SCN Blog Digest – January 2017

Folks,

Political protests seem to be all the rage these days (quite literally) and SCN is not an exception. Earlier this month I made a decision to stop answering questions on SCN in protest against a bug that can cause an answer to be lost instead of submitting it. Too bad for “my client has a requirement” demographics (or not?) but lucky for you since this gave me tons of free time to read the blogs and to write about them. Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on crème de la crème of the SCN bloggery for January 2017.

General

• If you would prefer not to rely on the kindness of strangers to find good blogs on SCN, read Never Miss a Blog Post Again by Jason Cao. I used his suggestion myself and set up an RSS feed of the SCN blogs with great degree of success.
• In her blog Returning to Work After Loss the fellow SAP Mentor Colleen Hebbert shares a humanizing personal story of loss, grief, survival, and hope. If your eyes don’t well up reading you might be a robot.
• I was a bit skeptical about Paul Taylor’s blog Empathy to Action: the Importance of Listening because the “e-word” tends to be exploited by the view-count-hungry authors. But I was glad I read it and believe it’s something we can all relate to.
• If you are tired of the SAP employees droning on about the “digital core innovation solutions providing best-of-breed customer experience in the connected environment with IoT and Big Data” on SCN then this obscure Public Sector blog To Provide: One of the Most Important Tasks of Every Government by Wolfgang Schaper may seem refreshing.
• Do you know a language other than English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean? Do you crave fame and eternal gratitude? Then why not help out SAP HANA Academy to translate the subtitles? More details in this blog by Denys van Kempen.

HR

• Quick – a performance review or a root canal? Which one would you pick? For many corporate employees the choice is not so apparent. Enjoy reading about the method to the performance management madness in the 3-part blog by SAP’s  Stephan Amling (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
• OK, I know it is starting to look like a blog featuring blog featuring blog but this collection by a fellow Mentor Jarret Pazahanick deserves recognition.

ABAP

• A “threefer” (one, two, and three) about the visitor design pattern in ABAP. Boring? Not if Paul Hardy writes about it.
• Marco Hernandez came out of nowhere with not just one but two manifestos: Make Great Software and And Now for Something Completely Different. A must read for the ABAPers, especially at the career crossroads.
• Do you know the Catmull Rom? The Catmull Rom? The Catmull Rom! Well, François Henrotte does.

UI

• Neat blog by Mauricio Lauffer on adding vibration to SAPUI5 apps
• Mike Doyle explains what favicon is and how to add it to your UI5 apps
• So, you created a great UI5 app with vibration, favicon and all. Now what? Head to this blog to find out about a secret underground UI5 app competition for the coveted… [what was the prize again? what? there is no prize? seriously? blimey] … eternal community recognition!

HANA

• An informative summary by Alper Somuncu Choosing the right HANA Database Architecture
• Join Thomas Grassl on an “intellectual journey” in Why NOT to Use an In-Memory Database. Spoiler alert: he will try to convince you otherwise.

Honorable Mention

The one and only SCN blog posted on January 1st deserves a special prize (like a copy of my award-non-winning book with autograph). While the whole world was partying SAP’s own DC CHUANG was sharing BI Admin tips. @DC CHUANG – please contact me to claim the prize. 

Happy reading and thank you to all the great SCN authors!