More Than Just A Conference - UI5con@SAP

[huseyindereli]

When I arrived at Frankfurt Airport in order to attend (4th) UI5con@SAP, I knew that it was going to be a great day full of valuable content and enthusiastic people, just like the first one happened more than a year ago.

First UI5con was really impressive with an extra benefit of joining SITFra. Two birds with one stone! I was the one who came the longest way for that event and it was worth it even just for one. If you’d like to know more, here is the recap by kimmo.jokinen.

Since then I wanted to attend all UI5con events, however, I missed two of them. One has happened at Eindhoven which was also jointly organized with a SIT event. Here is a summary of that one. The other one I missed was the 2nd edition of SitFRA & UI5con combined event.



After a little bit of my UI5con history, let’s get back to the latest UI5con. 4th one. What makes this one special is, it was the biggest so far and also it was the first UI5con entirely organized by SAP (see Margot's comment). Lots of UI5 team members involved. Maybe that explains why the venue was at St. Leon 🙂 Around 400 hundred people gathered together for discussing and sharing everything about UI5. With 3 rooms, 3 booths and an expert corner the agenda was so comprehensive and fulfilling for a day.

Everything was perfectly organized. Finding the parking space and the building was so easy. Badges were ready. There was a nice booklet attached to them that includes all the needed information for an attendee. Delicious refreshments with a surprise at the end. One of the SAP buildings at St. Leon-Rot was used as a venue and it was a good fit for 400 people.

So we dived into networking part after grabbing a coffee with Soner. soner.asri joined UI5con from Barcelona who is a former colleague of mine. It was great to see him and all other UI5ers I knew from the first UI5con and to meet new people. I think, getting lots of passionate software geeks together and connecting them was the biggest success of UI5con. Besides the improvements of UI5 itself, the community around UI5 is also getting stronger with this sort of dedicated events.

It’s really hard to mention all of the cool stuff at the sessions I’ve joined. I could just say it’s more than you would expect. And I think the community was generally more curious to hear about the roadmap, best practices, new features, and renovations of the framework. And of course, there is no better place. The UI5 team provided us all the information.

Here are the resources of the related sessions. The list is still getting curated. And I heard that sessions at the main room were recorded and will be available on the official youtube channel of openui5. Don’t miss them. Other things to mention;

The new logo has been unveiled.

This was one of the important announcements https://blogs.sap.com/2017/07/03/handling-of-ui5-mimes-in-the-abap-stack-will-change-in-2018/.

OData V4 Model has lots of new features and improvements. And I’m so happy that it got rid of __metadata parts 🙂

UI5 Support Assistant seems like to save lots of time and glad to have such a tool. Just press CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + P for the magic! You can try it here.

Community-driven custom UI5 repository was presented by michael.graf and ericci. It’s a nice way of gathering a list of open-source custom controls or other types of UI5 related code artifacts together. They become easy to discover and play with. It’s waiting for contributions of all kinds. Check out the repo https://github.com/UI5Lab/.

To create a CI Workflow for UI5 apps is an extremely important topic. If you think so, definitely take a look at this session. A well-prepared and clear presentation that is supported by flow diagrams.

I’ve joined two hands-on sessions. The first session was like an intro to OPA; Write Reliable Application Tests for Your UI5 Application https://github.com/UI5con2017/opaintro and the other session was about getting started with UI5 on Cloud Foundry https://github.com/frdrcbrg/ui5con-cf-todo.

And my attempt to join another hands-on session titled “Functional Programming For Your UI5 App” failed. At least we have this document to be able to try it at home. Actually, I am lucky, I have joined a similar session at TechEd. So next time it should be considered to spare a bigger room for dj.adams.

Thanks to andreas.kunz, for the first time in my life, I drank open-source beer! It has a unique taste of freedom 🙂 Actually, it was really delicious. I’ve already opened an issue of “How to get more”. If anyone wants to try it, just check the recipe https://github.com/akudev/UI5ersBrewing. While drinking our beers, we had a group photo outside of the building. Everyone seemed so happy to be a part of this event. And it didn’t stop there. We went to Kalipeh at Walldorf. A dinner with friends in a nice weather was a good finish. Thanks to everyone who made this outstanding event possible for the community.

 

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NOTE

Check these two videos from Christian Braukmüller to get a quick tour.

https://twitter.com/CBasis/status/880756297167241216 - Walkthru Part 1

https://twitter.com/CBasis/status/880889637023211520 - Walkthru Part 2

 

IMAGE RESOURCES

@ui5con ‏- History of UI5

openui5.org - UI5con Logo

https://twitter.com/michadelics/status/880697725267914752 - Opening

https://twitter.com/qmacro/status/880689081419804672 - Crowd

https://twitter.com/h_neumann/status/880693340412538880 - New Logo

https://twitter.com/diegohdora/status/880735331963809792 - ODataV4

https://twitter.com/qmacro/status/880702202901401600 - Support Assistant

https://twitter.com/roelvdberge/status/880768325999104000 - UI5lab

https://twitter.com/HuseyinDereli/status/880805381659914240 - CI

https://twitter.com/HuseyinDereli/status/880816771913187328 - CF

https://twitter.com/_dinatopia/status/880835113701044225 - Beer