recording with SAP up to do a two minute video of trying to encourage young people to go down the app route, shall we say? Because they really not many are.
Paul M: What's it [00:05:00] like, I, this has been something that's popped into my head and I think maybe almost for the last four or five months or so, I've kind of become aware and then more and more aware. What's the, why is it? You guys think that and people can tell by my accent that I'm born and raised in the U S like, why is it?
We think that the US kind of lags in the ABAP department. Right because we don't like, I don't, I think you're right. I think the US is a little bit of a, like a, a weight in the cart of, of things progressing forward. So to speak in the tack in, in that kind of stuff. Why do you guys think that is.
Paul H: Well, one thing I was talking to a us colleague of mine and he was amazed when I told him that in Monash university, in Victoria, in Australia, it's actually you can do courses in SAP.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: And I don't think there's anything like that in the states. I believe.
Paul M: [00:06:00] There's one program I know of that. I think might've even died, so, yeah.
Jelena: Yeah. So there are programs in universities, but they are not an ABAP. They are not even in SAP development. I can speak like for the whole university Alliance, of course, but all the programs, all the professors I talked to and. Faculty staff, all those programs, they are preparing functional consultants.
None of the programs, programs that I know of, it doesn't mean they don't exist, but they obviously not very well known. If, if not many people heard about them, they just do not prepare developers. And I suspect that maybe historically us was more effected by outsourcing. That's one of my theories and maybe second theory is.
To be honest at this point in time, I think wages for SAP developers are really not on par with the rest of the development world. So whoever like me and Paul kind of started a while ago and just [00:07:00] continuing we are I'm not, I'm not likely to switch to Java programming. Even though I can, I'm sure all of us could do well in other languages, but it's just it's, it's not the time for us probably changing careers, but as our developers, younger developers, they have very little incentive to go into SAP because they don't have to go through specialized training. They can use a lot of their knowledge that they got out of college and go play someplace else that pays them sometimes, literally I think twice as much as, and then whatever it the United States at least.
Paul H: That would do it. Wouldn't it.
Jelena: Yeah,
Paul M: Ah, Yeah, there it is. The, so there's, there's an interesting, I think there's an interesting sub question here or related question and Jelena you and I have discussed a little bit, I think, and the question is, oh gosh, how did, how did this go? This, like, we were very [00:08:00] observant of what, like SAP that people like us who are the mentors and the authors and the, like the passionate people.
We're very observant of what SAP puts out there in terms of like dev advocacy and events and things like that, that push that push tech and tools. Really far forward. Right. In good ways I think. But there's also like what what's happening in the real world right out at companies out at the big size. I don't know, all that kind of stuff like Paul, do you see that?
There's like a, like a pretty big, like a yawning chasm. Between like, whoa, shiny new and yeah, but here's what happens day to day. Right. Do you see that?
Paul H: Yes. Like what a wonderful example of, of this sort of thing. Take the good old, take the. B O P F
Paul M: Yeah. Yeah.
Paul H: that was that was being pushed by SAP as a big, shiny new thing. [00:09:00] And only, I think it was two months ago the development manager and now our company in Germany has heard of it. I, and he said to one of my colleagues, right.
Do you think we should do training on this? He says, no, because. So by the time people have heard of something it's obsolete.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: So there's a gap between SAP bringing something out that it's used in the real room.
Paul M: That's hilarious. Well Jelena what are your thoughts there? Cause we've talked about this a bit, but for the world, like what, what do you think is going on there?
Jelena: Yeah, I kind of advertise more books Paul's, they have written some except I have just one of them. There is a SAP data science with SAP and you also . It's funny because everything, all of our books, essentially, all of them, it took three people, three people in ports. All right. But all of that is what SAP developers are expected to know.
[00:10:00] And, and to add insult to injury, all of, all of this knowledge and effort for lower pay compared to other developers. Come on now. And yeah, to add to this SAP kind of constantly dropping all toys to chase shiny new toys and without even, you know, real strategies there, I totally understand that technology kind of rotates become subsidy.
I mean, come on, throw us a bone here. Just, you know, or cut some slack, however you call it. I mean, we just, you need to share with us what's what's your next way is at least or something like that, or, yeah. Do something about it.
Paul M: Yeah, it is. I do think there is kind of that possibility for every, for every new shiny thing it's possible for someone who has, I mean, even modest longevity in their career for them to entirely [00:11:00] miss it or not have to worry about it. Right. It can go, it can go peripheral to what you're doing and.
By the time, just like Paul's example, by the time you become aware of it, it won't matter. Right. And like, I'm not even sure that that's necessarily a bad thing. Although I do think it is, it feels a little more splintered than other ecosystems. Although I guess I kind of, I kind of compare it to new newer ecosystems.
So maybe I'm talking out of my, whatever here, like, cause in my head I always compare. Like SAP technology stuff too. Cause I'm, I'm a, I'm like a cloud guy. I love, I love Azure. I love GCP. I love AWS, all that stuff. I'm always playing around. I'm always reading the news and that stuff. And to me, that's what my head is sort of full of is those things.
And so. Even if it's not a right or just, or fair comparison, I'm always looking at SAP tech in terms of those texts. Right. And maybe [00:12:00] that's not fair to either SAP or to those other guys that, that I'm like. But look at all, the shiny is over here that people are actually like grabbing onto and using versus all of the shinies over here that like pass over people's heads entirely and don't get used and disappear into the past.
And are gone. You know what I mean? So I don't know. Maybe I'm maybe I'm navel gazing a bit too much here, but I think, I think I when I, when I get on my thought train about. About tech. And I'm when I mix SAP in with other things, SAP comes out as like, you know how, if you, like, if you make a, if you make something like a stew or whatever, right?
There's like sometimes you just get the big clump of ham. That's still. Like SAP is like the big clump of ham in the, in your split pea soup that like, it didn't break apart yet. It's still like right there. And the other ones have kind of diffused and, and sort of become part of the flavor [00:13:00] and SAP hasn't quite done that yet.
Jelena: Huh.
Paul M: Right. So you'd think it would be, I don't know. I'm just, I feel like I'm jabbering now, but you get my point, right? This is that the technologies have these different boiling points in different diffusion points in different, whatever that, that go into their ecosystems.
Jelena: Yeah.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: The stay with a soup analogy.
Paul M: Yes, let's do it guys. We're guys. We're 24, 7 soup here. Okay. All soup all the time.
Paul H: Soup analogy. What if it's far too hot and many consultants are guilty of burning the customers by. Mostly offering them the latest new thing. An example in my company, it was a good old HR system. They were told us they being, they being a consultant, said the web jam web dim pro Java is the way to go.
That's the way you
Jelena: Oh boy.
Paul H: look at your reports and web dynpro Java, right? I paid lots of money [00:14:00] then by the time it was finished, it was no, no, no. That's, that's no good. It's webpro app. You really want, right. So you've got to redo all the things you've just written in this new technology.
Okay. Then by the time you do that, 10 be ridiculous. But didn't for, I bet it's UI five. That's what you've got to go for. We do them all again, but which no, no, it wasn't
Paul M: Nope.
Paul H: by the time we do that, there'll be something else.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: Perhaps missing, missing the odd technology along the way. Isn't the end of the
Paul M: Right. And maybe it's a good strategy, right? Like leave some brain space for like your life. Right. Don't stuff every single thing inside your head, you know, remember your family's birthdays or whatever. Occasionally, something like that. Right.
Jelena: Yeah.
Paul H: Again, not development managers that never heard of BIP F from the time he has his obsolete. Maybe it's not such a huge loss
Paul M: Yeah. It like, if it, if it didn't change the world [00:15:00] it didn't rise your attention maybe you secretly did the right thing anyway, by not paying attention to it in the first place. Yeah.
Jelena: It's funny. I skipped the whole web dynpro. I just, I just kept it consciously. I like looked at it. Okay. It looks neat, but you know, I don't want to deal with it at all. And I, I'm pretty sure. This decision. I, yeah, I think that's actually most valuable knowledge in SAP space is to know which things to spend your time on.
And I'm sure your Paul and Paul, your radars are already fine tuned pretty well to words, what, what actually has some longevity and what doesn't, but I'm curious if a newer generation of developers, if they might be struggling more with that than we did in our time.
Paul H: I find the, what people do with new technology is look up to see what all the shiny new words are, put it on their resume, whether they know about it, or[00:16:00]
if you want to have a, what, a list of buzzwords on your technology, just look at a resume. You'll see them all
Paul M: Yeah. And like at some point that's the optimal way to do it, right? Like if your, if your career goal is like, I'm going to make enough money to retire, then it may be the right thing to do is shuffle, shuffle, acronyms, on your resume. Get a better job, shuffle more into your resume and get a better job.
Shuffled them more. I'm ask more money from the man, whatever. Right. And, and sail off into the sunset with a, with a alphabet soup. It's keeping a soup in there with alphabet soup of, of technologies and your resume and a nice big fat retirement account. And there you go. I'll send on, you did it, did the right thing.
Okay guys I'm going to dig, developing new topic. Okay. Great. April 1st post out there. No Cod development. I want to ask, first of all, just generally to all of us is April fools dead.
Paul H: It wasn't a [00:17:00] lot this year.
