And a happy birthday it was ... #sitNL 5 year anniversary

Celebrating 5 years of sitNL

On Saturday November 23, it was time to celebrate our 5thanniversary. For the 5th time SAP NetWeaver and SAP TechEd enthusiasts gathered together to share knowledge at SAP Inside Track Netherlands, sitNL in short.

Or to look at it from another perspective, our little event is just the warm up for Haseenah’s delicious dinner party in the evening 

Our sitNL birthday cake

Some statistics

The Ciber office was crowded, 62 participants joined for our SAP TechEd XPerience.

Some participant statistics

• 52 from the Netherlands
• 5 from Belgium
• 4 from Germany
• 1 from Norway (Thanks for joining Njal ;-)
• 44 different companies
• 7 customer representatives
• 12 freelancers
• 14 from Ciber
• 3 from Accenture
• 3 from TCS
• 2 from Synerscope

Some other sitNL statistics

• 14 high quality sessions (agenda)
• 1 entertaining Pubquiz
• 1 live podcast recording by the Dutch BI Podcast members

Recap

Roel van den Berge already shared his personal sitnl experiences. In this blog I’ll try to recap the day in pictures, slides, replays and some words.

Welcome and opening Twan van den Broek Practical use of innovations, check out how Mr. Beanuses scissors, his credit card and his socks to create a lunch. Innovations without practical use or where the end user experience is not taken into account will have a hard time in maturing. Prezi
SAP HANA Cloud Platform Matthias Steiner Matthias prepared the keynote for Vishal at SAP TechEd in Bangalore  Try it yourself, experience the cloud athanatrial.ondemand.com. When asked about participating the opensap courses, the majority of the sitNL crowd raised their hands. And made Matthias happy of course. Slides
Visual analysis of relational data with SynerScope on HANA Niels Willems, Danny Holten SynerScope is one of the HANA startup companies. Niels joined the winning InnoJam and DemoJam team at SAP TechEd in Amsterdam. Niels and Danny proved that a good visualization of data is the right starting point for analysis.
Test Driven Development(TDD) Introduction and Live ABAP Unit TDD Coding Session Hendrik Neumann First of the packed sessions. Hendrik brought great looking slides and did some live ABAP coding.  He even dared to use the word ‘Fascinating’ for ABAP 7.4. Fascinating is a word that has special meaning to those who attended keynotes by Jim Hagemann Snabe. Slides
What I took away from SAP TechEd with regards to enterprise mobility (and devs) Roel van den Berge Our rockstar who even used a rocksong on stage. “Keep on coding in the free world”. His SAP based lyrics even matched the original song “Keep on rocking in the free world”. Roel managed to include a live demo of the AppBuilder, which was only released a few days before. Slides
Search through your ABAP code base realtime non-HANA Roy van de Kerkhof A busy ‘dad’, as Roy’s family recently grew with a third child. Roy’s talk was about a real time search, without HANA (!).  With his solution he made developers life easy at a large international company.
Lunch
Dutch BI Podcast - live R. Konijnenburg Xavier HackingJeroen van der A Sven Van Leuken Two members of the podcast (Xavier and Jeroen) recently finished a new SAP Press book, Getting Started with SAP Business Objects Design Studio. Thanks to them we could give away one copy during the pubquiz. The Dutch BI podcast took of in … Dutch, of course ;-) They talked about Agile Analytics, Predictive Analysis and reports that have been created in the past. Replay
Let's take that call. Build your own Fiori style (calltaker) app Leo van Hengel Wim Snoep Well, here is a note to ourselves. If you include a session about Fiori, SAPUI5, SAP NetWeaver Gateway and some live coding – make sure that your room is large enough. Fully packed is a term that needed to be redefined, people had to stand in the hallway to see and hear Leo and Wim.
Developing a SAPUI5 Desktop UI with the Neptune Application Designer Njål Stabell This year the 'most kilometers award' goes to Njål who travelled all the way from Norway to show us how to create mobile applications right out of the ABAP workbench using the Neptune Application Designer. Slides
Trends, some live hacking, statistics, SAP Security topics from SAP TechEd 2013 Joris van de Vis Our long time sitNL friend, Joris, talked about dangerous ABAP commands and did some live hacking. It is scary to see how easy it is to hack into an SAP system. He also pointed out the SAP NetWeaver add on for code vulnerability analysis, a mouth full. Great tool, but additional licenses required  Slides
Break
HANA vs RDBMS battles and HANA integration into ABAP 7.4 Wouter Lemaire How cool to see that new community members step up and take the stage. Wouter did a HANA versus RDBMS battle. And even mentioned Oracle on our SAP event.
Overview of where and how business logic is implemented in SAP applications Fred Verheul Although sitNL is a techie based event, Fred dared to do a talk about business rules. It was an interactive session where for example Ben Meijs stood up to talk about the separation of concerns. Somewhere the H-word or The-Word-That-Must-Not-Be-Named got mentioned. But regardless of that, the room was packed.
HANA Control Center (SAPUI5 app) in the Mobile Portal Tamas Szirtes Tamas brought his SAP TechEd story on the HANA monitoring app. With that HANA is in control  Slides
Floorplan Manager introduction. What is Floorplan Manager, why should we use it and where to start Robin Vleeschhouwer Good to see the good old SFLIGHT_LIST pop in at a session on the Floor Plan Manager. Again it is proven that live coding guarantees a full house. Although full house was some kind of an understatement.
Surprise session - please don't tell me what it's going to be about! Thorsten Franz The online Thorsten stepped in for the real live Thorsten, who got involved in 3 simultaneous projects and was not able to join us IRL. Best alternative was to set up a live stream with Operatics_DE office. In the end that was quite difficult, as we could not manage to get both video and audio. Thorsten shared his experiences about starting your own company. I only wish I knew that in advance so that I had the chance to evacuate my Ciber colleagues  Slides
PubQuiz Sven Van Leuken Difficult, easy, catchy, … all kind of questions that were collected by our famous quizmaster Sven. Winners could choose one of the SAP Press books accompanied by some hats/shirts and bags from our sponsors. Slides
Dinnertime! Mrs. Haseenah Penninkhof One word: Delicious and Wonderful. Oh no, more than one word. It’s hard to state down in words how we experienced Mrs. Penninkhof’s dinner. We all  our chef.

Some final words

To finalize, some predictions for trending topics in 2014:

Open Source SAPUI5, of course. See Jan Penninkhof’s blog.

Final thanks

• To our presenters for their high quality sessions
• To our attendees for joining our 5th anniversary
• To Mrs. Penninkhof for her enthusiasm and delicious dinner, again
• To our sponsors Ciber, Phoqus, SAP Press, Intenzz and NL4B
• To the celebration committee Jan Penninkhof, Fred Verheul, Roel van den Berge, Sven Van Leuken, Tamas Szirtes, Twan van den Broek
• To my colleagues at Ciber for setting up the rooms and cleaning them afterwards
• To the SCN community for being such an active one

More pictures in our sitNL 2013 Flickr album.

Also posted on SCN.