SAP TechEd Blog Posts
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Siarljp
Active Participant

Barcelona Teched 2015 kicked off with Steve Lucas dealing out the bad news to the SAP competition in confident style;

but behind the bluster of the key note, the technical innovations were there to be delved into, Chris Swanepoel here showing us that the future of ABAP clearly lies within Eclipse with his wry sense of humour and (in a later session) abilities to hack his colleagues keyboard language settings through telepathy were truly impressive (how did you do that again Chris?)

Despite the lack of coffee machines the venue was truly awesome with many places to stop and check the emails, charge up the (laptop) batteries, and the Fiori Cafe really saved the day for coffee lovers, even if it meant a 10 minute walk between the buildings, I think SAP are secretly trying to get us all into shape!

Having a developer background some of my sessions were pretty heavy even in the first day, it was truly fascinating though to peel your way through the hype to really start to understand the technology in the background, and understand what it can begin to deliver. For me it was fascinating to discover that even before we get to Hana we can make use of the huge performance benefits of CDS views, and they will help us prep the way to the brave new SAP future world (S/4 HANA).

DemoJam finished off the Monday, and it opened my eyes a little more to what was possible there; BIG congratulations go to the winners; who definitely had the best celebrations following a Demojam win that I have ever witnessed. Perhaps a future career in kick boxing awaits, seriously though - that was an awesome presentation and a well deserved victory celebration!

Then the keynote on Tuesday for me that was the real keynote! if you are of a more geekie persuasion, Björn Goerke went where few keynote speakers will usually dare to tread, SE16 for the first time in a keynote, quickly followed up by SE37, by this time we are cheering in delirium and before we know it he is busy coding his way out of being marooned on the planet Mars using all of the available latest HANA tech he can muster together, this has to be seen to be believed, and to do this live in a keynote; without a single visit to ST22! that was pretty impressive I can tell you. That was how to wow a crowd full of ABAPers!

Then one of the session highlights for me was Stefan Elfner's overview of the S/4 HANA architecture, this was the first time that I really started to understand where SAP are going with S/4 HANA and the slightly perilous journey that us customers will have to take to get there with them, a truly inspiring session from a truly inspiring Teched. Go and see the video of this session (TEC206 - Hint: SAP please make a vid available) if you are unsure about what S/4 HANA is all about, it is a must see!

Tuesday night was everyone's chance to wind down after 2 pretty heavy duty days, of wandering the Teched showroom floors. gatecrashing as many hands on sessions as is possible, and posing tricky questions to all of the SAP experts on hand. What a night SAP had planned for us - with 4 clubs in a row, my group made the sound decision that we simply had to eat and drink in every one, and what a night!

Apologies in advance to anyone I catch in the pictures who was partying a little to hard! I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (they seem to get blurrier as the night progresses, clearly must be a fault developing with the camera there).

We decided we needed a long walk back after the partying to catch a bit of the Barcelona sea air, and to watch the fishermen bring in tomorrows catch.

My final day was I think truly epicly badly planned on my part - starting with a 4 hour hands on development session (which I was fashionably late for; the very last person let in to a very full session). I had the good fortune to sit next to a .Net developer whose skillset had clearly expanded into being a very competent SAP developer, I wisely let him speed through the exercises whilst I focused on sitting back and carefully observing.

Then to really cap things off nicely my last teched session of the conference was innocently titled "Write less code using new language features for more concise code". I was thinking this would be a fun way to conclude Teched - what I hadn't really prepped for was for a session by 2 of the leads of the ABAP language group, who promptly educated us how to write 50 lines of ABAP code in just 2 lines.

You know you are in real trouble when one of these experts stands back and scratches his head and says something like "hmmm let me take another look at that line of code for a few minutes", and then explains that you need to get into the ABAP zone before really getting this new concise syntax into your head - or something like that - by this time my remaining brain cells had I think jumped ship and transported their way out of Teched, and were shortly followed by me in person.

That's me signing off from what has been a truly memorable, and brain zapping Teched, but after all of the hours of sessions, thousands of miles walked to find a fresh cup of coffee and the hard partying, I have to hand it to SAP for organizing a truly memorable Teched 2015 conference. Thanks SAP!.

Note all these pictures (in their full resolution glory) and more can be found on my picture site here (feel free to download):

http://siarl.zenfolio.com/sapteched2015_barcelona

Please feel free to post your own pics in the comments below, or discuss the various merits of the sessions, the fun behind the scenes and the lack of coffee machines where they were really needed - the lecture area! :wink:

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