Paul M: Yeah,
Paul H: Normally it's a pleasure to read these papers. If there's so much nonsense in it. I
Paul M: been a.
Paul H: one year in Australia, there was brilliant
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: talking about underwater rugby. I had what was it? Sorry, the garden nuns, which boost your Wi-Fi signal because in that fishing world is a hidden area.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: It's a huge pleasure. But this year I went looking, I couldn't spot anything really.
Paul M: Did you see much?
Jelena: Yeah, I keep repeating kind of retweeting polls Paul Hardy's blog from years ago about SAP brewery because they love it so much. And there is always someone who hasn't read it yet and they really enjoy it. But you have to agree on, I think it may be just overall depressing mood. I don't know, in the world, maybe that's what kind of them I certainly hope to have to have more next [00:18:00] year and Paul's blog, which I called too late because it was a date difference. It, for me, it came up on March 31st.
Paul H: I did that about 11 o'clock in the morning, Australia.
Paul M: Oh, yeah.
Paul H: it would have been April the first for almost 12 hours, but no, it,
the world now
Jelena: not a, not
Paul H: real, the 31st.
Jelena: guess, or wherever is it that he has a timestamp is funny.
Paul M: You got to look at, when is this going to post UTC? That's what I should click save, right?
Jelena: Yep.
Paul M: Yeah.
Yeah. it does feel like things have still done. Good. I used to look forward to the Google one and now Google doesn't do them. Yeah.
they had one, Google had one where you was like, you could request that your email be printed and there was like, they would, they would ship It like a truck to you with all of your email printed off and the way they would save money by the print ads.
On the other side of the. So you're going to have, you have a giant, like a giant boxes full of your email, and then like, you know, Walmart ads on the other side of the paper of all the emails and [00:19:00] stuff. Anyway, I missed those things, you know, and Jelena, we used to do those at Mindset and there's a couple of years have slipped by, we forgot, but like Mindset Consulting used to do them.
And I think Bowdark did one last year. I'm not sure, but anyway, that, like, I just wish the, I just wish the tradition went on because, because the spirit of that and the spirit you got into there, Paul, I think is positive for the world, you know? And I think, I think us nerds need to take everything a little bit less seriously, probably in the universe, if I may be so bold and saying that yeah.
Paul H: was a very good, very good one some years back where someone claims that you can have the SAP GUI on your watch.
Paul M: That was, that was Mindset Consulting. yeah. And there was one, we did one where it was when it was SAP GUI in your Tesla screen on your car.
Paul H: yeah.
Paul M: So you could type in T codes to like control your Tesla.
Jelena: should, we should do like anthology or something core for falls, the blogs. I mean, who, who says you, you cannot pose them again outside of April fools and you just, [00:20:00] here you go. You know, you need more fun. There
Paul M: I have a list somewhere I compiled of them. Yeah. So, yeah.
Jelena: I I'm curious though, if we can. I mean, of course Paul's post was humorous and in, in that spirit, I wondering if we want to kind of talk, I don't know, just very slightly more seriously about that low code and obvious, obvious not to app guide or app.
So Paul, I know Paul Modderman, I know you had a great podcast. Step is out recently with. Sorry, forgetting the name right now, but it'll come to me in a second. you talked about yeah, exactly. So you talked about a low code, but really I just like marketing term low code my myself, and I think your definition it's like accelerated rapid app development that I think is much, much better for.
So I'm curious as since purple heart is our guests. Paul, are there any serious thoughts that you have on, on local then? AppGyver and all of that.[00:21:00]
Paul H: I'm only enough. I was contacted about two months, two months ago by the CEO of a company called D pros in Israel. I want to demonstrate something. it was what I would call. I sort of ALV robot type thing where
Jelena: Wow,
Paul H: you I'm either alter an existing standard SAP report or create one free roam by not by writing code, but by, you know, ticking boxes as it were in dragging things around.
And what have you, and you can.
Jelena: sorry, excuse me. Or something, because that's what they did pretty much.
Paul H: And again, apparent this, this product is, you know, it's cornered the market in Israel for,
Jelena: Well,
Paul H: this, there started this sort of thing, all the, all the government and the big companies there use his tour things in it. It's all very impressive. But as you know, as a developer I'm always going to be pushing for the writing code type [00:22:00] approach.
It's biased, I suppose. And I'll give you another example up again. Right? Right at home. From where I work, we bought one of these robotic process automation. Tools, not the SAP one, but something like the UIPath. And I'm one of the competitors, but they're all the same sort of thing because that's eight people and it's one off the shelf bought another company and
Paul M: yeah,
Paul H: then stamp SAP on the top of its name.
I said, I, your tasks, you do. But what I found is if you go looking for citizen developers and to my mind, if the people who ended up doing it, I ended up being programmers. I, we found this this gentleman and he said, bro, you interested in interested in this? Most people weren't to be honest. And it starts off dragging boxes around connecting them like PowerPoint.
Visio. Visio. That's the word I… what are these things? [00:23:00] Start? We put in boxes together and all that. I need you get it. And it's not needed. Only do 90% or 95% of what I want when you go to the. Yeah, the vendor or the help and say, I'm probably to get that last 5% said, Ooh, you cannot code. You cannot code inside those boxes right out here to go there before, you know, it it's cruel in with code because you, because you can put it there.
In the end of the day, . With more code then in your low-code solution like RPA, then you added a real thing. If you've written it by hand.
Paul M: Yeah, that's a good point. Cause there's a lot of these discussions about low-code and no-code also still include the pro code. The moniker pro code moniker, which is yeah. Now, now we need a nerd to do the hard things, right. Or the, the, the code hard things. There's the business hard and the code hard.
Right. And I think you know, I've, I've done a lot of reading and of course I talked to Mathias and I talked [00:24:00] to Holger Bruchelt from, from formerly, from SAP now at Microsoft about this. And I think, I think that that world is kind of swirling around and solidifying around an idea that they call fusion teams or a fusion approach or whatever, which is to say that like, In a, in a, in a rough example, like the person who knows what the business needs to do, they're going to do with a prototype version of whatever.
And they're going to make it for like their little use case. And it's going to like kind of clunk along and do whatever. And the idea is that the fusion team is like the, the clunk maker, the citizen developer is the clunk maker. And then the, the pro developer is the one who makes it like. Take the clunker and make the clunker into a thing that everyone can use.
Right. And that's kind of the, the, like the sort of the, we all kumbaya, I live in harmony kind of thing and move app development forward in that respect, because I would like, there are absolutely cases where I think [00:25:00] where lo and no-code have worked and Ken work, but. It's never the whole scenario. You know what I mean?
Like it's, it's, it's, it's always a very finally a thinly slice thing that you can accomplish solely with the dragging and dropping and to Paul's point as soon as you hit. Oh, but I want it to be like purple and upside down. There it is. Now you're not used to sort of like leaped over the wall. And guys like Paul or women like Julina, or like me are like rushing to the rescue with like more code to do the things.
So it's like, I would, I, my, my read on it, my again, on a soap box here is that like, the tide is rising, but it's got this effect where none of the pro developers have, should be worried. Because there are, there are going to be 10 million things to still do and 10 million ways to do new things and glue other things [00:26:00] together.
That there's just no point in being like, it's like any of us on this, on this podcast or anybody who is a pro developer, listen to this podcast should never be worried about your job. Because like, until there's an AI, that's like a human being like Terminator until there's that there's always going to be a need for pro code dev
Paul H: Well, the, the ex the example I always give is the gentleman who sat next to me at work for 10 years with retired now. And he said, bunny, he was a young man and he started programming. That was again, rumors that very soon, that, that w they didn't call it low code, of course, but it's a thing that we'll be able to re just. Tell the system, what you want and it'll generate the program for you without one line of code at that stage, it was still programming using punch cards.
Paul M: And it was any day now. Yeah,
Paul H: And then they will, they will be right back then, but they didn't, [00:27:00] they didn't need to be. It's like here we are 50 years on or whatever. And we're still hearing the exact same rumors and exact same new products without one line of code, nothing, nothing new under the sun. Nothing.
Jelena: Yeah, I think it's a great point that the things that we're seeing right now, they're not exactly brand new, the marketing terminology, local no-code and there's the stupidest term citizen developer. They are new, but. Behind it, it's not even new, like the same excuse. There are ones that SAP query or ABAP query.
However it's named this days that was a regional local in SAP and evens that good old BTC recordings that you do. Some, you go into the screens, you do their sequence and it generates reports for use that you can, then you take. Cut down the pieces that you want from it, and you write some code on top of it.
And that's where I think SAP is marketing approach selling's as tools as solution. So software developer [00:28:00] shortage problem. That's that's not gonna solve the problem, I think at all local tools. Yeah, please go ahead, Paul.
Paul H: I'm just suddenly, just suddenly occurred to me. And this was when I had to speak. Otherwise I forget if I got a ten second memory, like a goldfish hit the meeting. I've got a one o'clock this afternoon, right. Is we're taking this spreadsheet and we're trying to move it inside SAP. And this spreadsheet you could, you could site, it was written by a citizen developer. That's what people do in the business. They they, they get, they get a spreadsheet and they start, they start off with just adding the cells together. Then they'll do some V lookups and what have you and add some tabs and they do V lookups here. Then if they're savvy enough, they brought a few macros in here and there, which is code in my, my books.
