During the Mastering SAP Technologies event, a large majority of the presentations were technically focussed, but Graham Robinson’s presentation entitled “Remaining Relevant in a Changing World?” was a great break from the technical details of some of the other sessions.

Graham has been around the block a few times (I hope he won't mind me saying that!) and seems more than happy to share his experiences and its good advice no matter what industry you’re in. Graham focused on things that are hard to fake...

1. Attitude - having a can do, self motivated approach, and be an energy giver not an energy sucker!
2. Curiosity - wanting to know why and how, having a passion to work things out.

And he gave some tips on how to stay relevant...

• Connect to smart people and connect smart people
• Never strive to be the smartest person in the room
• Be yourself, don't try to fake it
• Build your network and connect and contribute
• Keep your skills up to date... you are a professional, it's your responsibility
• Share your thoughts and opinions and be prepared to debate your opinion
• Have fun and enjoy what you do!

And don't forget that we are all influencers in one way or another.

Highlights of SAP Code Exchange - Chris Paine, Gregor Wolf & Graham Robinson

Three of the current SAP Mentors presented on the top of SAP Code Exchange... have you heard of it? Basically it is a place for people to share code and you can find it under the SCN banner. Make sure you read the EULA carefully and accept the agreement before you post your code or use any of the code already there but that aside it seems like a good idea and already has some very useful projects such as ADL

To get started you should check out the SAPLink project, This will get you started with nuggets and slinkys (basically a way to move code from one ABAP system to another without using the normal SAP transport mechanisms). Once you understand that check out these other projects:

• ZAKE - an API for SAPLink
• abap2xlsx - create an read XLSX documents in ABAP
• ZGEOCODE - uses open street map to geocode an address
• ZJSON - create JSON from nearly any ABAP structure
• ZoAuth - the ABAP oAuth library

Sharing new technologies, ideas and advances via the SAPLink project seems to me to be a great way to remain ‘relevant’ and in Graham’s words “connect to smart people”. What do you think? Let me know your experiences by commenting below!