With my Kindle, and the Send to Kindle Chrome extension, I have a nice workflow for saving stuff (with a quick alt-k keypress) to read later. The nice thing about the way the Kindle displays new articles is that there’s a “new” tag, until you’ve read it, and once you’ve read it, it floats away to the top (where I can find it, review what I’ve read, and remove it). So here’s a quick rundown of the stuff I read this early evening on a break. If it’s in this list, it’s recommended.

How to be a mentor: A thoughtfully written post with a lot of good suggestions for guiding a mentee along the right path. Let mentees set the agenda for meetings; allow them the occasional mistake (great learning); help them to help themselves by providing strategies for discovering the solution, rather than direct answers; use your experience to help them sort the wheat from the chaff as far as online content is concerned.

Getting access to SAP Fiori trial: many obstacles: Unfortunately the obstacle phenomenon is not a new thing; SAP seem to constantly struggle to make easy the things that should be easy. And in this case it’s commercially disadvantageous for them, hindering customer from trialling Fiori. This is one example of many instances where SAP really need to get a grip and learn from other presences on the Web (another is the SAP ID Service, but that’s a story for another time).

Why you don’t need an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): This article made me smile, as it’s a simple piece but has a very strong impact. There are too many architecture astronauts out there (I for one have had my share of overengineered, overcomplex and underthought designes pushed in my face from them in my career) and I can imagine this piece being a lovely little wake up call to all those who have seen the classic “ESB icon [seemingly] pre-painted on their whiteboards”.

The many languages native to Britain: A fascinating piece, not only because of the myriad languages that are still alive within our shores (and beyond, it seems) but also because of the difficulty (futility?) in classification. What is a language, what is a dialect? What is native and what is immigrant? When do these classifications change? Who says? (Joseph – this is the piece I was telling you about).

King has trademarked the word CANDY (and you’re probably infringing): I read this piece probably with my mouth wide open. It beggars belief that the US Trademark Office bureaucrats are stupid enough to cause this to happen. It’s one thing for a greedy and self-centred games company to apply for a trademark like them (good luck to them, bold as brass and all) but it’s another for the ridiculous request to be granted. Good grief.

Stack Overflow’s About Page: I’ve recently started to become active on Stack Overflow in the UI5 area, in the light of OpenUI5 and our reachout to the wider non-SAP developer ecosphere(s). The reason Stack Overflow is such a success is because of the quality of its content, and the reason for the content quality is the conduct expected. This conduct is explained concisely in the About page, and there’s more information in the Help sections too. After struggling with SCN’s software for years, and trying to decipher hazy and incomplete questions so that I might answer them, it looks like Stack Overflow will be a breath of fresh air.

So there you have it. I really enjoyed each of these articles, perhaps you’ll find something there too.