Does anyone ever call them citizen? Developers is a good question. again, it gets to the stage where this is. This is wonderful. [00:29:00] This is fantastic. But I it's, you know, it's actually this it's outside the computer system. It's it's offline and all that. How much better would it be if it was integrated with the, you know, the SAP data. And so it's time to take a bit and take the beast that's brome over, like could be 10 years or more and more and more and more complicated Excel spreadsheet and an app app size it as it were.
Jelena: Yeah, I think we should all just give into the charm of Excel spreadsheets. Just, you know, there was a word that I think it's like, it's like another cockroach of it. That's an spreadsheet. It, I think they will never die. There is that very nice cipher, a serious expanse on on Amazon prime right now. But I think it's a great mistake that XL spreadsheet do not appear even, even once since that's serious.
I'm sure they still exist in that far future in that. they it's, it's [00:30:00] just, it's all there. I mean, is there any, there's so many things you can do with it and go in against them is a huge mistake. You're just, you're just adopter and just given.
Paul H: They never get, I can never gonna to get rid of it. The SAP gooey really, or formerly.
Paul M: You know, like I'm having so many thoughts right now. I probably should just write them down and blog about them for something. Cause there's like, yeah, I could get stuck in this discussion forever. So I'm going to, I'm going to dig my own little bell and say, ding, ding, next subject. Cause, cause I'm like, I'm feeling that like, oh, but, but what about real?
And that's going to get me stuck and I don't want to do that. Okay. And it's something that I don't have a ton of experience in, but I wonder if you guys have either done some more, read more about it or, or are taken more approaches we've heard about the Abba Rapp methodology, right? The rapid API development kind of stuff.
Right. Or restful about programming programming. [00:31:00] And Elena pointed this out, and this is kudos to her for that. This is what grinds my gears sense too. Some of the things out there in that Rackspace Julina give us a, give us a brief, like here's what grinds my gears about rap. Robert, give us, give us the first go of that.
Jelena: I have a long list. I think to me, and it may be I'm as an experienced type of developer might be slightly biased in it because I have certain, you know, I have my list of programs that they have developed. They do certain things and they already know how to do some, some things well. So when something new comes about, it would be really nice, at least for me, and I believe many other experienced developers to see how we can use.
Knowledge and kind of adopted things in the new ways, in the good ways. And to me, some things that were pretty easy already to do in classic habit development, [00:32:00] they are not maybe that easy to do properly and properly. It's a big word in our bar prep. And I have a complaint lodged with full Hardy because they think you cause the chapter in your habits is a future book on the upper half.
I feel it should have been.
Paul M: Oh, no next subject. Don't fight.
Jelena: Please if we need, we would definitely need more practical information about, about prep because what's so what we know so far, it's the famous open SAP course. It's all of the webinars that came out of it that essentially are rehashing the same material.
There are a few, I think, items here in Xero, like tutorials, et cetera, but there isn't really. Nearly as much materials that's needed for practical application of this programming model like today. Right now, not tomorrow, not, not in the cloud, not in some expense future, but right now because yeah, there are some things that are easily done, but I, it's not [00:33:00] just me many developers at work.
We are basically struggling. How do we, how do we do this within certain constraints of this new model? And most importantly, how do we do it? Well,
Paul M: Oh, but Paul, this was, I bet you, Paul has lots of thoughts. So please, please jump in and, and return that serve.
Paul H: the underlying problem here is. Perhaps related to SAP, maybe it's related to the software market as a whole. I, and that is software companies have a gigantic incentive to release something before it's ready. All right. No matter what it is, because the idea is if you've done right, someone else that's, let's say Oracle baby, or whoever will release it first.
And even though it doesn't work properly because they've got one new. They'll corner the market. And by the time you released your one that does work, it is too late. There's works by that point. So they both have to release things that don't work. [00:34:00] I, the end result is everything that released. Every single thing that gets released, it doesn't work.
I didn't see what is not really an ideal situation. Imagine that the. Of the rat is a frog. Right. And it does all the frog things that you'd expect it hops around the Lily pond. It catches flies with its tongue. It does. Oh, you know, the basic frog things. Right. But they, when they release that and say, look at this bright new frog, we've got, say, that's not a frog, that's a tackle. It can hop. It can catch flies that hasn't even got any legs. It says the tail. I, and unfortunately the RAF is like that because even the name keeps changing, which is not unusual with SAP. The moment it's the restful application programming model. And it used to be the restful Abba programming model.
And it's changed. The names changed twice since then. The irrelevant part. The [00:35:00] most relevant part is when I was writing my chapter on the rap, I, it took me SSA. It took eight weeks, much longer than any other one. And there's a reason for that. I, during that eight week period, when I was writing that chapter, there were two releases came out.
I joined that and code the compiled at the start of the. Halfway through it was getting mornings. And at the end of it, it was getting syntax errors because it changed that much. And I thought to myself, how can I write about this? It's changing faster than I can write. And that's SAP is selling this as production.
I am some Irish consider foodish companies have gone with this, like Lego being a prime example, and they've got actual productive applications. And I thought to myself, how can you have a productive application if every three months, pretty more often you've got to go and rewrite it all because you're just in coast, suddenly got [00:36:00] syntax errors where it didn't have before, because it's not like ABAC where it was all traditional app, where it was always downward compare.
And then a new release came out and it knew nothing was going to break that that's not the case, not the case with the rock at all. It's going to keep changing it. And so I'd say, wait until it's a frog, then judge it.
Jelena: Now I'm wondering what's what's the timeline on that? Because it's yeah. If, if you, if you watch presentations, That's subject. It's like, yeah. I mean, classic carb-up obviously already gone. It's like 1999 fuel remodel. It's still safe investment, but you know, you guys need to get the unknowns about prep, trains.
That's what SAP has been telling us. Not for months for, I would say a year at minimum,
Paul H: I'd say it's pretty good. 42 years.
Jelena: yeah,
Paul H: 'cause it was, it was, it was touted as production ready from the very first day
but it wasn't, [00:37:00] and it still isn't.
Jelena: I'm kind of curious, and I don't know if any of you have any scoop on, on this. So what's the deal with those different scenarios that managed are managed? Because to be honest, I, I don't really see much value in the ones that managed scenario, because it's just very narrow application. And at the same time, it's not easy to jump from one to another.
Like if you take that path. Then going back and taking another path, it will be very difficult. You will have essentially you have to scratch our code and almost start from the beginning was a different scenario. So, so Y I, I honestly, I don't understand why even bother with this two scenarios instead of just, you know, just make an effort and make just one of the scenarios work, maybe better.
Paul H: You wrote, you can't move, you can't move between them because the whole plumbing, shall we say it is utterly an utterly different between the manager and the unmanaged, because in one of them it's doing [00:38:00] what I call the black magic under the hood. It's what you could see what. You could say it's like a logical database and that way,
Jelena: Yeah. Yeah,
Paul H: not because when I first encountered one of those things, I was really, really.
I thought where's, where's the selection screen coming from?
Jelena: yeah.
Paul H: it's not in the program. Where's it coming from? Where's it, the database reads. They're not in the program either. And it's the same way with the rest of library programming module. This is wonderful. We do it all for you, but it's scary, scary when it, when it's all under the hood, because you're not, you don't know how it's working.
You don't know if it's really doing it in the most efficient. Because people say, oh no, it must be, it must be brilliant because it was written by SAP and all their programmers are geniuses. Well, if you've ever gone to a party in SAP headquarters and talked to a few of the staff, you might think, [00:39:00] Hmm,
Paul M: fired. Oh, no. But that's, that's an interesting point too, is that the, the things there's, there's a degree to which. The, the, the level, the level of hiddenness of abstractions can be dangerous. Right. In other words, if, if, if this rap, if this particular slice or flavor of rap is sort of leaves you baffled as to light, but how has it even during that, then, then what's happens is as developers, we can't develop a mental model of it.
And then if something goes wrong, we have no idea how to. Pocket and like push the dials and flip the switches and make it go better. Right. If I don't understand how the thing works, I can't like put my wrench on the right nut and go, there you go. Now it's better. Right. So maybe, maybe that's maybe that's part of the, the, the core of some of the frustration is there too.
Jelena is the discipline like the hidden layers [00:40:00] of like there's too many hidden layers,
Jelena: Yeah. And, and some of it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Like I said, there's two different scenarios. If you cannot go from one to another relatively easily, that's kind of deal breaker to me because I'm not even gonna bother introducing one to my client because I know they're gonna want something.
The second you implemented using this managed scenario, they will say, Hmm, what about this? You know, it covers 90%, but the 10% is super duper important to me. So now you have to go back and start, start with a new scenario, and there is just completely bizarre things that simply. Allowed in certain situations, like for example, I was trying to use validation commands are I don't even, I'm not even sure in which language is this whole stuff with rhythms these days, it's it looks like Alba, but it's definitely not.
So you enter validation and then you get syntax, Sarah, and it says, oh, you're using unmanaged scenario. Like without a dress. [00:41:00] But only with like a mileage squeeze drive. This is allowed. I do people not use validations with the draft. I, I don't get it. Like what's, what's even, what's the connection there.
