This year I returned back to Germany after finishing my master degree in Sydney, Australia. So it was time to look for a new challenge. Luckily I got in touch with some folks at SAP and they offered me a job. Since this week I am an official member of the SAP family.

This will not cause changes to this blog but I want to make one thing clear:

The articles on this blog are my own individual views, rather than those of my employer. I won`t disclose anything I should not. (borrowed from Thomas Otter).

I am happy to announce that I was accepted to do another BOF session after the one in Melbourne in June. This one has the title "Exploratory testing or ways to improve your manual testing skills..." and will be a part of the SDN Community Day in Munich on the 16th of October.

Exploratory testing is an interesting topic. It is one of those activities which everybody is doing but nobody is aware of it and therefore it is hard to improve this skill. Usually I am more known for talking passionately about automated testing so it is nice to venture into different territory this time. So if you are interesting in learning something new about software testing attend my session. For all the people who cannot attend I will post all interesting resources here for review.

Some weeks ago I build my first mash up. A mash up is a site which takes existing data and services from websites and uses them in a new way. I implemented two things. First I built a mobile view of the RSS feed of the SAP Developer Network which can be found here. Second I implemented a small search engine for the SAP Developer Network which can be found here. Again, it is optimized for mobile devices. The idea for both sites came from Matt Harding whom I met at the SAP Community Day in Melbourne.

I learned two things by building these sites. First, Ruby on Rails is still an incredible framework for building data driven websites even if you use web services instead of a database backend. I was able to build both sites in a day. In the end testing and releasing them took way more time. Second, Yahoo's REST search API is highly recommendable. It is interesting to see that Yahoo basically gives their search away for free and Google does not even have such a product anymore (they stopped offering their SOAP based search API). Competition is a great thing to have.

It was also interesting to design an interface especially for mobile devices. The constraints imposed by the screen sizes can be quite refreshing.

I wrote two articles about the site on SDN, too. You can find them here and here.

On June 3rd I attended the community day of the SAP Developer Network in Melbourne. This event organized by SAP was a chance to meet fellow community members and to do some networking.

For me the most interesting part of the day was giving my first Birds Of a Feather session (BOF). I wrote a summary about my general experiences and my BOF session with the title "Unit testing in the ABAP world or how to write software which stays soft" over at my SDN blog.

Two days ago I discovered a new service from Google. It is called Google Co-op and one thing it allows you to do it to build customized search engines. You can read more about it here. The service is quite useful. Especially for people who want to focus their search always on one subject, for example researchers. I built an engine for the SAP area. You can find the search engine here. I also wrote an article on SDN about it.