I’m in Enschede (Netherlands) this weekend for EuroFoo – a mini-conference get-together for hackers and geeks of different persuasions.

It’s a great mix of ideas, skills, and energy, where the talks are decided more or less spontaneously and written up on a series of whiteboards.

I gave a talk – HelloSapWorld – this morning which was intended to burst the bubble that SAP seems to find itself within, for a great majority of hackers outside the SAP universe.

Monolith, behemoth, huge-and-complicated, impenetrable, impossible. Those are all terms I’ve heard used by friends and colleagues with respect to getting started with SAP. Especially here. So I was pleasantly surprised to see a good turnout for the talk, where we crowded round the laptops (there was no projector in the room allocated to us, so we improvised by replicating the screen on the rest of the wifi-connected laptops in the room via VNC).

After a few slides, we got into the meat of the talk, which was a live hacking session where we created simple ‘Hello World’ style objects – a report, a function module, a BSP page, an ICF handler, a Python RFC client, a Perl RFC server, and even a (one-dynpro) transaction. The time we had (an hour) simply flew by.

I have already had very positive feedback from the attendees … who knows, maybe we’ll see more open source hackers entering the SAP world soon!

Update: Some pictures are available here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/eurofoo/

Originally published on SAP Community