And again, to me, it's, it's just, it's like death by a thousand paper cuts. You introduce something that's great, but then this tiny little things, they take so much away that at some point, I'm wondering if it's like a, like a cabbage, you know, you peel and peel and peel it and you'll end up with just, just a core and Xeon.
I think it definitely takes away a lot from a desire of developers to use a smart.
Paul M: Yeah. Okay. Once more thing, meaning next subject. Have you guys heard of the game F Mary Kylen, F of course being an abbreviation of, of
Jelena: Was it
Paul M: the make love to yeah. The F F is the F word. Yeah.
F marry kill the. This Elena, this is a good idea. I think for a good, [00:42:00] like a good aftertaste, a good, a good little close it off. Have some fun segment here.
I think we should. All, All three of us should pick a little pick three little things from the SAP bucket as our F Mary kill things. So the F is, think about it. This the F is you can use it one time and love it, but then you're done. The Mary is yes, I'm married to it. And by gosh, we're, we're going to the grave together.
And the kill is. You know, you dropped the hard drive, containing it into the sea, right. It's done. right. So I nominate Jelena as our first contestant in F marry kill. Jelena, please.
Jelena: All right, I'll go. I'll go with my choices for SAP world. So I will start with Mary because it's, it's easy part. I would say Mary CDs views because rapport, no rep your remodel, whatever model. I think they are pretty. Neat tools [00:43:00] that is there to stay probably for foreseeable future. So learn how to use them, learn how they work, what they do, how to take advantage of them.
Then for the F part I would probably put, maybe there's are so many choices to pick and drop, but. I would speak maybe SAP app guy for a surprisingly, I think it's a really fun little app. And I think right now is perfect time to do that before SAP kind of went in with their stumping feed and spoiled the heck out of it while it's still nice and fresh, new to SAP world, just go and explore and play was at the application while before it gets foiled.
And.
Paul M: You heard you heard it here first, Julina had a one night stand with app driver.
Jelena: Exactly. That's, that's exactly what it was for me. And from the Q department, I vote like with two hands for SAP script, just get rid of the flipping thing. Just get it destroyed. All of them, burn it with [00:44:00] fire. That's my choices. Well, bold, bold, bold, Hardy. Yes. To
Paul M: yes, this window. And my screen right here, that one, Paul you're next.
Paul H: Well, I'm going to start with a good one. Nightstand, use it once and really, really enjoy it. Then throw it away. I would put in this bucket pretty much any new ABAP syntax feature. I, I, I learned about it. I, and I have great fun getting it through. I oh, what was the new statement? Reread juice or.
Paul M: Yeah.
Paul H: It's really, really pleasurable to get it to work.
I've got, I've got this work. I've worked great. This new syntax, it compiles. Fantastic. I had a great time using that. I'm ever going to use it again. No, because it's more complicated and it's harder to understand and harder to read and you can't debug the buddy thing. So that's nice, but I laughed it.
Goodbye. Here's a taxi money, right? [00:45:00] The one that, that I'm going to stay married to, because I know that doesn't like it very much, but it's a good old app unit and test driven development. I've become, I've become a huge comfort to that and I'm using it. I'm using it in firstly, most new developments or the, at least the ones
Paul M: we gotta
Paul H: will have to be tomorrow.
Paul M: talking, we ended up, we gotta have another episode cause
Jelena: Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be spinoff. Yeah. Spinoff show. Yeah.
Paul M: just put a pin in that. Paul we'll come back to that some other time.
Paul H: That's right. And one to be killed and thrown through the sea is webbed in pro Abba.
They'd said that it doesn't deserve to live. I put, I've still got it in my book, but it will be the last time. It won't be a future edition because it's, it's horrible. It always has been pretty much wasn't it from day one.
Paul M: Yeah, stuck it the ocean. Okay. Guys, my list, my F marry kill. I'm going to try to be interesting here. I'm trying to be like a little bit weird. Okay. So my F is going to [00:46:00] be, even though I have been married to it for a while, I'm going to go into our post-marriage a one night stand kind of thing.
And that's SAP UI. Not because it's a bad thing, but because it like in the broader marketplace, I don't know how much it actually makes a difference. I think a lot of places are opting to make SAP data and I say processes available in other ways, besides. And I think that, you know, for I'm going to, I'm going to spend a little more time than you.
I five and keep kind of keep my, keep my skills up for a little while there, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it pretty soon here. I'm gonna give you the tax money, taxi money. It can, it can Uber off from my, from my apartment my studio apartments into wherever real. Okay. So there's that. And that's coming from me.
I've written [00:47:00] two books. Three books that have code in them. So this is like a big thing I had. This is like, this is why it's a divorce and not just like an F it's like a get divorced and then, you know, one nightstand after the divorce.
Paul H: The road.
Paul M: Yeah. One for the,
Jelena: I was just going to say this not great for your books.
Paul M: well, yeah, well, let's, let's just say that my royalty checks aren't exactly paying my mortgage anyway. So the the kill again, trying to be, trying to be a little bit here and maybe look forward, I think maybe kill cloud Foundry stuff, because I think it's time. To do cloud in the cloud, hyperscalers, the Azure, Google AWS, like do the cloud where the cloud experts are and scale and whatever, and do it there where that's their core competency and where we're.
I mean, I say that he's building on top of the new. Right. I say, do the cloud things [00:48:00] there where the, where the cloud platform people are, the experts and leave the like cloud Foundry stuff. Let's just, I don't know. Let's just, let's just not there's the sound cranky and maybe someone's going to hit me.
I don't know, but I guess bring the haters. Okay. My marriage. Is I was, and I was gonna say CDS Jelena because I think CDS is like, like a good Swiss army knife for a lot of
Jelena: Yeah. Great, great minds think alike. So.
Paul M: So, but let me, let me try to pick another one here. Okay. So, so to, just, to, just to have another thing in here too, is let's see if I'm going to keep one thing around forever.
This is also gonna sound weird and maybe it doesn't matter anymore, but I think SLT has a lot of good uses the system landscape transformation tool that gets your data and gets, gets it out of SAP to other places for you. I think something like that [00:49:00] has a lot of good uses, especially it gives in my, my bias toward get the data out to where.
Right. Like, that's my, it's my thing there too. So. Yeah, boy, I hope I don't encourage a lot of haters for what I just said, but, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna go strong on it.
Jelena: Yeah, I think caters probably started with cloud Foundry. Someone is at the SAP headquarters must be having a heart attack right now.
Paul M: But okay, well, anyway, so that was, that was the fun bit. That was the stuff that was the, that was the wrap it up in a good way. So, Paul, we want to say thank you. We appreciate your time. We appreciate your expertise. We appreciate your good humor, your good nature, all that kind of stuff.
Thank you for coming on and regaling us with tales of the, everything. And just talking with a couple of nerds who love to turn out about stuff. Thank you.
Paul H: Well, we did pleasure, never a chore.
Jelena: Thank you so much.
Paul M: yeah. And to all of our listeners catch us on w we have a stinger, so we'll just use this stinger. [00:50:00] Okay. Thanks guys. Bye.
Paul: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back. This is Paul. Hi, Jelena.
Jelena: this is Jelena.
Paul: For our first episode with a guest, we have a, a great, a great man, a legend, a Titan of industry. We have Michael Keller with us to talk about learning frustrations, training, tutorials, all that kind of good stuff, the in the SAP sphere.
And I think with that, Jelena take us away. Let's just, let's just start going.
Jelena: Yeah, sure. I want to welcome Michael to our podcast, please say hi.
Michael: Hello, greetings from Germany.
Jelena: Excellent. So we, the starting point of our conversation today is a blog that has been posted on SAP community by I don't want to butcher his name, but they hope I pronounce it semi correctly, right. Radoslaw Chudziak. The book title was learning frustrations, often SAP developer, and I think all of us[00:01:00] personally and Michael, we both commented on the blog itself.
And I think all of us can totally relate to the subject of this blog. So I, I'm curious to hear from both of you how do you relate personally to the subjects that that is raised in this, in this post? And we can start with Paul.
Paul: Yeah. So, okay. Thank you. I think so, as I reflect on, we kind of want this blog post and I reflect on my sort of personal learning journey in SAP. I think the, I think one of the key points here that was for me was the, so when I say. It was, I had a very specific, my job was I went from a different job in the development world into an ABAP developer job.
And so the company that I was with, they sent me to an ABAP training course, because this was like 2010. So the online presence of that stuff was less, it was there, but it was less. So they sent me to a specific place that had like an SAP. [00:02:00] And so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to be a good little student.
I'm going to do all this stuff the right way. And I'll do S flight, this S flight desk, blah, blah, blah. And it was a week long stuff. My brain was full by the end. And I came back to my job and. It was, it was, it was almost like, because, so then I got back to my job eventually I got my sort of my first rice F like assignment, you know what I mean?
Like do this report or do this. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I remember thinking to myself, this, this training basically did nothing for me in terms of what I would be doing, because, like I was already sort of a relatively experienced developer, you know, and it, it basically did nothing for me in terms of getting that job done, because all of, all of the stuff that was hard, like for somebody who is a programmer, you understand like swapping variables and [00:03:00] this and assignments and things like that in sub routines already.
