DJ Adams

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screenshots of various pages of the notes, with a selfie of me pointing at them

Greetings! Detailed & searchable notes to part 2 of our recent #HandsOnSAPDev series on CXL in CAP are now available: https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2026/03/09/cds-expressions-in-cap-notes-on-part-2/ #SAPCAP

Share & enjoy!

The State of the Art by Iain M Banks - BBC Sounds A spaceship arrives on Earth and finds a planet obsessed with alien concepts like 'money'.

My BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Iain M. Banks' The State of the Art can now be found and played here: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Me grinning at the camera, sitting at a conference table in my OSCON tshirt and shorts, working on a tiny laptop with a PCMCIA WiFi card sticking out of the side.

I used to attend & often speak at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) back in the day, mostly on SAP topics, and ran a 640 mini SAP system on this tiny Sony Vaio C1 laptop which had no more than 256MB RAM. I had tuned the central instance parameters right down, but it still swapped like crazy.

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#SAPCAP #CodeConnect #reCAP

Another thought, akin to Chesterton's Fence but from a different angle. I and others appreciate the value of REST in general, and OData in particular. Because I have scars from what came before - SOAP, WS-Deathstar, etc. (Which incidentally is why I am not particularly enamoured with GraphQL).

It's not even that. It's just nonsense. Or at least short sightedness.

Agree, but but experience in approach and process counts for something too, regardless of context. How does one go about tackling problem X, recognise what's important and relevant and what's not, etc.

- YouTube Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

This week's SAP Developer News, brought to you by the Developer Advocates, is out now 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6hDrE2ERyI

- configuring and mounting RF antennas & scanners in a warehouse for an SAP-to-external system with a C + RFCSDK based realtime interface I had to write
- crawling under the raised floor of a data centre to recable

- and all those other tasks you mention too

Hands dirty, brain replete.

- being on call to solve issues with an entire overnight batch schedule, not just my own group's jobs
- calculating to specific DASD track & cylinder coordinates where ABEZ's indices should go
- tuning report performance when HANA should have solved the issue but hadn't

Some unexpected but rewarding tasks that have added layers of understanding, context & perspective for me:

And I worry somewhat that by jumping straight to solutions, without building understanding, context, scar tissue, we're accelerating into a future where the only certainty is the uncertainty of reliable know-how.

It resonates with me very much; I've been in many trenches, feel I've forgotten more than some people have learned these days, and have done all the jobs mentioned, and more.

Your article confirms my reflection today: above all, experience is what counts. Hard won, through diverse roles.

Just read the article. Another absolute gem.

Back in the day that's all we had, and we built pretty solid Web based HTML and API interfaces to SAP systems. Then we upgraded to mechanisms like mod_perl (in Apache's httpd) and never looked back. This was the reality and how experience & perspective grew, both of which are still relevant today.

org/blog/posts/2025/12/09/a-new-hands-on-sap-dev-mini-series-on-the-core-expression-language-in-cds/

A screenshot of the series post, with a red arrow from the new "notes" link pointing to a screenshot of a couple of pages from the post which has the notes to part 1 of the series. Also a selfie where I'm wearing winter gear and pointing upwards at the arrow.

We've started to publish notes for our recent series on CXL in CAP with Patrice Bender. Video chapter links & all the examples so you can search & recall. Notes to part 1 out now, linked from the series post https://qmacro.

Just finished re-sealing the covers of where my PV panel cables go into the narrowboat roof. Used Sikaflex. I think I got more on me than around the seals. #CanalLife

Photo of an early morning landscape with a steely purple sky, a full moon in the distance, and meadows rolling from the foreground to the middle distance where woodlands start. There's a large old (oak?) tree in the right foreground, with ever shrinking branches that look like the capillaries in a lung.

Lovely.

To accompany this, here's a photo I took this on my run this morning, looking west over the Cheshire plain from the Middlewood Way.

The Expert Session thumbnail, showing a photo of me and Daniel Schlachter, with the text: Deploying to Cloud Foundry CAP Node.js Expert Session and the number 2 (for part 2) in a circle.

Our CDS expressions in CAP mini-series has finished, but we're continuing soon the CAP Node.js Expert Session series with Daniel Schlachter, with part 2 on deploying to Cloud Foundry. Watch out for the announcement of the premiere on the SAP Developers YT channel later this month! #SAPCAP

Anyone else misty-eyed with nostalgia when they see a .cgi or cgi-bin as part of a URL?

a screenshot of my AWK terminal explorer, showing source CSV data in the top right, a short AWK script definition in the bottom right, and the output on the left.

New post: "Genres, cuids and a bit of AWK
" - Using AWK to process the Genres data from the CAP bookshop sample 👉 #AWK #SAPCAP https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2026/03/03/genres-cuids-and-a-bit-of-awk/

Me writing an email: “AI makes mistakes, check your work.”

Department of Defense: “When if we hooked it up to a machine gun”

I know nothing much, this is just from initial digging. Would love to be corrected / learn more from others.
Links:
rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directo...
www.samhallas.co.uk/repository/d...

A 1960's classic British telephone with a rotary dial mechanism. Both letters and numbers are visible for each of the rotary positions.

This fits, given the SW15 postcode also on the letterhead. It also fits in that this exchange was 770 which is achieved by dialling P-R-O (interesting that the O is on the 0 rather than with the M & N on the 6) This is in the context of the numbering plan in the "Director" telephone system ...

Wonderful! I've just come back from a curiosity-triggered adventure looking into the first part of "PRO 3332" at the top of the original letter.

"PRO" is the short code for "Prospect" which seems to be the telephone exchange in the Mortlake area of London ...

CDS expressions in CAP - Under the hood - Part 7 We wrap up our detailed look at CXL, the expression language which is part of the CDS family of languages, and bring this series to an end. With special gues...

LIVE in 1 hour from now - join Patrice Bender and me on #HandsOnSAPDev for the final part of the CDS expressions in CAP series, everyone welcome! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqfHXKKHEEU

the macOS UX is getting steadily worse, to the point now where it can only be deliberately poor design. It can be hair-tearingly bad.

SAP CodeTalk with Timo John YouTube video by SAP Developers

🚀 Exciting News!
I recently had the opportunity to join SAP Code Talk as a guest — and the episode is now live! 🎉
we dove into how technical consultants can leverage modern SAP development tools, shared real-world insights from customer projects, & explored what’s next in the SAP ecosystem.