On Thursday Mar 2nd a number of Dutch developers and data scientists gathered at the Dutch office of
SOA People for the first ever
SAPCodejam Nieuwegein. The topic:
SAP Cloud Platform predictive services.
Introduction
We had the pleasure of welcoming
abdel.dadouche from the
developer relations team to help us understand what these predictive services are all about. Abdel emphasized that these are business services, exposed by a
RESTful API. You start by registering datasets, and subsequently you can ask certain questions of the data: key influencers, scoring equations, forecasts (time series), outlier detection and more.
Hands-on
After a 1hr introduction, including some historical context about the
Predictive Analytics product, it was time to get started with the hands-on tutorials. These are provided on the awesome
SAP developer page. Start at the
tutorial navigator, and you can easily find the tutorials you're interested in. For predictive services there are currently three. The first one is for setting up everything you need, from SAP Cloud Platform stuff to Postman (a REST Client, provided as Chrome plugin). The second is to explore the predictive services using Postman, and the last one is to build an SAPUI5 application that makes use of the predictive services.
Dinner
After a couple of hours working on the tutorials it was time for dinner and socializing. The food was excellent, as can be judged from the comment of one of the attendees: "It reminds me of SAPTechEd" (Europe edition
😉 ).
After dinner there was still enough time to finish the UI5 application that shows how to include calls to the predictive services in a real application. Some of the participants made it well past the official end time (20.00h) of the event!
All in all, it was a great learning experience, and although the tutorials are available online, it helps a lot to have an expert around to answer questions and solve bugs. As my colleague
Pim van Nispen said: "At home you can easily be stuck for an hour or longer on something silly. Here, you just get the expert and you're back up and running in 5 minutes. So you can make the most out of your time." I couldn't agree more!
Apr 26th: the next SAP Codejam Nieuwegein
As announced
earlier, on Apr 26th we'll host a second Codejam in Nieuwegein, on the topic of
SAP HANA Vora. There are still tickets available, and you sure don't want to miss this one, even if only for the food ;-). Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sap-codejam-nieuwegein-registration-31904520279.
See you on Apr 26th!