I did not understand anything about SAP processes. I didn't understand anything about the, the sort of like the, the, the divisions of RICEFWs in general and what those things were. It would've been, it would have been infinitely more powerful for me to have done that training and to have done like a real, like literally SAP must have like a backlog of like, here are actual customer enhancements that they have done to actual things and say, okay, your job is to enhance the sales order.
Do you have another field that does this and this and this when the customer clicks save or whatever, and that flow happens. And that, that would have, that would have set me off on a thousand different places. So it was okay. The training was okay, but I still, I still. I left not [00:04:00] having kind of gotten the speed I needed to do what I was really going to do because there's programming.
And then there's what you do when your program and SAP development is, has like lots of, a lot closer, like stitch togetherness to business processes than other languages and things like that. And it would have been really nice to been, to been like, sort of bundle up together with like, here's an, here's a real-world example of an enhancement to sales or a screen or whatever.
Right. That's kind of stuff. Anyway, that was my experience of kind of onboarding and training and stuff. And I really, I really reflected on that when I saw this, this piece out there, because I was, I, I feel for people who land inside SAP and they're like, oh my God, I'm in like a. in a different universe, you know, I'm floating in space compared to like there's possibilities.
And like, I don't have, I don't have a map. I don't have rockets to get there from where I am now. [00:05:00] Anyway, I, I I've just babbled on a lot, but that's, that's my sort of learning perspective on that stuff.
Jelena: Yeah. Yeah, definitely think it's something we can all relate to. I think SAP development is sometimes not even as much about development itself as a. Firefighting, I think your language skills, but it is, as you said, it's about business process. It's about data model. So it's really much more to that. So Michael what's what's what do you think, where, where did this blog touched?
You personally?
Michael: Very personally, I agree with a lot of the points in the blog, and I want to compare it with lego bricks. Perhaps you know these little lego bricks. Yes. And when you are a child, you are building a house with it. And when you were an adult, perhaps you play with lego bricks from time to time.
Paul: Yeah,
Michael: It's like working with lego bricks, you can build a house, a small, tiny house, and then your customer comes in and ask you to build a skyscraper [00:06:00] because you can build a little house. And he said, oh, build a skyscraper and do it with what, not the stolen material. And you're sitting there and thinking, okay basically. I know how to do it. I have an idea about, oh, I need an architect. I need some experts for that, that, that, so the blog describes a lot of points that I experienced in the past very well. Think about your experience with, or your journey with the business. And you first tried to try to post a partial order and you were Ridley, you were so bewildered, what fields have to be filled
Jelena: Yup.
Michael: that you get this magical sentence? Yes, it's posted
Jelena: Yeah, exactly. It's like, does this field work [00:07:00] now? Does this field work? Can you tell me, what do you want me to do? No, you just, just keep trying, just keep trying, keep, keep entering some fields and eventually it's going to work out. Yeah, it's still totally ridiculous. And I think that overtime. Some, in some cases actually CP when they hadn't updated poppy documentation, but in most cases, even today, you look at.
Really, there are thankfully many posts on SAP community where you can find out what's actually needed. But in most cases, I mean, no one bothered it really to go back and update the commendation for them even using the same community posts. So, yeah, it's very, yeah. And I just want to speak for myself for a second time.
Totally when I saw this blog, when they just saw the title in my RSS feed, I was like, yeah. So that's, that's something that they, that they totally feel. And there is just so much going on and I feel that sometimes even developers get sort of a backlash for that. Well, what do you mean? You know, it's always, you need to [00:08:00] always slower and you need to always.
I totally agree with that. But if you do not give someone specific direction, what, what should they learn really more specifically, not just, yeah, I mean, totally. I learn things every day in many areas, but for my professional life, I would really appreciate better direction. Like what would, what would work for me?
What would work with my preferences and with systems that I'm working in. But I feel that that's just not there at least, at least still not yet, even though we we are long ago since the days when Paul started his career, when I started with Michael started and still were talking about the same issues that existed many, many years ago.
So that kind of takes us to another subject that that they wanted to discuss. It's the learning material. So this is, I feel the case when too much is not really good. Because there is so much content and it's really great compared to having [00:09:00] no content at all, which was the case maybe 20 years ago.
But it is gotten to the point where developers are overwhelmed and it's not just the platforms themselves, even those are. Well, very manual right now is there is SAP community was a blog post and some Q and a, there are YouTube videos that are open. The CP courses. There is, there is official official SAP training, which is probably quite far from your life at this point.
There is. There used to be SAP learning. I think it still exists at least for certification and SAP just opened officially is our new learning websites which so far I'm not convinced is solving really any problem. So so how do you feel about this proliferation of different platforms and overall kind of spreading of information and knowledge and how can developers manage that better?
Paul: So, let me, let me jump in here real quick, like, I, [00:10:00] I don't want to, so here, I'll preface this with this. Is it like SAP has an enviable, not an unenviable problem here, because, because to go from like total new to like proficient or whatever. I think it's probably a more daunting task in the SAP universe than it is in, you know, Java, Python, whatever is because you have, you have a lot of places to jump to and you have a lot of like programming, proficiency being a good programmer is not even close to enough to do the right thing, so to speak in this place.
And so like, I like, I totally, I mean, I, I don't what I, while I might be saying like, okay, this, this or that is not good enough. It's not to say that like, oh, SAP, you really stink. And I hate you. That's not the case at all. [00:11:00] It's just that they have a hard challenge because of the complexity of the topics here is enormous it, when you consider what somebody has to go through to, to, to get to where they need to go. In other words, think about this. Like my, my first, probably my first year of doing SAP work of any kind, I was like, how is anybody an expert in this? This is, I was like, I'm drowning. How is, how is it even possible to be good at this?
There's way too much. And every little thing is like different from the other things. And every little, like, if you do some HR programming, you know what I mean? You guys know what I mean? Like you do, you go do some info type stuff, and then you jump over like SAP, TM or something in the BOPF other places, right.
You're like, how are these the same system at all? You know? And it's that, that's like it's broad and. And so there are lots of things there, [00:12:00] but so there, but there are some places where I think that like, I've also done a lot of stuff with cloud platforms like Azure, Google cloud, that kind of stuff.
And I wish I totally wish SAP documentation felt like Microsoft Azure documentation because that stuff is like that, that, that documentation has. Like they start, there's a lot of places where they start from a scenario. They're saying, if you want to do this and this here's the path. And it has a lot more than just click this to turn on this thing and go ABC.
It's really, from the perspective of. If you're doing this with this architecture, try this. And like it's got, it's got a lot more, it's got a lot better flow, a lot better understanding a lot better, all that kind of stuff. That's. If, if I, if I had a way to like pour the SAP knowledge into the [00:13:00] Azure shape, I would 100% do that 100% in a heartbeat.
That's my, that's my like, rambly answer to this question. If that makes any sense at all.
Jelena: No. Yeah. I make a mental notes. Yeah. I want to hear from Michael and after that, I want to jump to some of, some, some of my mental notes. So, Michael, what, what do you think about this?
Michael: I like this idea, really give the people a motivation or a good introduction. And then the right action. There are a lot of good platforms with a lot of content and that's at the same time, the big problem, because.
Jelena: Yeah,
Michael: A lot of promise. You have not enough time over the whole working day to say, oh, I'm visiting platform.
One that from 2, 3, 4, oh, there, new content. I have to learn it now. Oh, I have to do exercises with it. And that's for me a big problem to say, okay why should I learn that now? Do I [00:14:00] need it? And what's the motivation for that because you can be very good in a special of the system or in a special area, I'm doing a lot of logistics and I have to say. I think a lot of people are thinking about handling units. Very special part, very important.
You can do a sales and distribution, but never have to do something with helping units. But if you want to learn something about it, you need a real life real world. Samples. And then you need the system, the processes, the idea behind you need to weigh a portrait of a, the way backward when you have to reword something.
And so on, there are a lot of things to learn and that's not easy. Then I want to say. The documentation about ABAP, for example, changed a little bit. One day we had this, this, this, the introduction of expressions, a lot of expressions table expressions and so on. And you can, [00:15:00] you're now able to do a lot of things in one line of code.
Paul: Love it. Love it. Yes.
Michael: That's very good. If you know what you want to do. And if you're a beginner you have in one line of code three, four statements included and yeah, you don't, you have no clue what, why it is. What is this doing? You cannot read target and examples in the documentation changed a little bit and. Yeah, very complex now for beginner.
It's out. If you're doing a long time above, you would say, oh great. Now three lines of code where I needed in the past 20 lines. Great.
Jelena: Yeah. Yeah. It can be blessing in the chorus, you know, to the extent it's this sure thing. So, yeah. So yeah. I want to touch on a couple of items because I see some connections between what we just talked about before [00:16:00] and now first of all SAP documentation and SAP help in particular.
So just recently I made the post on Twitter. Became quite popular. I made it when I was really frustrated. I spent my morning going through different Google searches that arrived at SAP documentation. But as anyone who's ever opened, this helped@thecp.com. I think we all know the feeling quite well when you're like confused Travolta, most of the times are if you know, like very specifically very, exactly what you're looking for, which, which is probably.
