Use the source Luke!

From Andrew Barnard comment in Piers blog:

In the former times, SAP's application logic was written in ABAP - open source - in the sense that anybody could understand it. Now I obverse, despite the benefits of open source - SAP is tending to hide the source in Java classes. The newer product offerings are more closed than the "closed" ABAP applications ever were.

This is a very good point. SAP was open source (meaning open knowledge) even before open source become popular. I'm not sure if they realize how important this was for their success. From my experience, good SAP implementations depend a lot on the ingenuity of consultants that hack the user-exits and BADIs. No matter how clever the consultants are, if they cannot read the source code they cannot invent those hacks (I wonder if APO would not be much more successful if it did not hide so much in the COM routines and optimizers binaries).

Source code, plus the integrated debugger and /h is the gem of SAP. Going away from it is a BAD decision.

Productivity Oh Productivity

Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. [...] managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in. That's not exactly productivity — it's more like fraud — but it's the state of the art for many American managers. (from Peopleware)

Caught for the second time

For the second time, when searching for user-exits, I failed to find
the exit I wanted because in the SMOD screen I never remember to
try the up/down arrows. In this case, the exit I needed was 005. I was in
this screen, I tried 001, 002 and 003. But I for my brain it was
clear that only those three existed. That would be understandable if
it was the first time. But no, it was the second time. This screen sucks!



Music playing: Uakti

SAP developer network forum for SCM

Another SAP forum for APO/SCM talk. There was already one in the SAP community.

Music playing: Pram

New kind of science

I've been reading the New Kind of Science book of Stephen Wolfram.
It's a punch in the stomach. Complex, almost random, behaviour resulting from simple rules.



Music playing: Pram