No. It's the typical scenario when people go into is health, because if you know what you're looking for, then you're already halfway there. So, but if you are kind of stumbling and trying to figure out what's the best way to do this, what's the appropriate way. What's good for my version that I'm working with, then you are most of the time, essentially, a lot of stem and the rods know it's 11:00 AM and they feel like I need a drink.
So after. Some people from [00:17:00] SAP reached out to me privately, which, which I'm very grateful for. I think it's great that they're trying to do that honestly. And sincerely trying to act on the feedback, but say the feedback was like, oh, you know, yeah. We read the Twitter world. Can you give us like more specific examples?
And on one side, I totally understand where they're coming from, because if you don't have more specifics, you cannot act on it. But it's the same time to me. It is just such a systemic issue. That I honestly, I just want to reply to them. I could spend my whole day giving you examples. Would it change anything really?
And I, I'm more concerned that if, if I give examples and you're just going to, oh, you know, this is, oh, you're just doing search wrong. And this happened before with many feedbacks that were given to SAP from Andrews, et cetera. So I think it is really. Paul pointed out when we go to SAP documentation and that means SAP help or the communication within the systems, we really would like to see some things that compare us to [00:18:00] Microsoft.
And those are, you know, more of like development, mature companies. And, and that's our point that another note that they made, so we talked about ABA is not as much about language, but about business process and data, but this is exactly the missing. 'cause all those learnings they go about as flight, which everyone hates at this point, or it goes about the training model and it is like oh, you know, let's, let's just do direct updates to the stable and we're going to show you how it works.
Very rarely where we went up, they was directly in SAP. Most of our time is just Michael said before it's working with BAPIs or other APIs or other SAP functionality. And just trying to wrangle it into something that customers really wanted to do. And this is I think the main struggling points that, that none of that nothing absolutely covers right now as a result.
Blog posts by passionate, you know, SAP community members [00:19:00] and maybe some GitHub examples that I'm really glad they're starting to emerge. But I feel there is really no, no place where someone can learn the right things in the right context right now. So, yeah. That's my take on it. And I think so just go in to very excellent points.
I just, just want to read the exact quote. The bottom line is that we have to deliver real world solutions, which are more complex than all this developed by CP UI five, five, and five minutes or using the famous flight data model. So I think that he just keeps it nail on the head right there.
It's a main challenge is that. And yes, to some extent I can think of as white and transform it into so sales order approaches for there. But if I do not update like Rebag, I have directly never like in my life. So that's just completely different challenge. [00:20:00] So, so what, so what do you guys think? What, what could possibly be helpful to kind of brings us together to combine learnings that's more theoretical and more just about language syntax and all of that with real world works at SAP developers.
Paul: I mean, you know, I've been jumping in, but I want to make sure I pass the ball to Michael first here. Sorry, I apologize for that, Michael. You're the honored guest,
Jelena: Right.
Paul: I invite you to speak before me.
Michael: Yeah. Oh, what should I say? I think you need, you have to pay attention to a very basic example. That's what we mostly have. And then you need a very hard example. Bigger one, a real life example, combined was a business process and was perhaps traps and pitfalls in it. You have to pay special attention.
This is only working. Why [00:21:00] that's a good sentence then? As you said, a tutorial worth doing that in five minutes. That's okay. You can do that. You can learn it in five minutes. Just address the basics. So we need more real life examples and they should not be divided into a technical and business part.
They should combine it because no customer is asking you a one day for enhanced S flight model or something like that. They would say I talk with you about purchase order say it's order other documents. So you should use. Because you learn a lot about the data models. And if you are working with the data, you have an idea what are needed here.
And what is the need of my customer, Y do we want to, to extent to process and we should have, have a lot of examples like that. That would be great.
Paul: You know, I was one of [00:22:00] the reasons I was kind of staring up into space here, as we were talking about this a little bit as I was like, you know, because examples are the best thing in the universe. Like they just are, and. And I, when I think back to all of the custom development I've done over the years for various things for customers. And when I was an internal employee of a company, that kind of stuff to you know, the great majority of that work was not like, how do I put this? I was not inventing a new search engine. When I'm doing that stuff. And so they're like, if, if that code that I wrote either the ABAP code or the code, for example, or whatever other supporting code I might have produced, if that code was out in the universe, it would not harm that business at all.
It wouldn't be. Right. And I think maybe there's, there's a gap somewhere in [00:23:00] that, like there's some business out there, or some consulting agency out there should adopt like a completely open model of like all of the, all of the stuff that we do. All the code we've written. Is there for the university. And that would capture like real examples of like really doing the real things with stuff.
And it would capture the, the weird, it's always about the weird quirky thing, right? There's the 90% of your code that just like lands there and does what it does. And then there's the 10% of your code that you're like, I, I can't quite make my internal table fit the format of the, the spec for this BAPI and I have to go through like crazy gyrations. make it work. Those crazy gyrations are valuable because that's where you get to see examples of things you don't see every day. And if that code was just in the universe for people to go see, maybe there'd be [00:24:00] better ways to, to learn from that stuff. So, I mean, that's just one piece of it.
Right? The other piece of it, I think is that like, people should just be. I don't, I don't know how SAP itself would solve this. Maybe they could, but like the SAP community, whatever that means these days should, should like adopt more and more and more of an open source model of some kind that says, I, you know, this was really. I don't know, like the I'm gonna get on a soapbox again.
Fair. Your second, like messed up things, things that you're like that you got working, but you're not particularly proud of. Those are some of the best things to learn from because chances are, if you struggled with something and you came up with a solution, you're like, oh, that's ugly.
But it works. Chances are, that was the best anybody could do. With a weird thing and people should like somebody out there else out there in the universe or in the globe where my hand is like sort of floating of the, somebody [00:25:00] in somebody covered by my hand on this globe here is having that same problem today and could totally benefit from you just saying this sucks, but I did it here, here, universe, have it.
Right. If there was a way to, to just like, have all of the code. Just be in the universe available. That would, that would do a lot. That's a big dream. I know it's a big dream and probably can't actually be done, but it would go a long way.
Jelena: Yeah. And, and, and look at those, those projects that already exist, how they're like, how about gates? That's open source about two XLSX that I think many customers are using right now. And even for ourselves, if you know, it's, it's going joke in SEP communities that every month someone posts, blog.
Talking about stoves at above [00:26:00] text that's already, but, and every time it's like, well, yeah, but my client doesn't want to install it every time I like to you can't be serious, honestly, these days. I mean, who, who is your client? I mean, North Korea. I mean, come on now. It's just, I think you just need to be more, more kind of push, push forward with that, then just steer your clients in the right direction.
Paul: So it's, sometimes things have to come from like the ground up on us, us, like, you know, foot soldiers on the field of code battle need to be, you know, knocking on the General's tent and say, Hey, spread the love. Right. Or whatever.
Jelena: Yeah. So, yeah, I think that there is a lot of feedback that can be given and I do not always see the tools or opportunities as they used to give this type of feedback. So I [00:27:00] think that's, that's definitely an issue that SAP should be able to solve. Because just take for example, Same direct messages that I mentioned about the CP help.
So why, why is there no official channel? Well, where hundreds of people can tell you, Hey, you know, this page sucks and it has a link that goes nowhere or require some kind of secret login from me. Or I can not understand what this is talking about, but it's the best thing they have. Is it was, it was this page was this page. I mean, it was helpful because it exists and they make you heard quotes here for those. It's better than nothing, but if I'm completely honest it leaves a lot to be desired because it sounds like a reader.
Paul: Yeah.
Jelena: It tells me something, but in some cases tells me too much not what they really want to know.
It doesn't give me examples and CDS view. I think it could example in this area we had, for example, And turn on Mindset learning [00:28:00] sessions that we have every month. We just gathered together with developers and talk about stuff. So it was the most recent one we had to Pete about CDS views and to different connotations and different acuities and to the presenter who did that was Ethan Jewett, basically the way he said, well, you can find examples in UI documentation. Why are CDS examples in UI documentation? When they go to the confrontation? There are no examples whatsoever. I look in says, here's the notation syntax, great! How, how do I use it? Where do I use it? Why do I use it? Can you tell me more about this? No. Nothing, because there is hundreds of different notations.
Here is the list. Look at it. This is just absolutely ridiculous situation in my view.
Michael: Yeah, it's a big challenge. Big challenge because we have, we have a lot of new technology in the last years and all [00:29:00] we need to adopt it, to bring it into the masses. And that's hard if you're working every day, a lot of your working day on old box problems to keep something life that was written 20 years ago.
Perhaps you cannot use any new Hardings methods or ideas to deal with this old code. And then you say, oh, I have to learn now about CDs, but you cannot really use it. How you have to deal with new stuff on the business. Technology platform really create an interesting, but if you your working time is over, you want to go home.
Paul: Yeah,
Jelena: Yeah, exactly.
Paul: I think the SAP space is especially tough from that scenario because you, I honestly think you probably work on slightly to moderately older code, a lot more of your time in the SAP space and a lot of [00:30:00] other sort of enterprise it places. I think they have a little bit more freedom to, to go, you know, exploring in the universe of new tools in their space than the SAP devs.
Do I think SAP devs are kind of. Slightly more locked into where they are, maybe not by choice, but by just by the nature of the platform that we use to, to produce, to produce their solution is we get locked into the old thing is, and it's to Michael's point, it's really hard to. A find the time, but be convinced management to let, give you the time to go play in the new playground.
Because I mean, I don't know, let's be real SAP development is also not seen as necessarily like a an innovation center. It's more seen as a, keep the lights on center.
Jelena: Yeah, of course cost center.
Paul: Yeah. It's tough.
Jelena: Yeah. So it's, it's kind of vicious circle because as [00:31:00] you said, it's, it's exactly to put what Michael said before your day spent half of your day spent trying to find how the heck this puppy works and trying to make things just purely work, just trying to satisfy client requirements.
And it can be just exhausting because you don't really know what, what you're supposed to do. And you're just trial and there are trying to push it in. It's like, What's the expression square peg round hole. So something along those lines. So your days are essentially wasted on that. And in many cases, we work either as consultants with the clients or as full-time developers working for a specific company, you are limited to what tools are available there.
And it could be all ECC systems. There are still systems that do not even have like 7.4 syntax. I, I worked in one of them just a couple of years ago or S/4HANA systems that are not latest and greatest cloud as for how the cloud, to be honest. Do not really [00:32:00] know, many people may be a couple who even work with those systems outside of who works for SAP.
Of course. So maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. I don't know. Maybe I'm not, I'm kind of stuck in, stuck in the past myself, but I think the reality is still majority of customers is, is running on premise system. That does. That's just what it is. I don't know when and how it's going to change.
Going back to Paul's point for the manager to give you time. They need to provide some justification. So, okay. We'll let this guy or girl spend some time on learning, but what will this learning? What value will this bring to the business? And this is where this disconnection is not always apparent.
And SAP has been here doing rather poor job, making those connections for the customers. They definitely has gotten better compared to like 10 years ago, but it's still really not, not really is their main goal because [00:33:00] they are selling their products to the buyers buyers. Don't talk to developers and developers are just caboose of sale train, and trying to implement whatever management's bought.
Paul: I'm keeping that one. I like that one. I'm keeping that in my, my expressions pocket. I, what can I do? I'm just the caboose of this train. Well, you know, sorry.
Jelena: So I think for the real change to happen, that that train needs to be rearranged. The things of the wagons on the train needs to be put maybe in slightly, slightly different order. So yeah, we haven't talking for a while, so I, I like to. To kind of in the place where we can maybe provide some specific suggestions or some specific advice.
Because as, as Dale Carnegie training teaches us, you need to end with some, some action items. Otherwise it's just poof you know, conversation. So for, for myself, Once. So just make suggestions to both develop are sent to SAP. So SAP, I [00:34:00] think in addition to helping customers to connect what you're offering with specific business values, that's definitely something that they need to do better, but in other things, they need to get better at taking feedback from.
In their ecosystem from the buyers, from managers, from developers or falls the levels. And there are ways to do this through some kind of SAP innovation tool. None of them work very well. So it's definitely something that SAP can improve with probably relatively small effort, I think. And for, for developers I want to say, first of all, do not despair because you're not alone with it.
And I, I, I may made up an expression myself and Paul and Michael feel free to borrow it. It takes a village to raise the developers and and, and, and proper in particular. So do not hesitate to find your. Hence, I I'm really sad that SAP has destroyed our, not just the village, but thriving like [00:35:00] country with SAP community, but there are villages out there and you just, you just need to find them and maybe help them to thrive and to maybe build that, builds them up into something new and beautiful.
So, yeah, that's, that's kind of my, my, my message to, to the world. So Michael, I want. I want to go to you and just what, what do you think? What would be your, your message?
Michael: And people should follow. Okay.
Paul: Love Michael. Yeah.
Michael: I have no clear message prepared and I'm not in a hurry. I would say everyone has to find a way that fits to him or her. I saw students having a lot of fun with the developer missions on, I don't know what SAP platform it [00:36:00] is, but this missions divided into steps that was very well adopted by the students. For them it was created to say, okay, I do that, that, that day.
For us when you're working a little bit longer in the SAP universe, you say, okay, click, click, click, click, click. Okay. And now I need a little bit more complex example. Perhaps that would be a good idea to have mission slash. Easy missions and then more harder missions divided into steps and you can stop and say, okay, I will do that later.
Perhaps you get a badge. Very wonderful. If you have the badge afterwards That would be for me, it would be a good, good idea. Because we have to make it more attractive for everyone. The whole SAP universe must be very attractive so that we can print new people in and that that we can help people staying in.
The SAP universe, because there are wonderful gardens full of lovely fruits. And so it's very important that people are not tired of, of using [00:37:00] technology. They should have fun. Okay. There are some minutes, every day. You have no fun with technology because it's not working, but. Absolutely normal at the hour always should be a moment.
Work, fun work, having fun. That would be great.
Jelena: I think it's a great, great message. And definitely we, yeah, we need to keep in mind. The kinds of developers that yeah. That work in SAP ecosystem right now. Awesome. He agreed wait message. Michael. He said to do they have one. That was great message. Thank you. Thank you so much for it. Yeah, but both what's what, what do you think what's, what's your mission statement to out, out to the universe?
Paul: think what, where did one thing where to go is like, cause we we've touched on this a couple times in this discussion, I think is example improvement. Right. And I think maybe one way to maybe one way to source, that would be for SAP to turn, to, to turn up the interrupted listening devices on its custom developer, I'd [00:38:00] farm the, or the, not the platform, the, their division, right. That goes out and does custom dev like bringing in, bringing in examples from what they've done and literally just streamline those into the documentation. Right? Take, take all of those stupid blah, blah, blah, whatever those things are that all those things do. And like literally just put them in the documentation or put somewhere in documentation, like say like here's, here's a real world example of what a real customer need is.
To have an extra field on their order screen to do X, Y, Z. That would be so like, just like just like forklift, all of those from custom dev into documentation and the number of people who would get like amazing things that really told them, like, imagine the rice lifts that you've worked on that were that general shape.
And you go look at an example of almost exactly what that is like, come on. [00:39:00] Amazing. Right. So that that's one thing. The other thing is like two, two people out in the universe, the, the, the nerds out there who are kind of in our seats raise, raise your voices on social media and whatever else. And also share, share your joys and share your sorrows out there and, and just, we need more people to say what is awesome and what sucks.
And I think that will help things get better too.
Jelena: Yep. Okay.
Paul: Yeah.
Jelena: And I think GitHub is actually a great platform for sharing, especially your potential failures, because they've seen let's say sheriff blogs posted and SAP community. And so there are lots of blogs. Even these days posting just really. If I'm on this really crappy code, it's it wasn't even good, like 20 years ago, really.
But these days with everything that we know so far, it's, it's really bad. But when you post it as a blog, it's like, oh, this is [00:40:00] what I recommend doing. Definitely to the three command set, but if you post this on get hubs and everyone can contribute and makes, makes our suggestions to say, Hey, you know, I see what you're doing here.
And there is a better way to do that. So instead of just use, use proper platform for, for what's there, men's mental be helpful for them. So, yeah. Instead of posting here is, you know, here's what I suggest to do. Just say, Hey, this is what I've done with. So, yeah. That's I think that would be great. All right.
So yeah, really excellent suggestions from everyone. So I think we're, yeah, we're at a great point and it was really great conversations that I personally have enjoyed and I hope that yeah, Poland, most importantly, Michael. Yeah, hopefully I hope you guys had fun and yeah. I hope that our listeners and potential viewers also enjoy this conversation and I'm really looking forward to more conversations between between us and future.
Paul: yeah. Michael, is there anything we can plug for you on this? [00:41:00] Like
Jelena: Oh yeah.
Paul: or websites or anything like that? Okay. Okay. Then we won't.
Jelena: consulting business and you think.
Paul: If you are unplugged. but yeah. Anyway, let me, let me just say, I really appreciate your time, Michael. Thank you so much. And I think it's gonna gonna make a big help out in the university to just get, to keep having these conversations. So I really appreciate it. Thank you,
Jelena: Yup.
Paul: Yeah.
Jelena: you, sir.
Michael: Absolutely.
Jelena: right. So thank you, everyone. That was our podcasts on the learning challenges of SAP developers. Thank you everyone. And they hope to hear and see you next time.
Here are the notes from the episode, and a transcript at the bottom.
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Paul: This is the very, very first inaugural episode of the podcast. And so what we'd like to do is kind of introduce ourselves, talk about what we're going to do, get all of that interest stuff into our listeners ears. So they know what's going on. I mean, I'm thinking that we should, before we do anything, we should really give ourselves like a, sort of a personal intro to the universe.
So I'm going to hand the podcast talking stick to you, Jelena, and say, please introduce yourself as who you are. What do you love? What you hate, what you do in life, all those things. Just tell us about yourself.
Jelena: Hey, thank you, Paul. So I'm Jelena Perfiljeva. I am an SAP professional with many years of experiences, as I would typically officially introduce myself. In real life, of course, I have many other interests. But what we usually focus on with Paul is enterprise software in general. And we have started talking to each other. And we also have a newsletter that we're publishing and we decided to do a podcast as well.
So talk about all the different things in enterprise software and then software in general, and even, even in life That that really excite us and that inspire us. So I hope that this podcast will also provide some interest in some inspiration to you, our listeners. Thank you. And back to you, Paul.
Paul: yeah. the, the stick has been passed back to me and now I may speak in the, in the campfire circle. Right. So thank you, Jelena. My name is Paul, as you probably heard in the intro, and as you hear me speaking now, so I am also a professional software developer, focused a lot in SAP, almost entirely in SAP and a little bit in sort of some Microsoft and Google things in there, here and there, but pretty much in SAP these days.
And, just like Jelena, I [00:02:00] have lots of strong interest in sort of the enterprise software space in general. And then of course, other things going on kind of outside the podcast. And we can add on some episodes someday, we should just kind of dive into our personal stuff too, at some point, at least a little bit of that personal stuff and get kind of a flavor of, you know, what else has been going on because I, for one would love to hear some of the little Jelena in the USSR, kinda like growing up kind of stuff, just to, just to learn more about that kind of thing. Right. It's interesting to me as…
Jelena: Back in the days.
Paul: Yeah those back in the day things can actually illuminate a lot of why, you know, why things are the way they are now for us as professionals in that kind of stuff.
So, anyway, like I said, we started this to be, to be educational, to have some sort of semblance of community, to, to share our experiences and knowledge with folks. And because the two of us, like we talked to each other and we have a good time and we also like to be social and talk to people and we like to talk to interesting [00:03:00] people.
And so we're going to have interesting people on this podcast and talk to them. So I'm excited. I'm pumped to get started on this. So, I think maybe Jelena, can you talk, talk us through why podcasting? Like what, what inspires you to think that a podcast is kind of the right thing for us to do in this space?
Jelena: Yeah, I think that podcast format, it allows us to have discussions that go much farther than a simple post or a blog or newsletter article can go on. And when we, when we're talking life to people, I think sharing of ideas and kind of immediately bouncing back against each other, that’s what really makes great podcasts stand out.
And I hope that we can have really great guests here. And talk to them and we can learn from them. They can hopefully learn from us as well. And then our listeners can learn from everyone here and maybe even [00:04:00] participate further, or maybe give us some feedback in our comments section, or just reach out to us directly.
Paul: Yeah. And I think one thing that's great about podcasts and why I think that we talked about this is like, you know, we, at this point we do a lots of our things on social media, right? We post on Twitter, LinkedIn, we have a newsletter, that kind of stuff, those things are engaging in a certain way, but sometimes, you know, comments and social media interactions they're disjointed.
And also you don't get a very good personal flavor sometimes because sometimes there's nuance, it's hard to interpret in just the typed word. And I think, I think that adding a personal touch of literally just talking to somebody will really help us kind of uncover some depth and get a kind of feedback that we can't get from like the digital, like written digital things in that space.
So I'm excited to, to have people on. And then if you, or I disagree in some way with either each other or with that person we're talking to. Of course it can be civil and then it can be easy to sort of like, say, I don't understand that. What do you mean by this? And then we can come to that resolution right there.
I think that's really neat about podcasts that I don't think Twitter has that, you know what I mean?
Jelena: Yeah.
Paul: Twitter has a different kind of energy
Jelena: Exact, exact opposite.
Paul: Twitter has a little more…
Jelena: …blurt out stuff. And then taken out of context, disagreements.
Paul: Yeah, love/hate back and forth a little bit kind of thing. And that, that hopefully we don't get too much love and hate back and forth in this podcast.
So our release schedule, we're starting out with once a month that may someday go maybe slightly more often, but right now we're being sane with our own lives, our own personal lives, our schedules, our listener's schedules too. And we're just going to go once a month with somebody interesting and go dive deep on a topic. So look for us to publish about once a month.
Our structure on the podcast is actually pretty simple. I think because really what we do is we identify a topic like training or learning. That'll be our first one and identify a person, a luminary in that space. And then we just, we just go to that.
There's no, like there's no news review and there's no like top 10 music hits or whatever kind of thing going on. It's just talk to another nerd, stitch it together and get out that's our, that's our format. And, and hopefully that's simple and quick and easy and kind of fun for people to get into.
Jelena: We just lure people in and then we question them.
Paul: Yeah, there's, there will be a virtual, like light bulb hanging over their heads. And we're going to have like a picture of a big burly guy in the background doing like this, then we're going to try to get the real answers out of them, you know, and make them talk, make them squeal.
Jelena: Yup.
Paul: Of course, like, I, I think we talked about this briefly before we started recording this, Jelena, that like these intro things are a little bit dry if there's not some kind of personal touch to them.
So I would love to add just like a tiny little spice of something personal to this. And so what I would love for you - and I'll do the same thing - describe for me, one of your favorite early moments in your programmer slash developer life, talk about something that was sort of formative for you in that nerd space.
Jelena: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So for me, it was very, very long time ago. My formative years are way, way, way behind. So think about late, late nineties or very super early two thousands. Before SAP, I was a mainframe consultant and the way I started this I found the company back in Latvia that did training for mainframe consultants that they then provided for projects for the rest of the world.
And prior to that, I did some development, but only for small [00:08:00] computers or personal computers of different kinds. Even though by education. I was essentially a system designer. I just, it, it was very typical path. I think for many developers for you get education in certain areas and you do work with some other things.
And for me suddenly that course, that training was suddenly connected to my education that I received at university. And suddenly I was able to apply all those concepts in the context of much bigger mainframe systems. And I think it is, it is similar, it's not the exact same experience, obviously, but it's similar to what many developers can relate to. It's a differences between enterprise and non-enterprise software and just having your learning and education in one area and maybe doing something else. And then suddenly later in life, connecting back to what you have learned and digging into that knowledge unexpectedly sometimes. So yeah, that's, that's my “origin story”, if you will.
Paul: That at some point we should have a, we should have a guest or a topic on that, like that difference between enterprise and non-enterprise development. That would be fascinating because I mean, for both of us, I think, the vast majority of our lives professionally have been in enterprise-shaped environments and it would be, I think, it'd be great to have somebody sort of contrast our experiences with theirs in, you know, startups or gaming or whatever like that, and really kind of illuminate some differences in that kind of stuff. That's an interesting, interesting take on.
Well, okay. So thank you, Jelena, for the, for the opening the history book and turning back a few years.
So you know, something that stands out to me in my, in my life as a programmer is even before I had a job as like a developer, I think one of the first programs I ever wrote, I was in college. And I didn't do tech in college, I did like theater and psychology. I did kind of just liberal arts stuff in college, and I noticed that my girlfriend, who is now my wife, she was playing lots of Sudoku.
So the, the nine by nine number game, right. That was in lots of newspapers then, I think it still probably is. And she taught me how to play and I would play a puzzle and I did a few of them and I realized I was just using the same strategy over and over to solve the thing. And I thought to myself, this can totally be automated. And I knew because I had seen somebody else doing macros in Excel. I was like, I bet you that Excel could automate this and solve a Sudoku puzzle in a macro.
So I literally from like, not knowing anything about that my school laptop had a copy of Excel on it. And my job for like the next week was like, I would do my schoolwork and my, like my job. I would come home and like, just type into Google, like how to program in Excel. Right? And so I started with my vision, so to speak, of like, how would I make a computer? Make a guess and then verify it. And then I had to like, learn, okay, how do I make program code encapsulate the logical process I'm thinking of. Right? And so I, after about a week of like, just like late nights and like scratching my head and like, what is a variable? Like all that kind of stuff. Right? I got it working, but it, it only worked up to like medium level difficulty. And if it didn't work, it didn't like, it didn't give you feedback. Like, oh, I can't solve this. It just crashed Excel! Right? So you just, what you would do is like, there was one sheet and you have to like, look at the newspaper and then like hand type, all the starting numbers in it, and then click a little button to make it start going. And so it would be like either “go, done” or “go, crash” because it would quickly run out of memory ‘cause I wasn't controlling things the right way.
Whatever, it's horrible program, now I'm sure. I wish I could find it. But what it really illustrated to me was two things. One is that, those late nights of like, “I bet you, I can do this, I just need to figure out how”. That was like inspiring to me. I was like, oh my gosh, you could make a computer do anything! Then (b) is because my girlfriend who, like I said now is my wife, she was like, why would you ruin a game that way? Why would you invent a thing that I just saw?
Jelena: Good point.
Paul: Because part of the fun is like going through the process and like you from A, to B to C to D or whatever. But to me, I was like, the game was making a thing that solves the game, not playing the game itself. Right? So anyway, that was my, I think my most formative experience early on in programming was like, just going, I can make a thing that does that better. Right?
Jelena: Yup.
Paul: So, okay. Those are some of our early formative stories.
Before we go out of control and go crazy and like off into the wilderness about all these different things, let's call it here. Let's say that we're done now and get this out to the world and then we'll get ready for our first guest in the next month's episode. So if you want to find out more, listeners, follow us at @BoringNerds on Twitter, go to boringenterprisenerds.com on the web or search for Boring Enterprise Nerds on LinkedIn. Find us there, follow us. You send us some money, you know, some cookies, do something like that. Give us stuff, I guess, is the thing. But we, we really, sincerely hope to hear from you to, to talk back with you, to talk to you, all that kind of stuff.
And we hope to see more as the months go on. Thanks, everyone!